A few years ago my two younger brothers became obsessed with the 90's version and gave the characters back stories. So if you over heard a game between them you would hear things like, "Is your person unhappily married?" "Is your person secretly a communist?"
Many people forget that 'black' and 'white' are just like 'brunette' and 'blonde'. it is not rascist, it is an identifying feature of a human so you can tell two people apart... and not necassarily to bully them, often just to say ' hi Anne'.
Yes rasist means making fun of or thinking they're better than a race. When you describe someone that say stole your car mentioning their race is just describing them
So awesome. Maybe also the Mr. Rogers guy from the Cracked Ads going up against Adam on his Adam Ruins Everything? The ideas are so amazing and endless.
Hey, but this is only one version of the game. I've got a version that has about 1/3 of the characters black. Then a 1/3 are tanned and 1/3 are pale. Ok, that's not perfect, but it's better, right?
yeah. can't expect them to go by the census and make sure each corresponds exactly to its share of the population also In terms of game balance it makes sense. wonder if they didn't make them all white just so people didn't ask about race
I was pretty confused by the video at first because the only new version I've played had different skin colors haha didn't realize there was another new one without.
In terms of balance they should either eliminate race as a guess by making it against the rules or make all the characters the same race. Any question that eliminates 1/3 of the characters is going to shorten the length of the game dramatically and consistently.
I don't know about other countries but the guess who that my family bought here in Germany in 2003 contains like over 1/3 of black people. Also, the Bernard that we have is black too, so seeing a white Bernard really freaked me out for a second there. Oh and we have sad people in the game too.
+CarpeDiem So Guess Who in Germany was pretty much stereotyping black people as criminals since the game is an adaption of 'find the murderer' type games. Since the black population in Germany is estimated to be around 0.3% that is 100 times Racist!!!!
honesty, from a game design point of view, skin color elimates too many people right away and makes that the first question you should ask. Maybe they thought making it so that picking the black lady was the worst person to pick seemed racist. Or they couldve just added other black people as well as other skin colors. Or maybe they're just racist.
Some psychologists designed a version where race was the first question to ask, to see who would ask. The older a subject was, until it leveled out in the 20'sish, the less likely they were to ask about race, particularly if the other participant was black. This made them appear more racist when they were afraid to bring up race- particularly if the other participant was black.
> skin color elimates too many people right away and makes that the first question you should ask The most effective question at any stage eliminates exactly half of the remaining characters. No more, and no less. It doesn't matter if it's skin color or anything else. For example, in the classic set, I can ask "Is your person someone with yellow or orange hair, or a woman with white hair" (supposing my person is none of those), and I will eliminate either 12 (for yes) or 11 (for no). Say it's 12 remaining; I can ask another question that applies to exactly 6 people. Now again, I'll have only 6 people remaining, given either answer. Next I'll ask something that narrows it down to 3. Then 2 or 1 (at which point I win). Obviously my last question will rule out one person, and I'm done. So you see, it doesn't really matter what attributes they put on the characters. You can _always_ craft your questions so that you'll eliminate half of the remaining people, and if you do that, you'll win in either four or five moves. If you ask more specific questions than that, then yes you'll get lucky sometimes. But the odds are against you; if there's only one black person, and you say "is your character black?", it's _very_ likely that you're only going to eliminate one person. I haven't done the statistics on this properly, but stabbing around at rough approximations, I'm pretty sure that the average number of moves it will take you to win is around 10 with that strategy. So the optimal strategy is around twice as strong.
The first question asked almost every game at my elementary school was "Does your person have facial hair (eyebrows don't count)?" You can eliminate a lot of the people with that question alone. It's almost more effective than if you asked about gender (probably the second most asked question, because there's a 50/50 split). chaumas is correct about asking which questions eliminate ~50% of the remaining board. You're taking a huge gamble by wasting a question on a single character. You could win the game on the spot, or you wasted an entire turn.
I vote we create a diverse set of Guess Who characters, that all look like fairly normal people, except we make Anne fucking blue. I feel like that's the best choice here.
chaumas on the subject of knocking out half of them, I had a set with multiple games on it and there was a set with household appliances and I’d always start with “does it need to be plugged in”
Reminds me of a study- after 8 years old, children grow increasingly afraid of asking about race in Guess Who (even if it was set up to be strategically the best question to ask first), and being afraid to mention race actually made them seem *more* racist.
