He__o Wor_d!

I play Hangman on an emulator and blog about it

By Sean Hofer  |  August 23, 2019

An introductory post to my class blog

For the first post to my class blog, I sat down to play a game I found on archive.org’s internet arcade called Hangman. It’s the classic pen-and-paper game we all probably know well, only in an arcade cabinet (or in this case, a browser).

Video games and paper games have a couple different advantages (as mentioned in class). Notably in this case, scoring was handled in a way that was not immediately clear to me. Because video games self-enforce rules, unclear rulesets can lead to frustrating experiences.

For example, on a number of occasions I would pick a letter incorrectly and it would result in an automatic loss (from 0 strikes). However, it only did this sometimes, and I couldn’t discern a pattern. After a bit of trial and error, I eventually realized what was happening: spinning randomizes the score you get, and selecting Go For It locks that score and removes your extra lives (this makes sense but was never explained).

One thing digital hangman does have as an advantage over the pen-and-paper version is that the phrases and words can be far more random and widely sourced than most people would likely be able to do off-the-cuff (when most people play hangman).

Note to self: when making digital versions of paper games, make sure the rules are consistent!