God's Imitator

Everyone fell into quiet thought. Looking at the game’s mechanics, this analysis carried real weight.

The Imitator’s true selection criterion wasn’t goodness or malice at all. It was ability, sharpness, decisiveness, and the capacity to execute.

But because the selection process was wrapped in the appearance of voluntary confession, it misled the audience. They instinctively assumed a player like that leaned benevolent.

And naturally, a player who confessed voluntarily wouldn’t throw away that moral capital either. They would keep performing, playing to the audience’s expectations.

So as long as the game followed its normal mechanics, the audience and the Production Director would arrive at a kind of mutual reinforcement, as if a genuinely selfless and fair player really had emerged in an Elimination-type game.

But thinking it through carefully reveals the flaw. The crimes the Gallery judged didn’t necessarily amount to serious violations of real-world law, but they were never trivial either.

Among the players the Gallery had branded as offenders, how many could genuinely be counted as good? And among those, how many were also rational, decisive, and selfless enough to fit the profile?

Filtered through all three criteria at once, the possibility that Zeng Yiming really was a good person became, if anything, the unlikely outcome.

Of course, this was a debrief, and a fair amount of the analysis carried the benefit of hindsight. In the desperate conditions of an Elimination-type game, players could rarely make fully rational, objective decisions. There was always some degree of wishful thinking involved.

They hadn’t simply been deceived by Zeng Yiming. More than that, they had actively chosen to believe in him, chosen to believe in a better possibility.

Lu Bingjun let out a quiet sigh. ”So let’s not be too hard on Wen Wan either.

”She was one of this community’s original veteran players. Everyone here knows her character well enough.

”She genuinely did have a tendency to gamble on wishful thinking. In most situations she wasn’t especially sharp or assertive, and she’d instinctively lean on others. When faced with a critical decision, she struggled to act decisively, and would often, without meaning to, choose to delay.

”And delaying usually meant losing the window entirely.

”I know this well, and I imagine everyone else does too.

”Put the other way round, if Wen Wan really had managed to act on the suggestion instantly, confessing on her own initiative and correctly guessing her way into becoming Production Director, that would have meant she’d effectively become a different kind of person entirely. Sharp, decisive, independent, quick to grasp the game’s mechanics.

”But that version of Wen Wan would have become another Zeng Yiming. Once she realised she could engineer a perfect scheme, earning both a spotless moral image and a million minutes of visa time, could she really have resisted that temptation?

”I don’t know.”

Yao Yuan let out a sigh, clearly feeling just as powerless in the face of this game. ”It is an S-tier game, after all.

”Lawyer Lin, you’ve seen more S-tier games than any of us. What do you think is the main reason this one earned that rating?

”I imagine most of us are wondering the same thing I am. We discussed before that originality is a decisive factor in a high rating. But this game seems clearly influenced by the King’s Trial, shouldn’t that count against it? Or was it really, as Zhang Yan suggested, just a case of parallel invention?”

Lin Sizhi considered for a moment. ”First, going by the general standard across all games, exploiting human weakness is a significant point in its favour, and everyone here has already recognised that.

”Beyond that, I think the main reason comes down to this: it’s an Elimination-type game, and we need to weigh its rating within that specific category.

”To start with, different game types seem to operate as separate tracks entirely.

”Among the Gallery’s game categories, Elimination-type and Judgment-type games are somewhat close in nature, but they’re still fundamentally distinct types.

”I’ve never personally seen an Elimination-type game earn an S rating before. So Trust Marketplace’s real competition isn’t the King’s Trial. It’s other Elimination-type games.

”As long as it outperforms other A-rated Elimination games, it has a real shot at S.

”Second, the primary objective of an Elimination-type game is elimination itself.

”Based on what we’ve learned from Imitators before, different game types seem to carry different requirements around mortality rate.

”In other game types, Selection-type games for instance, a full wipeout would clearly count against the rating.

”But it seems Elimination-type games work differently. A full wipeout might actually count in its favour.

”Finally, beyond originality, downstream impact also appears to significantly boost a game’s rating.

”And downstream impact here doesn’t just mean the inspiration a game’s content provides to other Imitators. It also includes how it reshapes the overall culture of the Gallery itself.”

Qin Cheng nodded quietly. ”That much is true.

”Trust Marketplace shattered what little mutual trust remained among players.

”Honestly, when I first read that final line in the rules, I was actually a little surprised. I assumed it was something a benevolent Imitator would say.”

Huang Shengjie thought back, ”Which line? ’How you understand trust will determine the final outcome of this game’?”

Qin Cheng nodded, ”Yes. Taken at face value, that line seems to be encouraging players to trust one another and work through the crisis together. It reads as something full of positive intent.

”But looking at it now, it feels more like a prophecy, or an announcement of the crime to come.

”Different players would read entirely opposite meanings into it.

”Some would misread it as the Imitator encouraging mutual trust, and in moments of ambiguity, they’d instinctively overlook warning signs and choose to believe in others.

”But it was exactly that kind of naive trust that dragged the game toward its irreversible collapse.

”Every small act of trust seemed harmless on its own, each person assuming their own small lapse didn’t matter. But Zeng Yiming took every one of those small lapses and stacked them together into one enormous lie.

”Other players, someone like Chen Guangming for instance, would read trust differently: nobody deserves it, ever. And as long as they held firmly to that position, they could win this kind of game easily.

”So my guess is that Community 12 probably came out of this game quite well.

”Looking at the final outcome, that line in the rules turned into something closer to mockery. Choosing to trust others was, in the end, a shallow and foolish interpretation, and it directly steered the game toward its worst possible ending.

”What matters even more is that the Imitator genuinely gave players real freedom of choice in this game. Type M medication really was made available within the game’s mechanics, and players really were given the opportunity to bring it home.

”And yet it was the players inside the game itself who destroyed that opportunity with their own hands.

”If the Imitator had simply rigged the rules and never actually offered real Type M medication, then even with a total wipeout on the floor, most of the audience’s anger would have been directed at the Imitator instead.

”But this time was different. The players’ anger could only spread among themselves.

”So after this game, more players are going to lean toward believing, unconditionally, that no one can be trusted.

”In other words, more players like Chen Guangming.”

Yao Yuan added, ”I don’t think trust is the only thing this shattered completely.

”Long-termism was destroyed along with it.”