Plea: “Game Invitation” instead of “Game Challenge” >>> POLL

OGS Development
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I’ve written this before, a few people liked it but it seems it was forgotten …

Being someone who is challenged by life in multiple ways (depression, PTSD, ADHD, and a few more), I’d dearly wish we could … no, we can … we would change …

Game Challenge

to

Game Invitation

Sounds a LOT friendlier to my ears, and thus also more fitting to our friendly community here :slight_smile: We are not gunslingers here, not shootists—at least most of us aren’t, are we?

Normal Games are also per default called “friendly game”, so why not make it like in Real Life where we’d also offer our game partner a cup of tea?
(Coffee for me, please, and an occasional spliff when I visit countries where it is legal.)

For myself at least it always is more like learning, and together … with rather than against, my, uhm, “opponent”. And yeah, sure it is against the other colour, but we “Fight the board, not the person!”, right?

Thoughts? Maybe I’m just getting old and mellow. But still, for me this is about the philosophy of Go.

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I like it.
For consideration, in the pop-up window when we click on a player, it’s just one word “Challenge”. I don’t know if “Invitation” (only the one word) will be intuitive enough, but that’s for the higher powers. :stuck_out_tongue:

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How about “Play a game” in the player menu?

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Thing is, “play a game” when we receive an invitation might not be too clear.

And “challenge received” sounds, to my ears, as if I were expected to appear to a shootout.

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Is there an “official term” for asking someone to play a game in Japanese, Chinese, Korean? Maybe paraphrasing will give us ideas.

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In Japanese it’s not much more than “Let’s do a game” 対戦しよう. Where the world for game, is actually composed of the characters of “opposed” and “battle”, so I’m not sure if that would be helpful…

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Thats a good point actually, “getting invited” to something sounds like fun and pleasant experience, but “being challenged” has some negative connotations onto it.

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I are often on the side that says that language matters less than facts, however I agree “Invitation” sounds much nicer and more natural.
In actual usage, as in, in a go club, I invite much more than I challenge. That might sound strange but to me “Challenge” almost sound a bit immature, like how a video game / manga character would behave.

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I agree that on the receiving side “invited” might sound nicer than “challenged”
But for the sake of consistency, I’m not sure “invite” would be as clear as “challenge” in the context menu…
Screenshot_20201026-101839_Brave

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Oh, that’s what’s it’s called… :woman_shrugging:

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How about “Invite to Game” in the context menu? Or maybe “Ask to Play” if we want something shorter.

Even if the context menu does not change, we could still change the language in the message sent to the person being invited.

Maybe the language received in the invitation could be “You have been invited to play a game with (Sender)” or “(Sender) has invited you to play a game”.

I like the overall shift from a word like “challenge” to “invite” or “ask”. Not only does it soften the language, but it also reinforces that it is completely optional to accept an invite, whereas a challenge sounds more like something that is taunting one not to decline.

On another hand, I think the ladder is a different context, where the challenges are not optional, and perhaps the language for just the ladder challenges should not change.

But I fully support calling the one-off direct game invitations as invitations.

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Oof. Yeah, I forgot about that… that’s certainly not ideal.

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IMO it is worth it. We say that OGS is “the best place to play Go”. Let’s make it so, down to the roots.

Maybe not ideal, but … worth it. We can go the extra mile. Heck, I’d even pay for the translation.
@anoek, if you would consider this plea, let me please know the cost and where to send the money.

I want to be (part of) the change that I wish to see in the world.
(Hat tip to Gandhi-ji, even though he has been de-throned for me in several aspects)

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That is very generous, but I would be a bit disappointed if you would have to pay for translation since you are a volunteer mod. :smiley:

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I will contribute to this.
I think the context menu should say “new game” if “invite to play” is too long.