Fascinating - if this video were posted today I can guarantee it would receive at least 1/3 dislikes regardless of the fact that it's comedy and not a serious critique. I'm always interested in the changes in social trends (even if it's an undercurrent) and in 2015-2016 we near invariably see a noteable chunk of people downvoting and complaining about any video that dares to mention racism. Clearly some people are very sensitive to this issue despite usually insisting that the video creators are "over-sensitive" or "too offended" even when they're perfectly calm while the commenter is outraged. Did I get all the scare words in?
The only think I see people taking offense to nowadays is this retarded belief that only whites can be racist and that every white is a privileged racist.
I know this is satire... but... the underlying points made in this video really are a bit spot-on. Milton-Bradley dumbed down the game we older folks grew up with for a new, softer generation, narrowing the field of questions possibly so games would go quicker. But on the other hand, in doing so, they made everyone pretty much the same character, but with different hair colors and articles of clothing. That's kind of sad...
+Joseph Collins Wait, wouldn't making the cast more ethnically centralized make the game more difficult? It removed some of the "easier to isolate" characters. Is the due with a small facial scar (the only guy with one) gone?
+Kami-sama no Otaku No. just the opposite. By guessing a certain minority, you might as well just be guessing for a specific individual. Sure, it may be easy victory if he actually chose such a character, but if he/she didn't, you basically wasted your move. there are a lot of objectively superior moves to make. By including more ethnic diversity, you're making the game easier, since it makes entire groups of people, if not most of the board easy to dismiss by guessing the right one.
+Nicolas Brun-Cottan Maybe we were just always bad at the game then... or good at reading each other. Not every time but often enough I could tell when my opponent was so nervous that he or she had to have a character that was going to be easily narrowed down. Plus most of the characters that were "One Question" types still had other features one could guess. Since it has been some 20 years since I last played, this example is probably horribly inaccurate but let us say there is one and only one character with a facial scar. He has dark hair and a red shirt. One of our games would typically go -Is it a man? -Is he wearing a red shirt? -Does he have black hair? -Does he have a scar? At least if each preceding question was answered "yes". We were just kids so if that is the wrong way to do it... my bad. Those times when someone was annoyed because they had one of the female characters (the edition I played had only a quarter to a third of the characters being female) or the guy with the small facial scar... well you guessed it pretty quick. I think because of a horrible failure to get the rules when I first started playing (...I lied about my character >.>) we never thought to bluff properly with our mannerism (I am not sure if I played this game past the age of 10).
The question now becomes, was the game any actually easier for you (did it take fewer questions for you to get the target) or was it purely a question of meta gaming, as in the other players attitude told you which questions to use.
+Nicolas Brun-Cottan Right, and as I tried to explain, by now I am not sure. ^^' That is why I gave such a detailed comment (if you did not click Read More, there is a lot to read more XP). If that sounds slower than your typical game of Guess Who (give or take a few decades) then yeah it was pure metagaming: if I had played more people who knew what they were doing then I would probably have realized it was a bad approach. If it is significantly faster then... maybe its the other way around? Though even if it is the other way around, I think I understand the point; it isn't just having a more diverse cast; it is having one that does not follow (for example) the population breakdown for the United States on a national level. So its a specific level of diversity that is needed; so that no one characteristic is an easy win.
***** there are literally 5 or 6 of EVERYTHING5 moustaches 5 hats 5 women (now) 5 black people any feature you ask about will either eliminate 5 or eliminate all but 5
Yeah I had that one. I remember once, the nerd I was as a child, statistically worked out in order which characters were best through to worse to have based one which was most common. I forgot the results though.
Yeah, people assume asking the race makes the game too easy. Not true! Asking the hair color, sad vs. happy, often took out MORE characters, as there was also at least one asian, hispanic, etc.
Well If your opponent asks "if your character is anything other than white" They are technically just asking "is you character Anne?" in that case still a shot in the dark in most cases.
