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Gameplans: Cultivate the housemates or cultivate the public?
Romola_Des_Loup
Posts: 3,152 Forum Member
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I always thought Victor's gameplan was the opposite of Craig Phillips in the first BB. Craig would be subtly irritating and annoying to the other housemates, just enough to be nominated but not enough to outrage the viewers. Then in the Diary Room, he wouldn't have a bad word to say about anyone, even when he was nominating them! Even the 'Nasty Nick' thing ran in his favour when it could easily have gone against him. Nick had actually shown one of his 'pieces of paper' to Craig but Craig hadn't chosen to mention it to anyone, much less BB, until he was asked outright by another HM (Mick?). However, once he saw which way the wind was blowing, Craig was suddenly outraged by the cheating and appeared to take the lead in confronting Nick. Craig's housemates continued to nominate him week after week, unwittingly strengthening his position. We know by now that surviving eviction is what builds a fanbase. Being kept in week after week made him unstoppable. He's the prime example of the 'cultivate the public/irritate the housemates' gameplan. I am sure that some will perceive Deana to have done something similar, although it didn't work for her.
When Victor set out to do the opposite a couple of years later, I facepalmed. I mean, how are the public going to vote for you when you are openly telling them in the Diary room that you are playing your housemates, staying under the radar, avoiding nomination, subtly manipulating them? But it was working beautifully until the Secret Room gave it away. I now think that Victor was just ahead of his time. Other housemates have tried to emulate him (Anton) but failed every time.
Which way would your gameplan go if you were in the house?Would you try to keep the housemates sweet, being everyone's friend to avoid nomination, while unveiling your Machiavellian plots in the Diary Room? Or would you subtly wind them up and go into the Diary Room as if butter wouldn't melt a la Craig Phillips?
When Victor set out to do the opposite a couple of years later, I facepalmed. I mean, how are the public going to vote for you when you are openly telling them in the Diary room that you are playing your housemates, staying under the radar, avoiding nomination, subtly manipulating them? But it was working beautifully until the Secret Room gave it away. I now think that Victor was just ahead of his time. Other housemates have tried to emulate him (Anton) but failed every time.
Which way would your gameplan go if you were in the house?Would you try to keep the housemates sweet, being everyone's friend to avoid nomination, while unveiling your Machiavellian plots in the Diary Room? Or would you subtly wind them up and go into the Diary Room as if butter wouldn't melt a la Craig Phillips?
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I think all anyone can do is be themself & hope the public likes them, because now, more than ever, they're at the mercy of the edit.
Nail on the head, BB without LF spawns fence-sitting as the only viable game plan for winning.
All well & good but suppose they didn't show your DR entries about playing the game. You'd come out hated & probably have to leave the country
I don't think you'll go down well with the public if you did that tbh. Would be great TV though
I think this is true........I never have a plan for any situation any more........I have an idea of how things will roughly go, but things never turn out as you assume they would......
Best thing is to be yourself, go with the flow, see how things pan out........after all you don't know these strangers, and they all have their own ideas which do not necessarily fit in with yours........so no point, is there.........just sit back for a couple of weeks, watch and listen, learn from them as to who they are........and.......if you are edited OK, and the public don't think you are a complete idiot........then you have a chance......
I would just enjoy it.......or at least hope to.......
Oh Im sure they would they show anything controversial.
Thats all that would matter to me. I wouldnt be playing to have a genuine chance at the money but to be remembered as a brill housemate. Well if BB is ever on and there is a housemate doung the above you know its me
That would depend on your allotted role in the soap.
If you give them the rope they will hang you. There is no way they would turn down giving someone the gameplaying villian role. Its positive things they are more likely to cut out. But I would tell them in the diary room I was more then happy to be edited as the villian.
But they might have you earmarked as 'nice but dull' ie the edit of death. There wouldn't be anything you could do about it. Especially if they already have their moustache twirling villain all lined up.
Suppose you did all that & got out (in 3rd place) to discover that you were only ever shown sunbathing & being nice to people
Aaron was a 'player' who won, but not in that sense at all; he was a thoughtful, socially adept person with an extensive knowledge of how BB works. He knew what traps to avoid, and would NEVER have done an Anton and tried to pitch any kind of machiavellian persona. He knew how to pitch a nomination so it was more likely to adversely affect the nominated person than the nominator, which is by no means always the case. It is fatally easy to sound cheesy, fake or spiteful. He had a good eye for when it was safe to mess with a task and when all hands had better be on deck. He had an enviable knack of taking the piss out of people without sounding like a bitch. Now THAT was a good strategy, but of course it was not a silly one-sentence strategy: it was a thousand mini-strategies responding to changing circumstances. The reason other people have not managed it is that it is hard. It requires intelligence, a finely tuned social radar, experience and a lot of thought.
