Issue #324: Australian Survivor Theory
Haven’t you heard? Paradox Newsletter has t-shirts and hats.
You can buy them here: https://paradoxnewsletter.bigcartel.com/
And you can read about the legendary illustrator who drew the art for them in last week’s letter:
There are also zines, the first among many I hope to be distributing through Paradox Newsletter. It has been fun selling them IRL, too.
I didn’t realize that Paolo wasn’t selling NWTHB online himself, so last week I was the only place you could buy it online. General Speech should have copies soon, but you can buy it from me now. Ignorant People Vol. 1 is sold out and other stuff is moving fast, so get your orders in.
The NBA Playoffs have begun. This is one of my favorite times of year, although it does result in overall diminished productivity. The Boston Celtics will certainly win it all, as is my belief every year. We played okay against the Heat. I’ll leave the Duncan Robinson mess to career pundits.
Right now, Joel Embiid is playing in Madison Square Garden. I am hardly a 6ers fan, but my heart dropped the other night after Embiid landed hard on his surgically repaired knee, from a meniscus injury. It is hard to imagine the pain, both physical and existential, when one who makes their living from their physical capabilities cannot get their body to do what they want it to do. For pro athletes, it feels like one of many minor deaths. I also think of recent experiences I have had with injuries and illness. Even the most physically unassuming suffer when parts of the body don’t work as they have been.
For the professional athlete, the status of the body is a point of cathexis for transference, as I wrote for Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society late last year. Whether a team wins or loses, or is supported or reviled, reveling in a player’s injury is beyond the pale of basketball fandom. This posture, it seems to me, is as earnest as any adopted to sustain a universal. Sports players getting injured is bad, no matter who it is. So, I hope everyone stays healthy. And I hope the Celtics win it all.
A Story from Nara
The grounds of Nara Park are really big and as populated with deer as social media posts would have you believe. The deer really do “bow” to you, I guess — I’m not sure if this is a common deer behavior or something regionally specific. But it’s a little bit depressing, too. The deer are pestered through incessant photographing, petting, and feeding. Many sit lethargically uninterested in the shika-senbei deer crackers that are the only thing you are supposed to feed them.
I preferred to give the deer a wide berth, so I ended up with a big pile of deer crackers. The further you go into the park, the easier it is to get a deer’s attention. The fewer people around, the better. But the real coup of deer interaction came at the public trash cans across from the Daibutsu-den.
Public trash cans are rare in Japan, but nobody is as fascinated by the available ones as I am. There were a few in the Dotonbori area of Osaka, the recycling and trash duo you would expect in any major U.S. city. More common are recycling receptacles next to vending machines. But I was lucky enough to find these cans in Nara Park that sat in front of a large, fenced ravine. Waiting in the ravine? Hungry deer.
The three deer we found seemed much more eager for human contact and ready to eat a heap of shika-senbei. A toddler approached the deer, too, so I offloaded half of my crackers much to the kid’s glee. These deer were really friendly though, interested in hanging around even after we were out of crackers.
As saturated as Nara Park is with slightly overexcited tourists, there are still some tranquil opportunities to hang out with the deer. You might have to go behind public trashcans, though.
One Tribal Council in Australian Survivor
Over the past week and a half, I’ve been watching the 11th season of Australian Survivor, subtitled Titans Vs Rebels, from earlier this year. The season is over, but I’m not done watching it, so don’t spoil me! But, if you haven’t watched or been watching, there are spoilers for the 10th episode ahead. I want to discuss the Tribal Council from that episode, entitled Bad Hair Day, in detail. To that end, I recommend watching the linked video below from the 42:55 timestamp, where the Tribal Council begins.
I think this lengthy episode segment captures the essence of what makes Australian Survivor so good. The show, and this season in particular, has no shortage of hype. But the legibility of the gameplay here, even with the unexpected twist, is unmistakable. In fact, the way the twist compresses the vote and makes the decision points both more clear to the audience and more important to the resolution of the game improves the strategic gameplay rather than diminishes it.
Going into the vote, there are several important players. Feras and Aileen are aligned along with Raymond, with the rest of the tribe working against them. Kirby is the ringleader of the opposing alliance, but Winna and Valeria are important figures in a trio that were swapped into this tribe — the third of which is Charles. Though you might be tricked into thinking Charles is important to the game just watching this episode, it contains his only spoken lines of the entire season. I didn’t even know his name before this episode — a pretty obvious clue that he will be eliminated.
