The Scramble

I forgot about “scramble competition”.
It’s another new term.
I like the free-for-all implied by it.
It appeals to my apparent need for chaos.
It’s dynamic and risky.
It’s a breakdance move.
It’s a midway ride.
It may be dangerous... especially for a reader.
A reader tends to like to sit back and watch, and be there for the long haul, for the story.
There’s pleasure in that.
That strategy (sit back and watch) could be an advantage if tenacity and being there are the keys that access the resources.
But the reader may not know or care about the competition.
The story is a siren.
Readers often don’t want to know where they are going (they hope though) and often don’t have practical skills in controlling where they are going (except to stop reading).
Are readers too polite?
Should they know what the competitive stakes may be before they go into the story?
In the scramble, can the reader be easily colonized, tricked out of the limited resources that caused the scramble in the first place?