Guess Who is not the only game that threw out its roots. When I was a kid, Monopoly was a trick that parents used to teach kids how to count money. A very necessary life skill. My niece brought over her Monopoly board one weekend and asked me to play. I said sure. She excitedly started setting up the board and then handed me a plastic card. I asked what this was for, and she said it was my ATM card. I almost died when I realized that the fundamental reason that Monopoly existed, has been replaced by a machine that automatically does all the work for you. That's progress I guess
Mister Mack pretty sure Monopoly was designed to demonstrate the faults of a capitalist society. So, that obviously didn't work. Plus, kids these days probably need more practice being responsible when spending with plastic than handling actual cash because, you know, wave of the future.
Monopoly being a metaphor for capitalism is irrelevant because ten year olds wouldn't comprehend that. I was talking about what it was actually USED for, to teach kids to count money. Your statement does not change that fact. Wave of the future? Since when is encouraging laziness a positive trend?
Mister Mack It really does. Parents who want to use it to teach still have the original available, actually that version is much easier to find in stores. The version with a card is a rather uncommon high price point version that is designed to simply be fun, and is sold as simply fun. It takes out most of tedious parts out of the game, everyone who buys it just doesn't want to deal with the paper money.
Pretty sure those little faces are able to be popped out, so you could realistically print out your own pictures and pop them into the board for any type of Guess Who you want?
I dunno. The "boring, casual white guy hat" looks like an Alpine-style fedora, meaning Bernard is now "cheerfully Teutonic" as opposed to "aggressively Russian." And at least one of the screenshots used in the "casual 70s racism," the Siamese cat in the blue suit and black bowtie, is from the 1980s show Rescue Rangers. And, in fact, it looks like the others are all from 1940s and 1950s era movies and shows. So literally nothing he showed was from the 70s and one was from AFTER the 70s.
His flight was about how certain months of racism were tolerated in the 70s so showing clips from directly before and after the 70s makes that point all the same
@@creativedesignation7880 Oh cmon it's just a board game, they probably only did it for balance purposes (like not making the first question asked eliminate 50% of the cast, and the fact that you can fit more features , like facial hair, on men) and not because they're sexist. Commenting on a 20 year old board game isn't helping the plight of inequality for either gender.
Did anyone else notice the weird squiggling black dot thing in the mug's shadow (starting at 0:38)? What's up with that? Some glitch with the green screen?
"Is your character anything other than white?" is a wasted question - it's like asking "is your character Tom?". You wouldn't pull the race card until you had, say, four people left. I say having a token black character taught kids that she was the same as everyone else - asking "Do you wear glasses" is much better for discrimination
I made my own version of Guess Who to help students with English. Every characteristic is represented in 5's. 5 black people, 5 people with white hair, 5 women, 5 Japanese people... the only problem is student's either ask "Are you a dark skinned person, are you a light skinned person or are you a Japanese skinned person?" I made things worse trying to be inclusive. Also student's think my Oprah card is a man.
Wouldn't guess who just be much, much easier if they made it more ethnically diverse? The only way to fix it would be to have different editions of the game, but then again it'd probably get called racist if they sold Guess Who: Black Edition.. Damned if you do, damned if you don't..
Eliminating the different races and making everyone look somewhat similar isn't meant to be racist it's meant to make the game harder. By having different races you could ask one question and eliminate potentially the entire board. Having everyone look really similar it makes the attention to detail much more important to keep the game challenging. There's nothing racist about it. As another commenter proposed here if you were to have an equal amount of people with different races the same problem would apply since you could still narrow down the field ridiculously far. Once again, there is nothing racist about this, it is just a company trying to make sure their game is still challenging and engaging to each new generation.
D.o'B., I like how you go on about conveying your words with pauses and whatnot here and then with a form of patching up your mental process to clear-up the statement. That and the beat boxing reminds me of Nickelodeon's Doug~
Maybe they got of the old characters because they were racist stereotypes themselves. For instance, the original Bernard looks like a suicidal Russian(which is a stereotype,weird) and the woman you showed was a stereotypical black woman
The version of Guess Who that I played had 5 black people, 5 women, 5 blondes, 5 with hats, 5 with facial hair, etc. Some of these fit in more than one category. I don't know what version you played, but that's what I played in the 90s and since I bought a new one in the 2010s.
