bug#33803: gomoku demotivational messages

[Eli Zaretskii]

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> From: Daniel Vianna <dmlvianna@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2018 08:05:20 +1100
> 
> Well... I feel discouraged too. As an adult.

I believe that depends on personal preferences.

> I understand the code is supposed to be terse an easy to interpret. Just 
> making the messages more
> encouraging would be great.

I'm quite sure the original messages were written with an explicit
goal to tease the human player.  It could be detrimental when the
player is young and this is his/her first experience with playing
games with computers.

> Another potential improvement would be to count how many moves were made 
> leading to the end of the
> game. As it stands, Gomoku displays only how many games were won/lost. It 
> doesn't take into account that
> the player might be making progress in terms of dragging the game longer 
> until the algorithm wins.
> 
> I believe the aim of any piece of elisp should be to encourage the user to 
> keep improving.
> 
> I'm not confident in elisp myself. Should I have a go at it?

If you can propose the changes to the messages and/or the places where
you think a move count will be useful, please do that, in plain
English, using the source line numbers to specify the location of each
change.  Changes in Lisp, if they are more than a dozen lines, will
require that you assign the copyright to the FSF, which involves
filling and sending a simple form with information about your changes.

Thanks.