New setting: Strict/Lenient Rules, aka: No pedants and buzzkills?

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MrBeardy
Posts: 141
Joined: 28 January 2022, 11:23

New setting: Strict/Lenient Rules, aka: No pedants and buzzkills?

Post by MrBeardy »

Could this game benefit from a game option setting "Pedant/fun" mode, where we select how strictly we apply certain undefined gaps in the rules to allow things/not allow them and therefore to filter pedantic buzzkill players who seem to take things far too seriously and exclude otherwise valid clues because <insert pedantic reason few people seem to care about>?

They can then have their super pernickety games unencumbered by those folk who just want to have fun and a bit of light-hearted banter without querying every round's clues in too much detail. I'm not saying anything goes, but I've had perfectly reasonable clues excluded because:
1) (i quote) "i don't know what it means"
2) misleading/tangential (in their opinion only) eg glass for onion, despite it being both a modern day film and a well known Beatles song.
3) it has the same root (when it didn't)
4) no hyphens, despite the word being a valid word in its own right if you ignored the dash at the end.
5) a word that is one word being excluded because one variant might use a hyphen in a different spelling that they assume is the only spelling (snotrag if anyone's interested, still rejected even after 4 people said it was ok, and links to three different online dictionaries were provided showing it could be spelt with or without a hyphen)

It's tedious arguing with such people. I find them buzzkills and after a few rounds it's just no fun to play with them. It seems to me a co-op game doesn't need the level of pedantry that a few people seem to take it to, and in some cases do so with outright sneering nastiness that just make it unpleasant to be in. Worse are the ones who when shown to be wrong in disallowing clues then get abusive in the chat for the next 10 rounds. It's so childish and unnecessary.
bagofnails
Posts: 9
Joined: 22 September 2022, 11:25

Re: New setting: Strict/Lenient Rules, aka: No pedants and buzzkills?

Post by bagofnails »

The fashion in which some people interpret the rules can seem confusing and not always consistent. The rules do seem to be a little vague and fuzzy in themselves which probably doesn't help. I have written words that do not seem to break any rules, only to have them struck because they do not seem to conform to the spirit of the rules, which is less than ideal, because surely everybody will have a different interpretation of what the spirit of the rules actually means.

I agree that having an option where you can play very strictly, or less strictly would seem to help this. I played one game where most of us had a consensus about a word that was allowed, but one person disagreed with this, and despite it being settled in a civil fashion, they were grumpy about it, not just for the rest of the game but in the following game as well.

At the very least, a little more clarification about precisely what is and is not allowed would help a lot. For instance I have had one person tell me that compound words are allowed, but I can not see anything within the rules to suggest this is either the case or not the case. (I am not that great at linguistics and thus had to read about compound words, and found out they can take three forms, one word compounds, two word compounds and hyphenated compounds. So cowboy is a one word compound, prime minister is a two word compound and merry-go-round is a hyphenated compound. According to this person, all three are allowed.) I think for non native English speakers, this makes the game very difficult to judge.
LesserJester
Posts: 80
Joined: 16 November 2022, 14:37

Re: New setting: Strict/Lenient Rules, aka: No pedants and buzzkills?

Post by LesserJester »

I think that person might have told you wrong. SFAIK one word compounds are fine, the other two are not, so you need to pick one half of them eg minister rather than prime minister.
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aghagh
Posts: 97
Joined: 22 November 2014, 20:38

Re: New setting: Strict/Lenient Rules, aka: No pedants and buzzkills?

Post by aghagh »

@MrBeardy

As someone who could potentially be on the pedantic side of the fence ;) , I'd like to make some comments.

I think it's unfair to make the distinction "pedants / fun" as if they were opposites. How would you feel if someone used "fun / cheaters" ? That would also be quite unfair. Perhaps "formal / casual" could be more fair. Or "formal / informal".

In any case, we all want to have fun. We just happen to have fun in different ways and that's ok (or should be ok). For example, I find it fun discovering new great clues for the same old words (after over 700 games it still happens). It was fun to discover the full word pool (took me around 400 games). I find it fun to learn new stuff, whether it's history, vocabulary, grammar or etymology. I find it fun the intellectual challenge of exploring the boundaries of the game and discussing why this or that might be acceptable or not.

For example, I find the contents of this website fun (even if I don't agree with everything):
https://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl? ... gEdgeCases
(it explores the boundaries of the game analyzing many edge cases). Perhaps more "casual" players might find it a lot of non-sense and a waste of time, I don't know.

