“Why the hide and seek games, if they’re such piss-poor amateurs at it? “
Perhaps it’s not hide and seek but a matter of gradual titration.
Titration by who? Like I said, why should we expect something utterly alien to understand or care about our psychology and whether we as a civilization would collapse when the aliens revealed themselves once and for all?
And anyway, the idea of getting us slowly acclimated to the knowledge that They're out there is . (It was kind of a hot topic back in '77 when Close Encounters came out).