If you can't manage that, you had better stick to the Craig/ Brian/ Kate/ Cameron/ Anthony/ Pete/ Brian/ Rachel/ Sophie/ Luke method (maybe not Nadia or Josie): stay out of the worst bitching sessions, join in cheerfully with the tasks, don't keep whining that you want to go home, be nice to most of the people most of the time, laugh at yourself, that kind of ordinary stuff. Not one of those people would have dreamed of sitting in the diary room reflecting on their own cleverness and cunning.
In the short term, yes, but if you can survive the early weeks, BB will generally try to give each housemate a turn at taking centre stage. What you do with it is up to you. This year, for example, they seemed to think Sara was too quiet and passive so they gave her 100 mini-tasks, in none of which she was especially interesting.
Yeah I get the point you are trying to make and it would be so funny if that actually happened. I do think though if you gave them any indication of gameplaying the editors would be on you in a shot. They want interesting characters at the the end of the day and gameplayers always start up that old debate of 'should you play the game?' and generate voting revenue with die hards voting to keep them in and casual viewers trying to get them out.
Thats not how it works though. Game players never do well in polls on here, for example, which surely represents die-hards rather than casual viewers.
I do think if you are doing the being nice to the HM's, but letting the public know all your cunning plans against the HM's you're being nice to, you have to play this really well. There is a very thin line between coming across quite fun, having a poke at the housemates and turning into a gloating heartless dick a la Anton. You really do need to know when to draw the line and not go too far. You also need to be aware that just because you go to the DR and laugh and cheer how you acted when someone was really upset (for example), that many won't be looking at you with happy eyes. I think it's a tricky game to play and you really do have to have a level enough head, not fuelled by a massive ego to play this well.
I also do think if you really detach yourself from everyone, like everyone is there to just play your game, you won't get anywhere near the final. There will be a few that will love it, but many don't like that sort of game.
I do think the public do like to know what HM's are thinking so just saying enough is really the way to go. I think it's more important to get the public onside than the HM's. It doesn't make any difference if all the HM's love you, when as soon as you're up for eviction, or come to the final week, you're the first out because the public hate you.
I think Aaron tapped into the snobbery of people, but did it so well, it didn't seem like he was! The whole kind of pointing out the minus points of Jay and co, was done in such a way that it almost was like he was saying 'why would you support a neaderthal like him and his gang over someone so well read and spoken as me?' Like anyone with a brain should vote for him or they would be a plebby as Jay and co.
Plus he also had the whole 'vote Aaron to show BB' thing going on too. I do think that Jay could've won if Aaron hadn't had this going for him, something that he had no control over or knew of.
I wasn't an Aaron or Jay fan, I didn't want either to win, but I do feel he won as he appealed to the public's superior side. He played it very well. I also do believe Jay came second as a backlash against this.
I do think there was an element of class divide in BB12; there were plenty of comments about Jay's fans being illiterate and chavvy, and there was certainly a powerful air of resentment among his twitter followers, who clearly knew this to be the case.
Totally agree with this. Plus Aaron's inhouse version of the BB12 soap (which wasn't shown much, for obvious reasons) led to Harry calling him the Producer after his (Harry's) eviction. Aaron used his EI and manipulation skills to define each HM in turn. You can imagine how annoying it must have been for the real producer of BB12 to have an HM effectively doling out the roles in his soap! :eek:
Now that really is the ultimate gameplan - to be the inhouse producer so that you can manage both the HMs and the external audience with a unified approach. Only difficulty is you're not the director, so you can define/predict the storylines but no control over the edit or the external PR (like BOTS)! In retrospect, you could see BB12 as being a historic battle of Producer v Director..... won as it turns out by an imposter!
Craig was generally a pleasant everyman guy who played cheeky-chappy pranks, which isn't a bad start for BB popularity, but as you say he wasn't any kind of moral guardian. Really none of the boys had any reason to complain about nom-fixing as such as they'd all blatantly fixed week 1's noms to get Sada and Caroline up. All they wanted was 'honour amongst thieves'.
The kitchen table thing worked because Nick had so spectacularly misplayed the 'gameplayer' thing (which made great TV but gave him no chance of winning). People wanted to see Nick get his comeuppance and Craig just did that really well, no matter what had gone before. If he'd hopped around and squawked like a lot of BBHMs would he wouldn't have won.
Even then he only squeaked past Anna in what is still the closest run off ever after news had leaked about what he was to going to do with the money.