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Allow me a bit of a rant as this might be a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

First off, I am not rellay against the proposed change; one word for another, whatever - to me the result stays the same, it is a button you press to challenge someone. But I am also certainly NOT for similar changes.
I appreciate reasonable political correctness and try to stick to some standarts, but would be very cautios about EXTREME correctness, and I think this is a very slippery and scary road to go down on (much like any good idea when taken to unreasonable extremes).

Rest of the rant

You can always find some offense if you are looking for it. Suddenly, we might consider “capture” too harsh, let’s change all the books and confuse everyone ever with “vacation”. “White wins?” Can we say that? Let’s change the colors to something more neutral and go with: “Grey managed to outplay beige in this one game - it could have been only luck, and everyone is a winner anyway” and so on. Of course I am overdoing it for comical effect, but once you start this witchhunt IT IS ENDLESS.
Words are arbitrary and have only the meaning we ascribe to them. I do not believe such extremities help change the world for the better. A bad intention is only masked by nice words, not gone. And when you know there is no bad intention (like I believe is the case with challenge buttons and such) changing the words is meaningless and will only serve to needlessly confuse and complicate matters. I believe there are much more worthwile changes anoek can be working on.

I believe you might be underestimating the non-ideality of the situation. To better illustrate the needs I think would arise: it would mean finding the original speakers (note the plural) to keep the same voice (maybe one of them is not interested anymore). Recording in more or less similar environment and similar equipement with similar tone of voice and rhytm (none of which is as easy as it sounds), process it in a similar way to original and replace all the files. Otherwise, it will sound weird. And then, what if other languages want the same treatment? Do we say no? Only English gets the prefferential treatment? Redoing parts of a project is often times harder than doing it all from scracth. And such a minor change might not justify that.

Despite saying that I am not against, the more I think about it the more I say it is ABSOLUTELY not worth it in my opinion. Sorry (as in sorry for disagreeing, not that it won’t happen, that’s not up to me :smiley: )

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I had many jokes, some involving book titles, and about how different people perceive shades of colors.

However, and I know this is completely off-topic, I now absolutely want a goban set with gold and silver stones. Has anyone seen anything similar? Probably some head of state gift?
I’ll never get it, but I would like to be able to dream of one.

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Just out of curiosity, who recorded the voices in the first place? We’re they paid or volunteers?

I will volunteer to re-record the words (not because I have any experience in voice acting, but because I think everyone on OGS should know the voice of benjito)

In seriousness, if human voices are infeasable, and make it so we can’t update the site in the future, isn’t that the real problem? Should we look into auto generated options? AI has come a long way!

And finally, my thoughts on the words:

Invite v Challenge: I think invite is accurate and indeed more PC.

Opponent v partner: I still prefer opponent here. The game is adversarial in nature, even if you are “learning together”, so opponent just makes sense. “Partner” is oodles more vague, (like are we playing rengo? :grinning:)

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I prefer “invitation”/“invite”/“request” over “challenge” not primarily because sensitivity/PC concerns, but rather since I think it sounds much more natural (as a native American English speaker) than “challenge”.

If I were to ask a friend or stranger for a game, I would never naturally say something like “I challenge you to a game” or “I’m sending you a challenge”. The word challenge seems a bit awkward in the context of requesting/inviting someone to play a game. Saying something like “Would you like to play a game?” sounds much more natural to me, and using language like “ask”, “request”, “invite” all sound simply more natural than “challenge”. This perception may be different in other languages/cultures, where the corresponding word “challenge” might actually be better, so I can only offer my personal perspective as an American English speaker.

For me, I would probably only say something like “I challenge you to a game”, if I wanted to be sarcastic (and hence I would only use that jokingly with a friend), since it sounds a bit old-fashioned and evokes the connotations of challenging another person to a duel. With such sarcasm, I would probably have to accompany that with the hyperbolic and sarcastic act of throwing a glove onto the floor, done in a silly exaggerated fashion that would make it obvious that I was joking.

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I agree! “Invite” is better in more than one way!

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