welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets
facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m jan Misali, and in this episode, wait a second.
it’s way too soon for another episode of Conlang Critic! what’s going on, what’s
this video about? DISTORTED VOICE: [whispering sounds] MITCH: what, hangman? didn’t I just make
a video about hangman? DISTORTED VOICE: [whispering sounds] MITCH: it has how many views? DISTORTED VOICE: [whispering sounds] MITCH: okay, yeah, I guess I gotta make a
follow up video then. sorry to anyone who was hoping for the Lingwa de Planeta episode
of Conlang Critic, that’s coming soon, I promise. anyway, I guess everyone really liked that
hangman video, huh? I mean, the Gorithm certainly decided that it was worth showing to people.
the thing is, unlike other times my videos have been randomly recommended to way too
many people, people who were randomly recommended my hangman video largely decided to actually
stick around, watch the whole thing, and even watch some of my other videos! so, to the actual thousands of you who are
new subscribers from my hangman video, welcome to the channel! I’m jan Misali, but you
can call me Misali or Mitch or hbm. the main thing I make on this channel is the show Conlang
Critic, an extremely niche series where I review constructed languages, but I also make
a lot of other completely different things. it’s a real hodgepodge of content here on
the jan Misali channel! in the comments of the hangman video, there’s
a few specific counterpoints and questions I’ve seen be brought up multiple times,
so at this point it would make no sense not to make a follow up video addressing them. oh, and just in case you haven’t seen my
hangman video yet, you should watch that before watching this. DISTORTED VOICE: is this seriously a 20 minute
video about hangman? how bored are you, and are you doing okay? MITCH: I actually had the idea to make a video
about hangman quite a while ago, in the Before Time. videos about absurdly specific topics
are apparently what I do best. see, eg. “w”. a. y. DISTORTED VOICE: wow, look at this guy making
a whole video about how hangman is too violent for the children these days. this is exactly
the problem with America. MITCH: that is not what hangman is a weird
game is about. I briefly talked about how hangman has a morbid theme because I couldn’t
not talk about that, but as I said, that’s really the least weird thing about the game.
I’m more interested in analyzing it from a game design perspective. I’m guessing
that the people who made that sort of comment didn’t actually watch the whole video, which
is understandable. if you haven’t already spent some time thinking about the game hangman,
it sounds like a really boring topic. DISTORTED VOICE: hey, that’s not how I play
hangman! what gives? MITCH: yeah, I should’ve seen this coming.
one of the main points I brought up in the video was the lack of standardization, but
I didn’t really get into just how many varients actually exist. there’s so many different
versions that I don’t think it would be possible for me to actually catalogue all
of them. the biggest one is that some people include
the gallows as part of the hangman drawing and not as part of the setup, usually resulting
in four extra incorrect guesses for the guesser. I also got comments from people saying that
they usually draw the hangman facing the other way, and comments from people saying that
the game actually ends with the hangman being set on fire?? I guess?? man, hangman is a weird game. someone should
make a video about that! DISTORTED VOICE: actually, the word hangman
refers to the executioner, not the person being hanged. MITCH: wait, really? [typing sounds] yeah,
you’re right. okay, so pretend every time I refer to the stick figure as “the hangman”
that I’m actually saying “the hanged man”. problem solved. DISTORTED VOICE: actually, Ring Around the
Rosie isn’t about the Black Death or the Great Plague or anything like that. MITCH: sure, not originally, but the rhyme
has changed so much throughout history that in a modern context it’s either about disease
or nothing at all. DISTORTED VOICE: actually, the letter <ñ>
isn’t just <n> with a diacritic; in Spanish it’s considered a separate letter. MITCH: that’s... literally what I said in
the video? I said that in Spanish, <n> and <ñ> are separate letters, but in English
they’re not. I don’t understand why this was such a common correction; it doesn’t
actually contradict what I said. I mean, unless they’re actually arguing that <ñ> is a
separate letter from <n> in English, but that’s obviously incorrect. DISTORTED VOICE: actually, the letter <ñ>
is called eñe in Spanish. MITCH: uh, yup! you are correct that that
is the Spanish name of the letter n-tilde. additionally, the letter <n> is called ene
in Spanish, as long as we’re using the Spanish names of letters. good job! DISTORTED VOICE: actually, an apostrophe is
a punctuation mark, not a letter. MITCH: it’s good to have strong opinions
on this topic, but just to make sure everyone is well informed, let’s go over the main
arguments on both sides of the debate. in English, an apostrophe is undeniably a
grapheme; there are multiple pairs of words that are pronounced differently where the
presence or absence of an apostrophe is the only thing differentiating between their spellings.
