It just doesn't seem that exploitable to me.
It seems counterproductive to me to enable players to share information with such a high-degree of reliability. If I have an argument with someone in a PM in which I quote parts of their post, and then BCC that to someone else, you can't lie about that content without the primary recipient immediately realizing it. It's your game and your choice, but I don't see it as a healthy form of gameplay depth, so to speak.
It's based off the stated rules which is how I came to that conclusion.
The rules didn't specify all screenshots, but you are still making a distinction between them, so it's not based off the stated rules. The rules also said "such as", implying that it was not limited exclusively to screenshots, but rather a category of actions.
Meta game information is information beyond the game.
Meta-game information is literally information about the game about the game. In normal games, meta-game information would be about things like players and game-environment (e.g. ladder representation), but since those things are a natural part of this game, I can't come up with something that is meaningfully defined as "Epistemology mafia meta-game".
'Beyond the game' is too nebulous a term to make judgments from, but any way you slice it, screenshots are still game-information. They're no more meta-game information than peeking at someone else's hand in a game of Magic, even if they're both considered cheating.
The game's rules allow us to PM.
Is it really a private message if you are sharing it with someone else?
The game's rules directly state screenshots are off limits.
Only of specific content.
Focusing on the fact that PMs are allowed, it stands to reason that when structuring a PM for the game (which I'm allowed to do) I can use the BCC function of the PM to include others. Or, if I wanted to be obvious about it, I could just send the same message to multiple people with the CC option as well (though that wouldn't have helped me back then).
Why does that stand to reason? I can also use the BBCode functionality of the content field to embed urls. I believe I can also forward conversations to other users, but I don't feel like setting up the extra accounts to test it properly.
And when Cato puts it in that way, that kinda makes it hard to bypass (referring to the using a method that would prove something was said by another player or the mod thing). Off the top of my head the only thing that would allow for that is if he designed such a role which explicitly allows for it.
I mean, it doesn't exclude proving that someone else said something to someone else.
It also makes it illegal to prove that someone else said something to you, even if they said it in public, which I find amusing.
@Elijin: It's unique strictly to Mown and I due to what occurred in the previous game. Despite what he thinks of my ability to judge character, he greatly disliked that I wouldn't take the easy win that was already setup by Rome with Persia (a byproduct, I'm sure, of the fact that Rag, Nik, and Mown are all friends which would have made it impossible for the Greeks or even Scar to win at all).
I'm not upset because "I didn't get an easy win", and you still keep projecting that I had ulterior motives for wanting to team with Rome, which is why I keep saying you are a poor judge of character. I'm upset because someone in the game saw fit to play an entirely different game than me. That regardless of whatever happened, KoD would never have teamed up with Rome, because of a reason that had nothing to do with the game itself. When I play a game, I assume that they're there to play the same game as me, and not have people with intentions like "I want X to lose the game", "I want to win and the rest of my team to lose", "I want the game to drag on as long as possible" or "I want to help X and Y hook up". I don't care, it has nothing to do with the game, play for the objectives you are given. Otherwise, I find that to be an outright repulsive display of entitlement. I'm not here to play with people whose entire line of reasoning comes down to "I don't want to.", even if your entire family tree has been sexually violated by Romans throughout the last century. It's irrelevant. The game wasn't designed around you having an additional character rule. Would you have sabotaged the entire game for your team if you ended up as a Roman?