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 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, 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 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 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 is NOT a vowel.
MITCH: okay, now that’s definitely wrong. I went over the origin of the letter in
my video called “w”, but briefly, 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 . when the Latin alphabet was first
used to write English, this Greek I was used whenever they needed to use as a glide
instead of as a full vowel, because for reasons just using in those contexts would’ve
been pronounced like [dʒ] instead. however, since was just an alternative to that
you could use whenever, it was also used as a replacement for the letter 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.