if you say that a character in a written language being a grapheme is enough for it to also
be a letter, then an apostrophe is unambiguously a letter. anti-apostrophicists will generally argue
that apostrophes don’t represent sounds, and therefore cannot be letters. this is hard
to argue against for English, but English spelling is highly irregular; it’s well
known that most letters in English are silent sometimes. is it that much of a stretch for
there to be a letter which is never pronounced? regardless, there exist several languages
where apostrophic literality is far more clear; apostrophes, and letters like them such as
the Hawai’ian ʻokina, are often used to represent glottal stop phonemes in various
languages. an apostrophe is also often used to transcribe the Cyrillic letter <ь> (front
er). both sides of this debate certainly have their
fair points, but I’d advise against simply dismissing the pro-apostrophicists outright. DISTORTED VOICE: actually, there are only
five vowels. the letter <y> is NOT a vowel. MITCH: okay, now that’s definitely wrong.
I went over the origin of the letter <y> in my video called “w”, but briefly, <y>
was originally added to the Latin alphabet to transcribe the Greek vowel upsilon, and
it was called “i graeca”, because it was thought of as an alternate version of the
letter <i>. when the Latin alphabet was first used to write English, this Greek I was used
whenever they needed to use <i> as a glide instead of as a full vowel, because for reasons
just using <i> in those contexts would’ve been pronounced like [dʒ] instead. however,
since <y> was just an alternative to <i> that you could use whenever, it was also used as
a replacement for the letter <i> word finally, because medieval scribes liked the way that
looked. and that’s why [beat] yeah, that’s right, a fresh new audience
means I can reuse jokes now. you know what Zese! I suppose you think that’s cute. the
Lojban word for 42 is- DISTORTED VOICE: nice reference to Homestar
Runner there! you have earned yourself a new subscriber my good sir :) MITCH: is that seriously all it takes to win
people over? just make a reference to a dated internet joke? in that case, you’d all love
😳what if we kissed😳in 2019😳! DISTORTED VOICE: the relationship between
the guesser and executioner isn’t really competitive or adversarial. the executioner’s
goal isn’t to “win”, but to provide a fun gameplay experience for the guesser.
their role is more like that of a game master in a tabletop RPG. MITCH: okay, now we’re getting into the
good stuff. so, yeah, I agree, the “executioner as game master” analysis is a great way
to think about what the executioner’s actual role in hangman is. I don’t think I would
make the jump to literally claiming that hangman is a tabletop RPG, but the parallels are pretty
clear. DISTORTED VOICE: what do you mean “pencil
and paper games are categorically simple”? hello, what about tabletop RPGs? are you calling
those games simple? MITCH: I don’t think tabletop RPGs count
as pencil and paper games. the defining trait of pencil and paper games is that the method
of interacting with them is by drawing and writing things. while that certainly is a
part of most RPGs, it’s not the main gameplay. crucially, if you want to play Dungeons & Dragons,
you need dice. DISTORTED VOICE: it’s not that hard to stop
the executioner from cheating, all you have to do is make them write down the word somewhere
secret before the game starts then have them reveal it to the guesser after it’s over. MITCH: yeah, but who actually wants to do
that? you’d need to get a completely separate sheet of paper, and then you’d need to make
sure that the guesser isn’t cheating by somehow finding where it’s written down. DISTORTED VOICE: what about twenty questions? MITCH: twenty questions is a guessing game
where one player thinks of something, and a second player asks them twenty questions
in order to figure out what it is. there’s a lot of really clear comparisons you can
make between twenty questions and hangman. it’s asymmetric; the two players are doing
different things. it’s open-ended; there’s no standard limit on what can be used as the
thing being guessed or what can be used as a question. the person who picked the thing
at the start can easily cheat by dynamically changing what it is mid-game. the relationship
between the two players is the same as it is between the guesser and executioner in
hangman. while I’d argue that the lack of standardization
in twenty questions isn’t quite as extreme as it is in hangman (the loss state for the
guesser in twenty questions is completely unambiguous), it’s definitely clear that
twenty questions belongs in the same subcategory of guessing games as hangman. DISTORTED VOICE: what about Mastermind? MITCH: I had actually never heard of Mastermind
before I saw people bringing it up in the comments, and yeah it sure is a lot like hangman.
