Disclaimer. I’m sure you don’t need more people suggesting UI improvements, and I apologise in advance for doing just that.
It’s common to lament the decline in the Go teaching culture since the ‘golden days’ of KGS and the Go Teaching Ladder. In my experience, strong Go players are often happy to teach weaker players, but if there’s friction in setting up a teaching game, it doesn’t happen.
I wanted to bring the following idea up for discussion, which might encourage a more active teaching culture on OGS. During game setup, players could mark a game as a ‘teaching game’, just as they mark it as ‘ranked/unranked’ and select the board size. In the Custom-Game menu, players could make it clear whether they’re offering to teach or asking to be taught by restricting opponents to weaker or stronger ranks, respectively. Alternatively, a sensei/student option could be available in the UI. It may be possible to build Teaching Games into the Automatch finder, but there would be some challenges there. You could set them as unranked, handicap games, but pairing would need to be restricted to players who’ve elected to be open to teaching games in their settings. The custom game route might be simpler.
Some arguments in favour of this idea:
If this option were available, I believe I’d use it on many, if not most, of my games, both as a teacher and as a student. If this were a prominent part of the UI, I suspect many other users would as well.
Teaching games followed by game reviews are part of what makes Go so enjoyable. Building the request for a post-game review into the UI would improve the user experience.
Teaching games are critical for catching and retaining newer players, and ultimately expanding the player base. Long-term, this could increase the player base for OGS.
Some arguments against this:
It might turn out to be an under-utilised feature which clogs up the UI.
There may be too many requests in one direction (for teaching, or for being taught).
You can do this already by naming your custom game as a teaching game request.
This would take a lot of work.
Regarding these points,
I don’t think this is a major concern: we already have ‘Rengo’, ‘Other’, ‘Ineligible’, etc. marked on the home page. What’s one more?
Things will come to a reasonable equilibrium state (players will cancel games if wait times are too long). Also, Go players enjoy both teaching and being taught; I’m sure most players would make sure to give back as much as they receive.
I see this as a culture thing: if it’s baked into the UI, it is more likely to be utilised, and possibly become a cultural norm.
I can’t speak to this, and could imagine it’s major enough to be a significant hassle.
Yes I was also going to say this. It’s important that there’s something to the suggestion more than just titling the game “Teaching Game” as @Atorrante points out.
Some previous threads
One thing that could be done at the moment
Functionally it doesn’t seem to far from
in the sense that you want both players to be able to play moves, but you still want to retain the idea of one player being in control to edit the position, maybe you still want clocks etc. Some sort of in between really.
i think all new players should by default play a 9x9 teaching game to learn the rules. I see lots of 40kyus asking for help after losing games with no idea why. That has to drive away 50% of potential new players.
I’m not sure this is the right way to enforce 9x9. The right way is to facilitate human help to a beginner instead. Changing the size has its own inconvenience. Maybe I could have given up on go if you give me a tsumego as an introduction to the game
I fully join the OP suggestion. To me it’s like having a demo changed into a game proposal with easier access and functionalities (like clock, scoring tools …)
There is a big difference between being able to name a game as having the category of teaching game, and actually supporting teaching by simulating how a real board works. On a real board, you can create an initial pattern quickly, by placing stones of arbitrary color in arbitrary order, and you can play illegal moves to illustrate what illegal moves are, and other such teaching operations. You can also ask the student to focus on one group, and play only in that one area for awhile.
All these and more are not how OGS is programmed, so actually supporting teaching would be a major software extension. However, that being said, it would also be in line with the fact that OGS is always on the forefront of offering new ways to play, to score, and to time games.
The possibilities for making OGS the standard way to teach are as endless as one’s imagination. I feel excited just thinking about it. Even I, with my low rating, could help out by teaching absolute beginners to the game, while 9p players could teach advanced players. And anyone could learn at their own level easily and, ultimately, at any time without prearrangement.
My conclusions from this thread so far: a “teaching” or “discussion” game should be able to alternate between two modes: discussion and normal play. The game should start in discussion mode, giving the chance to make any special setup that is wanted.
I do not know how much is already available.
Normal play should work exactly as it does now, except that either player can switch to discussion, which pauses the clock. (Or is there some difference needed in the implementation of (super)ko? I think not.)
Discussion mode should have one player in control and allow:
Hand over control to the other player.
Play a variation.
Alter the board with total freedom, even allowing illegal positions. This should also allow markup (text, circles, etc.).
Skip backwards or forwards to any point in the tree of positions and variations in the game and discussion so far.
Adjust the clock.
Resume play in the current position, ¿with either player to move?
Chat messages by either player, of course.
There should be an “Enable discussion” option in the game setup. This option should be incompatible with “Ranked”. If discussion is enabled, the game should start in discussion mode, with White in control, as an arbitrary / pragmatic choice.
