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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: bad reviews for foreign language games (like Begegnung am Fluss)
Message-ID: <Gn2D4F.H2E@world.std.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 20:05:02 GMT
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Andrew Plotkin  <erkyrath@eblong.com> wrote:
>Gunther Schmidl <gschmidl@xxx.gmx.at> wrote:
>> Hmm, I guess since my native language isn't English, I'll give every English
>> comp game an 1 next year because of the effort I need to go through to play
>> it.
>
>If you honestly find it annoying and offensive, then you should.

I find the English-centric voting attitudes annoying and
perhaps even offensive, given the effort made by a lot
of non-native English speakers to participate in this
community, in English.

>Reductio ad absurdum arguments are terrible at finding the most
>practical approach.

If there is a practical concern that a comp with 25 German
games and 25 English games is going to produce meaningless
results unless we start awarding separate winners in each
language, and if that is then equivalent to having two
separate comps, one in German and one in English, then I
think it's in practice far more effective to make it a
comp rule (or perhaps a recommendation) that submitted
games be in English, and leave it to other people to run
their own German IF comp, much as there is already apparently
one for Spanish-language games. Heck, it doesn't even need
to be a rule; just change the name of the comp to include
the word "English".

Otherwise we're just inviting authors to submit foreign-language
games and let these authors fail to learn anything useful
from the results, which are simply always going to be skewed
by some meaningless data (guess what! some judges don't speak
German--I'd never have imagined).

In the end, the comp results are just a popularity contest
within this small community, and as such, saying that BoF
was not popular is not at all wrong. But it seems like it
would be a more productive use of both authors' and judges'
time to make explicit the expectations of language.

Then again, one could argue that people might want to submit
games in foreign languages, knowing their games are going
to get skewed votes, because they don't care about the vote
results, they just want more people to play their games.

But again, I don't think anyone thinks the existence of
a Spanish-language comp is a bad idea, so I'm not clear why
the existence of an English-language comp is a bad idea either.
And don't say "well go run one then"-- we already have one, in
practice. It's just not codified.

Not calling our comp English-language seems offensive either
on the grounds of "our language is the one true language so
we don't need to mention it" or offensive on the grounds of
"ours is not a language-specific comp, it's an international
comp in which 1/3 of the votes for a non-English game will
be a '1' because it's not in the judge's native language".

Of course we didn't know that's how it would turn out until
this year, but now that we know, that's how it looks to me.

SeanB
And, yes, I realize the comp rules and other pages are all
in English. That just misses the point.