in a round of Mastermind, one player is a codemaker and the other is a codebreaker.
the codemaker creates a sequence of four colored pegs, and the codebreaker tries to guess the
sequence. for each guess, the codebreaker plays their own sequence of four pegs on the
board, and the codemaker replies only by indicating when the breaker correctly guessed the exact
location of every peg of a certain color in the sequence. so, it’s definitely obvious that this game
has a lot in common with hangman. they’re both games about guessing some sequence by
guessing its individual segments. however, there are some key differences. most significantly,
the guesser not only has to guess that a specific segment appears somewhere in the sequence,
they also have to know where in the sequence it appears. this certainly makes the game
more difficult than hangman. additionally, Mastermind’s rules are very
precisely defined. it’s very clear what sequences are legal for the codemaker to select
at the start, and it’s very clear what counts as the codebreaker winning or losing. DISTORTED VOICE: what about ghost? MITCH: ghost isn’t very much like hangman,
but it is a fun word game. in a round of ghost, two or more players take turns adding letters
to a sequence, at each step making sure that it’s the valid start of some word, but avoiding
having it actually be a word. so like, if the letter you say makes the sequence into
a full word, you lose the round, but if it makes it into a sequence of letters that isn’t
the start of any word, you also lose the round. it has to be a sequence of letters that starts
some English word, without being an English word on its own. traditionally, a player who
loses five rounds loses the game. the main thing connecting ghost to hangman
is that as a word game, it’s unclear exactly what counts as a word, and therefore it’s
unclear what moves are or are not losing moves. like, suppose three players spell out the
word “ghost”. player one says “g”, player two says “h”, player three “o”,
player one “s”, player two says “t” which spells out a word so they lose the round.
but do they? now, if you recall, all single letters are
also words, so you could make the argument that player one lost this round by saying
“g”. however, if that were enforced, ghost would be a very boring game, so let’s say
that one letter words don’t count. okay, so you could instead make the argument that
player three lost this round by spelling out “gho”, which refers to the traditional
clothing worn by men in Bhutan. is that an English word? how often does a word have to
be used in English for it to count? DISTORTED VOICE: that symmetric competitive
version of hangman you brought up already exists! MITCH: of course it does. I probably could’ve
checked beforehand, but I didn’t for some reason. oh well! DISTORTED VOICE: what’s that boppin’ song
you used in the video? MITCH: that’s a song I made called sangman.
I make a lot of music for this channel, which you can listen to in my “music” playlist.
I sometimes also release albums of my music on bandcamp, which is a great way to support
the channel. DISTORTED VOICE: hey, I found a way to improve
your “perfect” strategy! MITCH: so, originally I wanted this video
to have a segment going over all the different strategies people suggested and comparing
them to each other to see how well they work. the thing is that that would’ve taken way
too long to actually do, and I want this to just be a quick video answering common questions. so, for now, I’ll say that I definitely
agree that the strategy I came up with can be improved, and sometime in the future I’ll
make a third video about hangman that’s completely dedicated to testing different
strategies. in the meantime, if you have any ideas for hangman strategies, post them in
the comments of this video so I don’t have to dig through the thousands of comments I
got on the main video. DISTORTED VOICE: are you going to make more
videos about game theory? MITCH: Game Theory? no way, I hate that guy!
[laugh track] but seriously, this channel is about as unfocused
as I am. I primarily make videos based on what sorts of things I want to see that don’t
already exist. hangman is a weird game is a perfect example of that. I legitimately
had been thinking a lot about how strange the game hangman is, and there weren’t any
videos on youtube about that topic, so I went ahead and made one myself. I will definitely continue to make more videos
that are like hangman is a weird game. video essays about absurdly specific topics are
what I do best, as it turns out. just, don’t expect more things that are exactly like it. that said, there is one other very simple
game that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. I wasn’t going to make a video
about it, but given the overwhelming success of the hangman video it’s definitely worth
a shot, right? okay, that’s all the common questions I
wanted to answer in this quick video. once again, thank you to all the new subscribers
who saw a guy rant about a spelling game for twenty minutes and decided “yeah, this is
someone I’d like to see more from”. I am unbelievably lucky to have any platform
at all. thanks for watching. I’ve been jan Misali,
and please stay safe.
