The Culture/Excession/YMMV: Difference between revisions
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** Forcing conversation ends badly. The Elench didn't really survive that when they tried. And that drone that [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|carved that message into the side of a ship that was destroying it]] did not really fare well in the end either.
** The first Culture ship to report on the Excession mentions attempts to talk with it, which is how it can later be addressed by its callsign, "I". The rest of the Minds involved quickly realize that communication with and studying the thing is less urgent and/or more dangerous than the immediate problem of dealing with how other civilizations will react to finding out about it.
** Game theory (specifically, the scenario of the open-ended iterated prisoner's dilemma) suggests that the optimum course of action when first meeting an entirely unknown entity is to lead off with a minor but clearly benign gesture, then wait to see what your opponent does, then mirror his responses re: cooperation or conflict. Now think back to what the Excession was behaving like throughout this entire story...
*** Directly lampshaded by the ''Sleeper Service'' at the end when it realizes that the Excession is merely echoing its own gesture re: giant threat display.
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