Spectator and Commentator Plans

We put a game spectate feature on the wishlist the week the first gomoku match went live, and work that more people asked for has pushed it back ever since. This is the honest version of that plan: what watching a match has to do on YiBoard, why a watch games feature is a privacy question before it is a feature, and what has to exist before anyone can commentate matches. Gomoku is open right now on the play page at yiboardgame.com.

What a spectate feature has to do

A match here is a list of moves and a clock. That is everything the server holds, so a watcher can in principle be shown the same thing the two players see, with one difference: the watcher gets it late. We plan to measure that delay in moves rather than seconds, so a game being cast live can never be used to help someone playing it right now. The older post on spectator mode framed watching as a way to learn. It is also the part that decides whether live watching is safe at all.

The privacy part comes first

Nobody who opens a board at midnight has agreed to be watched. So the default is closed: a match is visible to the two people playing it, and watching needs a link one of them chose to share. That link carries the match, not the players’ names and not their rating history, and it stops working when the game ends. Replays are a separate decision, made after the match, by whoever shared it.

• Watching is opt-in per match. There is no account setting that leaves it on by default
• The share link exposes the move log, not the rating and not the account
• Watchers see the board a few moves behind the players
• Both players can see who is watching and can end it at any point

Board game casting, and why live is harder

Casting a board is not like casting a shooter. There are two people thinking and nothing else on screen, and the part worth watching happens where nobody can see it. We tried several ways to make an empty board look busy. The versions that looked good in a screenshot all made the game harder to read.

• Animated stone drops: good in a still image, and they make a fast game feel slow, which is also why we turned them down in the performance work
• Highlighting candidate moves: watchers read it as a hint and players read it as a leak
• A win probability curve: our gomoku evaluation function is hand-written and the line jumps around, so it misleads more than it informs
• Chat: no moderators, no chat

Commentating a match without getting in the way

Commentary is only useful if the players cannot see it. The commentator seat is one way: the commentator writes, watchers read, and the two people at the board receive nothing. The commentator also gets no more information than the watchers, on the same move delay. These are not rules of etiquette. They are the conditions under which the feature is allowed to exist.

What we would build, in order

• Step one: replay links. A finished match you can send, with a scrubber over the move log
• Step two: live watching with a delay, invite link only
• Step three: a commentator role. One person writes, watchers read, players notice nothing
• Step four: public spectator rooms, and only if step three has not turned into a moderation job

When this happens

After xiangqi. Spectating sits on top of the referee kernel, and xiangqi is making that kernel more complicated right now. Building it once after that settles is less work than building it now and rebuilding it. Until then the leaderboards are the only place to see how other people play, and the play page has been open the whole time.

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