Where we pick up is after a twist that has given Feras, Aileen, and Kirby immunity as well as the only votes on the tribe. The three of them will decide who goes home. On that level, it seems uncomplicated. There’s Feras’s alliance of three and Kirby’s alliance of six. Before the twist, Feras’s alliance would have been reduced to two. After, with Feras’s alliance in the voting majority, it seems like Kirby’s will be reduced to five. There are a number of factors here, however, that complicate things. In the beginning conversation of the second portion of the Tribal, Kirby offers to vote with Feras and Aileen. Given the distribution of available votes, her willingness to vote or not vote along with the duo won’t change the outcome. The reason for this is the basic Survivor principle that it is better to be on the “right” side of a vote. Voting along with the majority, or in concert with the plan of the majority, is something Survivor contestants reference as an accomplishment in their speeches to become Sole Survivor.
Of course, there’s more than just Kirby’s negotiation of the unfavorable voting situation. She, reasonably, throws out the newly swapped tribe members as opposed to the players who she has been with since the beginning of the game. Likewise, Winna, Val, and Charles have had stern words for Feras in the course of the Tribal. But Winna, who has an idol, tries to provoke Feras and Aileen and nullify their votes with an idol, once again putting his alliance back in the driver’s seat by way of Kirby.
Feras is a highly intelligent player, one unlikely to fall for Winna’s provocation, and indeed he doesn’t. But the decisions here are exciting because of the small number of votes and the ambiguity of how the twist works. In a normal Tribal Council, a tie is resolved by a revote with options reduced to anyone who received a vote. So, on one level Feras and Aileen are competing with Winna in a shell game. They need to put their votes on the person Winna doesn’t play his idol for. Things get a little more favorable for the Feras alliance when one considers the possibility of a tie. More than likely, Feras and Aileen putting one vote each on any combination of Winna, Val, and Charles would make Winna’s idol play irrelevant. If one is immune, another gets one vote, tying with whoever Kirby votes for. Then, on the revote, whoever’s vote was nullified by the idol can change their vote. And, as you saw if you watched the clip, this is precisely what happens.
Aside from the strategic choices the players can make, the episode’s tension comes in part from the fact that the audience isn’t sure if a tie will resolve in the same way as usual — although we have no reason to think otherwise. Watching Winna prod Feras, though, I did wonder… does Feras see the line?
As is the case in this example, Titans Vs Rebels does a good job of making strategic possibilities clear to the audience without providing them with the outcomes of every decision. The players in Australian Survivor are also highly strategic, playing at a high level from the beginning of the game. The 10th episode here is no more or less exciting than the 2nd or 20th. The game’s twists also generally adhere to principles of popular game design. They eschew randomness and provide opportunities for disadvantaged players to catch up when behind.
If the strong suit of Australian Survivor, at least this season, is highlighting strategic play, its weakness is the human interest element that has been foregrounded in U.S. Survivor. Even at this late part of the season, I have a great understanding of most of the remaining players’ strategic thinking but little knowledge of their background or out of game personalities. Watching Australian Survivor, more than it’s U.S. counterpart, is watching people behave extraordinarily relative to what is called for in normal life. Looking at some of the late game players, I wonder how the hell they are ever going to adjust to relating to people normally after all the plotting, backstabbing, and blindsiding.
The edit can also be brutal. Like Charles, there are characters with so few spoken lines they may as well not have been there. They are the proverbial Star Trek “redshirts” of Survivor, with no opportunity to show their personality and no strategic importance whatsoever. I think this is a knock against Australian Survivor. While I would accept this as the status quo — some players getting basically no screen time — in exchange for seasons of this quality if I had to, I’ve seen seasons of U.S. Survivor that are about as good without such a punishing edit. Just as it erases certain people, other players are highlighted so obviously that just about anyone could tell you they’re going to go deep.
Moments like episode ten’s tribal council are the norm rather than the exception on Australian Survivor. And if you’re not a fan of twists, they are mercifully uncommon in Titans Vs Rebels. But if you are a lapsed Survivor fan, a new Survivor fan, or deeply entrenched in U.S. Survivor, Titans Vs Rebels has something for everyone.
Weekly Reading List
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/apr/21/the-game-boy-at-35-a-portal-to-other-magical-worlds — The Nintendo Game Boy is, perhaps, the most important and enduring consumer electronic product ever made. Competing with essentially only the Sony Walkman as far as I am concerned, the Game Boy’s legacy endured as a product line through 2005, with an obvious successor in the Nintendo DS and a slightly less obvious successor in the Nintendo Switch.
I’m not really a guy who watches “youtubers” or keeps up with the technology news cycle beyond what surfaces to the mainstream. So, I think me being a fan of Marques Brownlee might be unexpected. I appreciate as much the content of his reviews and videos as his demeanor in them. He is informative, enthusiastic when he needs to be, critical enough that it rarely feels like he’s just blowing smoke. Recently he reviewed the Humane AI Pin, something stupid enough that it shouldn’t take a youtube review to make it obvious it’s bound to be a Juicero-level flop. However, his coverage of the Pin was definitively negative enough to make Brownlee reflect on the art of reviewing. I enjoyed hearing his comments on the news cycle.
Until next time.