Needs Help (New crowner 21 June 2021): Unwinnable By Insanity

All right, it's been a few days since the last post—where do we stand? Do we start a crowner to get an official consensus? And if so, are we looking at a single-proposition crowner, or do we have additional options to consider?

What are the choices currently up for consideration? It seems like:

• Merge Unwinnable by Mistake and Unwinnable by Insanity together into a single trope, perhaps named Unintentionally Unwillable.
• Merge Unwinnable by Mistake and Unwinnable by Insanity together into a Trivia item, perhaps named Unintentionally Unwillable.
• Leave them as is, but maybe try to fix the descriptions to make the distinction that Mistake is a developer problem and Insanity is a player-induced choice clearer.

Any others?

I would suggest that we don't worry about the name of a hypothetically-merged trope just yet—let's first decide for or against the merger, then settle on a good name if we decide on "for"!

Hmm...

So, I might suggest formulating those options like this:

• Merge Unwinnable by Insanity with Unwinnable by Mistake
  • Name to be decided later
  • Not mutually exclusive with "move to trivia", below
  • Mutually exclusive with "no merger", below
• Move the trope(s) to Trivia
  • Not mutually exclusive with either of the other options
• No merger, but increase the emphasis in the trope-descriptions on game-design in Unwinnable by Mistake and player-behaviour in Unwinnable by Insanity
  • Mutually exclusive with "merge", above.

However, given that there's been a bit of time since the thread was last active, I fear that I may have forgotten some options. Thus I'd like to wait for some of the other participants to weigh in, just in case. ^^;

Merging all three types of unwinnability was also an option, though we don't recall how popular it was.

Those options sound good, plus the option of merging both into Unwinnable as wingedcatgirl said in the post below yours (I'm pretty sure I brought it up a while back as well).

That said, I'm not in favor of merging Unwinnable by Mistake and Unwinnable by Insanity into vanilla Unwinnable, in contrast to to merging By Insanity and By Mistake into each other while keeping Unwinnable as a separate supertrope to unintentional (By Mistake and By Insanity) and intentional (By Design) examples, and I think Unwinnable by Design should remain its own thing.

Edit: Fixed a mistake that made it sound like I was proposing something I wasn't actually in favor of (I accidentally put "merging By Design and By Mistake into each other" when I meant to put "merging By Insanity and By Mistake into each other").

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 24th 2021 at 3:30:53 AM

Yeah, "Design" can stay separate.

Anyways, crowner options look good.

I wasn't completely awake when I posted my previous post, so I accidentally mentioned merging Unwinnable by Design and Unwinnable by Mistake into each other. I was never in favor of that. I meant to put "By Insanity" when I shortened the trope names, not "By Design", so I fixed that.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 24th 2021 at 3:27:39 AM

Excellent, then!

I've put together a crowner, including the "merge all three" option. You should find it here:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php/PageAction/UnwinnableByInsanity2

[edit] And hollered, I believe!

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on May 24th 2021 at 11:26:35 AM

FYI above/below references don't work in crowners, since the options will get shuffled around based on popularity.

I removed the words "above" and "below" and referenced your post when removing them.

Edit: That said, the "Move to Trivia" option is probably getting as many downvotes as it is because it's too broad. I don't think anyone who previously mentioned moving By Mistake and By Insanity to Trivia was in favor of moving By Design to Trivia.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 24th 2021 at 4:59:23 AM

Sorry for the double post, but I think we should leave the Trivia option off this crowner and focus on whether to merge and how to merge if we do merge. After that, I was thinking we could use a second crowner to decide what gets moved to Trivia (if anything).

I think that's fair.

Crowner hooked per request.

Ah, you're right of course—that was silly of me! Sorry about that! ^^;

Thank you for doing that! ^_^

That's fair, and indeed, perhaps the current option is too broad then. I'm content to run another crowner after this one for the "trivia" question!

Thank you for doing that! ^_^

Time to merge Mistake and Insanity, with Design being kept separate. Calling.

As for names, I am thinking either:

• Keep Unwinnable by Mistake
• Rename to Accidentally Unwinnable (currently a redirect)

I'll be open to other name options.

Edited by Berrenta on May 29th 2021 at 5:33:41 AM

While Accident doesn't really encapsulate Insanity all that well, I guess it's the best we've got?

https://www.synonyms.com/antonyms/design

Should we have another vote for whether this is Trivia? I think lumping multiple tropes on one crowner option may have made voters less sure what they were voting on, so they ended up downvoting it as a precaution.

Either way, the fact that Unwinnable by Insanity is YMMV might mean we need to have a crowner option for whether the merged trope is a regular trope, Trivia, or YMMV.

Edit: Also, Unintentionally Unwinnable was suggested as a name.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 29th 2021 at 8:50:05 AM

Good point.

I should probably add that I previously suggested using a second crowner for deciding whether this is Trivia in this post; my previous post was just reiterating that instead of just being in response to the results of the currently hooked crowner.

I guess the crowner has spoken, but I don't see how Unwinnable by Mistake and Unwinnable by Insanity are one and the same. The former is "a glitch prevents you from winning", the latter is "you made a decision so mind-bendingly idiotic, that the game has more or less no choice than prevent you from winning".

In fact I'd say it's more related to Unwinnable by Design, in the sense that it's almost an Easter Egg way of introducing an Unwinnable condition.

But most Unwinnable by Insanity examples are mistakes in the programming, just things that people wouldn't normally stumble upon by accident. But it's still something the programmers didn't intend.

Game Freak definitely didn't INTEND for players to, say, get stuck on Cinnabar with just a Magikarp, but it's still a classic softlock method.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 29th 2021 at 10:05:32 AM

That sounds more like the two different tropes are getting confused rather than them being one and the same. Just look at the page image in Unwinnable by Insanity. No glitches are occuring in there, the game is working perfectly normally. But it's blatantly obvious that if you dig down that way you're going to get stuck. You dug down, now you're stuck. Congrats?

Edited by WackyPancake on May 29th 2021 at 4:08:46 PM

It doesn't need to be a glitch, just something the programmers overlooked that could softlock the game if players did it. The literal only difference is how likely players are to find it.

It's no Easter Egg since it's not intended to end the game.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 29th 2021 at 10:07:54 AM

Honestly, I'm with pancake on this.

I think the main difference is that Unwinnable by Mistake is "the game logic broke at some point preventing you from winning, it's not your fault, shucks!".

Unwinnable by Insanity is "the game logic is working perfectly, but you abused it in such a way that you cannot win anymore, you idiot!".

Edited by WackyPancake on May 29th 2021 at 4:09:36 PM