About your experiences with excluded words, I partially agree with you:
1) I am with you on this one. Not knowing what something means is no reason to invalidate a clue. The judge can ask other players (without giving it away) or search for its meaning on the Internet. It looks as not knowing the rules, not because of being "pedantic".
2) I am with you on this one. A clue may be a bad one and that's no reason it should get invalidated. Again it looks more lack of knowledge of the rules.
3) No opinion as I would need to know the words involved. The general idea of the game is removing words from the same family from a language perspective.
4) Not sure if I understand correctly. Hyphens are fine in hyphenated words. Not fine at the beginning or ending of a string to indicate collocation (this is discussed elsewhere, won't get into details).
5) I am with you on this one. Some words can be hyphenated or not and still be one word. Using a dictionary is a correct way to proceed to validate clues.

So of the 5 examples provided, I am with you in 3 or more. I think you might be labeling as "pedantic" what could be a mixture of bad manners, bad playing and lack of knowledge of the rules. :)

At my tables, If I have the time, I do try to help new players and explain things (sometimes I am multitasking and I am not able to). Sometimes I think I am succesful and sometimes I think I fail for whatever reason (maybe because I didn't use the best wording or timing). I've been suggested at least a couple of times to play just with other pedantic or etymology fans because of that, but that's the minority. Most often players welcome the tips or keep silent (so I really don't know what was their take).

Coming back to your initial suggestion, I don't think BGA would implement such an option. It's not an official variant and I think it wouldn't feel right to have. The only think I can think of is having different groups that players might join depending on the style of play they want to have (I think I've seen such groups in the French playing community, although I'm not sure). But even in that case there will be differences inside each group, as each player will draw the line of what's valid or not in a different place. In the end it's a lot about manners, common sense and discussing different opinions in a civilized way.

@bagofnails

My impression is that compund words are more common in Germanic languages that in Latin ones. I've seen German or Dutch players give a clue that in English is two words because in their language is just one. And the authors of Just One are French. So it feels natural that they didn't make a reference to compound words in the rules. In Latin languages we do have compund words, but just not as many as in English. And we don't use the hyphen that much compared to English, either, so that can also explain why there is no reference to hyphenated words in the rulebook (this will be updated in the future official rules, if I am not mistaken). I might be wrong about my theory, though. Who knows.

In a nutshell, compund words are valid as long as they are one word (rule of thumb: "no spaces", that's why a blank space is not allowed for clues). "Cowboy" and "merry-go-round" would therefore be both valid clues, while "prime minister" would not (I agree with LesserJester). The other thing to keep in mind about compound words is that they have more than one root word (a root word plus an affix would not be a compound word), so they belong to more than one word family and therefore can clash in more ways.
pjt33
Posts: 204
Joined: 05 April 2020, 15:35

Re: New setting: Strict/Lenient Rules, aka: No pedants and buzzkills?

Post by pjt33 »

MrBeardy wrote: 16 November 2022, 17:38 ... pedantic buzzkill players who seem to take things far too seriously and exclude otherwise valid clues because <insert pedantic reason few people seem to care about>?

They can then have their super pernickety games ...

... outright sneering nastiness that just make it unpleasant to be in. ...
You don't think that post is at all hypocritical?

MrBeardy wrote: 16 November 2022, 17:38 I've had perfectly reasonable clues excluded because:
1) (i quote) "i don't know what it means"
2) misleading/tangential (in their opinion only)
Everyone who's played the game a lot has had this happen. I requested a UI change to clarify which words should be filtered out, but it was rejected ( https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=75030 ). The solution is to explain the rules to the newbie, or if they're not a newbie to red thumb them.

MrBeardy wrote: 16 November 2022, 17:38 3) it has the same root (when it didn't)
It's sometimes surprising which pairs of words do and don't have common roots. But you seem to regard it as relevant whether it had the same root or not, which means that you're not arguing about pedantry but about mistakes. Good luck finding a table of people none of whom ever make mistakes.

MrBeardy wrote: 16 November 2022, 17:38 4) no hyphens, despite the word being a valid word in its own right if you ignored the dash at the end.
It's a downside of the implementation that this can't be settled by removing the hyphen and leaving the word in.

On the more general issue of hyphens, this is indeed an area of ambiguity, but it's not fair to call players who reject words with hyphens pedants. Ambiguities are often settled by house rules; the group that I used to play Just One with over Discord resolved the ambiguity with a house rule (or maybe a house clarification would be a more neutral term, if less common coinage) that hyphens are disallowed. The players you're complaining about may just be following the house rules that they've learnt in other contexts or from other players.

Maybe it would be good to have a game option which allows or disallows hyphens. You could try making a formal feature request. It's also something that you can raise informally in chat at the start of a game, to establish house rules for the table.
MrBeardy wrote: 16 November 2022, 17:38... after a few rounds it's just no fun to play with them.
That's what personal red thumbs are for.
MrBeardy wrote: 16 November 2022, 17:38Worse are the ones who when shown to be wrong in disallowing clues then get abusive in the chat for the next 10 rounds. It's so childish and unnecessary.
And that's what public red thumbs and abuse reports are for.
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