Did you know there's a very clear difference between racism and just plain stereotypes? Yeah. Also, remember earlier how he was commenting on the Russian guys hat and then he says "Now it's just a...white guys hat." If Guess Who is racist, which is logical whatsoever, then he's racist too, because obviously logic doesn't exist in this video.
Guess Who is also sexist. According to Hasbro the reason they only have 5 women in the game is because they have 5 of every characteristic represented. Basically, Hasbro believes being male is the default and being a woman is equivalent to having brown hair or wearing a hat.
Jo Dee its called game design, they needed to pick either men or women to represent the base, or every single game ever would start with "is it a woman?" and eliminate half the board right off the bat, which is a waste. the only way to make it not "sexist" would be to use androgynous characters like robots or aliens, or kitchen appliances.
Nicholas MacNeil true, that is a flaw in splitting the genders 50/50 but how do girls feel if that same question leads to all but 5 characters being eliminated. Getting the girl character becomes a negative. Imagine if Hasbro made the game with primarily female characters, which is just as reasonable as having the base gender be male. How would boys feel being so undervalued and underrepresented? Perhaps Hasbro should make a "girl" version. I know they have made a Star Wars version which does have alien creatures.
Jo Dee i think youre probably a lot more bothered by being "underrepresented" than i am, i am a guy with a little sister and almost exclusively younger female cousins, so i end up playing the "girly version" of a lot of games. no it doesnt really get to me. on a side note, destroying the status quoe in female centric imagination (playin' house like a boss) based games is hilarious.
nO BUT WHAT IF THEY HAD A DW VERSION OF GUESS WHO WITH ALL THE DOCTORS AND COMPANIONS OMG wait there would still be like two back people...fucking mickey and martha
I feel I should point out, which I'm sure someone else has said it already, that it's entirely possible that Guess Who changed their characters to increase the difficulty of the game. The video explicitly talks about how there was, like, one black person in the older version of the game, and how much it sucked to draw her because it was so easy to guess. The point of the game is guessing the identity of the other player's character by distinguishing features. Does this premise promote racism? Probably. But making the game harder by making the characters look more similar (and thus making them harder to single out) is also simply a good design strategy. Were there racist and PC motivations behind the changes? Definitely probably. But I just wanted to say that the game is more fun when it's more challenging, and making the characters more similar accomplishes this. Keep up the great videos guys. I think I'm starting to come down with my own case of OPCD
This video unpleasantly glossed over any versions in between the one he played and the one he bought recently. I recall multiple black people from the ones I played. I wonder how they evolved over the years to what it is today, as that might actually be an interesting video.
I assumed Anne (black Anne) would be a good character to pick. Saying "is the character black?" would be a useless question because it would only knock one character off of the selection board. A move someone would only use as the game reaches the end, rather than a first question.
Wow I am so happy to see The Oatmeal "Nikola Tesla" mug. Glad more people know how kick ass The Oatmeal is and how mindblowingly awesome Tesla was, especially on Cracked!
Back in the 80's version, using the smiling/not smiling question and whether they had rosy cheeks were like a cheat code if the other person didn't know about them.
SirNilzey and that is exactly what's happening. besides this, it tends to distort what imagery and words really mean, because when you censor things to that degree, their meaning is often times, inevitably altered and obscured.
How about we just rename political correctness to what it really is, which is "not being an asshole." From my own experience, a majority of people who complain about "PC" are usually ignorant, intolerant people.
Guess Who is the easiest game in the world to win. It's a simple matter of who goes first. They all have *names*! Meaning that you just ask the same question a few times and voila, you win in a maximum of 5 moves. Usually it take 3. Ask if the persons name begins with a letter in the first or second half of the alphabet. Repeat this and you win in usually 3 moves.
James Daniels You seen like a genuinely nice guy,and I don't want to get into another argument so I'll just rap up my comment and hopefully we can both leave it at that.I actually care (contrary to the words that you put in my mouth),I know it may sound rude,but honestly people have to stop looking into things so hard you seem like an intelligent guy so hopefully you can understand where I come from.