Re: surviving evictions: I think it's true that surviving evictions can help build popularity if you're galvanising your supporters to take sides, but it's far too risky to try as a strategy. Think of the potential winners who've been edged out - most recently Lauren in a narrow vote against Luke A. Spencer Smith was odds-on to win BB3 not long before he was evicted against Alex. Rachel Rice had a fairly near-miss against guyliner Stu on her way to winning BB9.
'Ahead of his time' is one way of looking at it. Victor's approach was very fresh, but it's no surprise that no one's really pulled it off before or since.
Comparing Victor to Nick before him and Anton later, what Victor did much better than Nick was to confide with the public what he was doing - and be quotable with it. He also didn't go too far like Nick (who claimed his wife had been killed) and you got the feeling his friendships with the other Jungle Cats were genuine whereas you never knew who Nick was going to chuck under a bus next.
So even though not everyone liked Victor, he made a good play for being the antihero or loveable rogue rather than just coming across as eeeeevil.
Anton, at the other end of the scale, didn't really have the charisma or wit to manage any of that. He was like the idiot who jumps out from behind a door at Hallowe'en wearing a sheet saying 'Woo! I'm a scary ghost!' No you're not.
One of the most boring pieces of advice in BB is to be yourself but there is some truth to it. Victor was doing a lot of gameplaying, but he was ultimately just being a version of Victor, and would have been very stupid to try to be Craig (or Brian
Nick got caught up in being a gameshow contestant and forgot BB is (also) a reality show. Anton tried to be Victor and came up short.
Ok this was my reasoning. I like to try to control as much of a situation (well TRY to) as i possibly can. I knew that i had NO CONTROL over editing or over the public vote. So all i could control or attempt to control was the nomination process. From watching previous cycles of BB i knew that if somebody had 3 or more nominations then they were potentially in jeopardy. That meant that in an ideal world i would have to find AT LEAST 3 other 'likeminded' people so we could carve up the nominations and then if it came to it turn on each other. Not personal, JUST BUSINESS. I also wanted to win because on the back end this is ultimately a POPULARITY CONTEST, so i had to be likeable & try to endear myself to those who watched. So rather than lie about it like most do i decided to try to INVOLVE the viewers in my plans & hope they saw that though i was scheming & making moves it was not malicious, just a game. This might have worked better in other earlier cycles, except BB5 was not a show.....IT WAS A WAR!!! Moments of laughter could turn to BLOODSHED in a heartbeat. There was GENUINE HATRED in that house unlike never before, so the game got SERIOUS, not fun, SURVIVAL! That made people (viewers) choose 'sides'. If you were plotting against anybody on the team they liked they disliked you. Siege mentality set in. The nastiest elements of your personality come to the surface & i became almost consumed with eliminating certain housemates.
Part of my problem also was the most unpredictable factor in any hypothesis - HUMAN BEINGS!!!
Jason was on the same page as i was. However, Stuart & Ahmed were not comfortable block voting for people and needed constant coercing which is draining. Ahmed is a man who lives life by his won rules & highly emotionally volatile so if you push 2 hard he will explode. Stuart was playing his OWN GAME (true story - he has admitted this to me several times) which was to be the young, handsome, inoffensive, fun loving friend to all. His problem was Michelle Bass. The negative effect she had on his performance made him look like a limp wrested sap & meant the likes of Shell finished above him in a vote to win scenario.
I knew i was going to be portrayed as the house villain (figured this out on launch night) and that stiffened my resolve to stay as long as possible and give as much footage to show me in a positive light. Hopefully the longer i stayed the public would decide i wasn't such a tool.
The problem is in this country 'gameplayers' is a swear word. It's seen as a negative thing as opposed to something a bit different. It should be welcomed as it is in BB USA. People should be made to feel comfortable doing whatever they want to do in the house because it takes a lot of heart to decide to go down the 'gameplayers' path. People will take an instant dislike to you no matter what you're like outside of the BB house in real life. You may not be able to turn it all around & you put yourself out of contention to win (initially).
Yeh this is great. So true. Without live feed every housemate is completely at the mercy of 'the edit'......
This is bloody good stuff. Fact about gameplaying is no matter how good a gameplayer u r you will always be yourself. If you try to be something you're not then it will all end in tears. :cool:
Editing was always a factor, of course, but the show seems so over produced now that the natural development of relationships, pecking orders and strategies is constantly stunted by tasks, heavy editing, disclosure of information and other interventions. This all militates against Victor style gameplaying and makes the show far less watchable for those of us who enjoyed watching a strategy develop.