Apparently Vassar gets a lot of his material from a roleplaying game called Mage: The Ascension, where he seems to have practiced his manipulation, intimidation, and suppression of people noticing it to an art form. Magic isn’t real, but reality distortion fields that work by believing something forcefully enough that others are pulled into believing it are, and going all-in on extreme vibes and pushing your models into other people is one way to reinforce them. It burns the commons of good epistemics and mental health, but it can look locally optimal from a sufficiently myopic and single-player perspective.
So I would strongly guess it’s just a founder effect from Vassar.
I’ve talked and corresponded with Michael a lot over the last 17 years (not regularly during all that time, but pretty frequently during 2017–2020), and I don’t recall him ever saying anything about Mage: The Ascension. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s never played—I never asked him about it—but it seems like some amount of absence of evidence undermining the “gets a lot of his material” claim.
I would strongly guess that you’re contributing to the phenomenon where gossip networks just make things up.
Plex’s post had this:
So I would strongly guess it’s just a founder effect from Vassar.
I’ve talked and corresponded with Michael a lot over the last 17 years (not regularly during all that time, but pretty frequently during 2017–2020), and I don’t recall him ever saying anything about Mage: The Ascension. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s never played—I never asked him about it—but it seems like some amount of absence of evidence undermining the “gets a lot of his material” claim.
I would strongly guess that you’re contributing to the phenomenon where gossip networks just make things up.
I’m fairly confident I heard him talking about it in like 2010/2011 (in a way that rhymed with how it’s portrayed in this post)