Guilherme Dal molin I do understand, I even sympathize. But looking deeply and obsessively into things that should just be taken as simple entertainment is quite literally the premise of this show. You could say "Oh my god who cares?!" about EVERY subject Daniel discusses. That's his shtick: overanalyzing things that were never intended for analysis... And he is WELL aware of this. He references the ridiculous and absurd nature of his compulsion to analyze pop culture in nearly every episode. It's like if you point out offensive jokes in a South Park episode: It's not that you're incorrect, but you're making an issue of something everyone else, including the writers, is well aware of. You're taking something calculated and intentional and calling attention to it as though it was a mistake. That's why I responded to you in the first place. It's comedy: Laugh or don't laugh. That's all😀
+mhypersonic no racist has been thrown around so much most people don't even know what it acctually means any more. it's just used as a slur to shut the other side up when someone is losing an argument now a days
yes they do know, WE ALL KNOW what it means, just cus you're clearly an implyed racist cancer that get called it all the time doesn't mean you don't know what it means. I'm pretty sure racist are on the losing side considering that they start with name calling and end with name calling.
''it's just used as a slur to shut the other side up when someone is losing an argument now a days'' im not assuming, your implications are quite obvious
a lot of my time playing boardgames was me trying to find ways to cheat. my brother never ONCE suspected or realized the reason i won EVERY SINGLE guess who game was because i rearranged the cardboard photos of the people to match exactly on both boards, so the moment he would knock down his own person i already won, haha
When I used to play the original version, one of my kids used to deliberately select the one she wanted, to the extent that we would just ask 'does your person have bows in their hair' as a first question. She then got incredibly annoyed that we would ask that and we were banned from asking that question. Last week I played the new version with her daughter. Just not the same😅
I'm black and If I was making a game of guess who I would have gotten rid of only black character as well to prevent the worlds shortest game of guess who ME: Is your character black? PLAYER:YES ME: I think we're done here Occams razor anyone?
to make it more fun my friends and i ask questions like 'does your character regret leaving his abusive wife' or 'does your character have a borderline drinking problem that he is thinking about getting help with so that he doesn't turn into his late father.' were hardly ever right but its fun.
It's not racist. It's just that they decided to make the game more difficult by making all of the characters more similar. Unless you could have an even distribution of all races or ethnicities, it makes it easy to rule someone of based on race, nationality, our culture
I had this game in the late 90s/early 00s. Mine had the new pictures. I've never seen the ones you're claiming are from the 90s xD Wonder when they updated, because it wasn't that recent.
Erin Fagan I was born in 92. We would've had Guess Who around the time I was 6-8, which would be 98-00. Perhaps yours is older, but mine, as I've said before, was from the late 90s or early 00s. The change wasn't that recent.
It is actually the worst gameplay strategy to ask a question that eliminates all but one person. The best strategy is to come up with questions that rule out as close to half of your board as possible, because then you get the same amount of information each time, no matter which way the person's answer goes. So if your opponent chose a person at random, and you ask "is your person black?", you only have a 1 in 24 chance of getting any advantage out of that question. If someone else is their character, there will be 23 characters left.
They did the same thing with the reboot of The Letter People, eliminating anything negative ("horrible hair" became "happy hair"), anything to do with junk food ("delicious donuts" became "dazzling dance"), and giving a bunch of the characters sex changes to even out the sexes.
Having had Anne picked out as a child, I NEVER once had the question of her skin colour come up between me and my brother. ITs not we weren't being racist, its just we didn't think to go by skin colour. Not only that, but her skin wasn't particularly distinct enough in colour. She had a tanner skin compared to the rest, but tone-wise it was more or less the same as the other characters. I personnelity wish they'd add more characters that was like Ann in rather then take her away.
I will talk with you about Storm Troopers, the absence of disease in Disney movies, stereotypes of real life placed as standard for movie plot points, and other interesting topics... for forever... or until you want me to go home :)
Played a new version of Guess Who recently and it had aliens and electronics...should it still be called Guess Who or maybe Guess What? Don't know but the kids loved it
