Should computer game screens show "you lose" or "you lost"? [duplicate]

Solution 1:

I think either way is correct. You are describing an event which is happenning at this moment. So at the moment that the player loses the game, it is present tense: "You lose." A second later the game is over and it is past tense: "You lost."

Many present-tense statements are only present tense at the instant they are written. The fact that I am reading it later does not make it an error. Like if Julius Caesar wrote, "I am crossing the Rubicon", of course by the time I read this two thousand years later it is long since past tense. But at the time Caesar wrote it, it was present tense. It would be silly to criticize him on the grounds that the event is now past and thus he should have used the past tense.

Similarly with your message. At the instant you display it, it is present tense: the event just happenned. By the time the player reads it and the shock of his humiliating defeat impinges on his feeble brain, it is past tense.

Solution 2:

"You lose" is more in the present which is probably what you are looking for in a computer game. You should also consider that computer game screens aren't generally judged on their grammatical content.

Unless of course you are building the first, first-person grammatical shooter. In which you must hunt a viscous gerund through a labyrinth of simile and metaphor.