#3 - Go
There are a lot of different reasons I might love a game. Maybe it's strategically engaging, or leads to fun interpersonal dynamics, or provides good stories, or it's simply hilarious. The games that I've written about here all exhibit those traits to one degree or another. Go exhibits them too. But that's not why I love it.
I love Go because it's beautiful. Not beautiful in the way that many games have painted boards or sculpted miniatures. Beautiful in the way a poem or a piece of music is beautiful. Go, for some reason, resonates with me.
Perhaps it's because Go, unlike most of the games I've discussed here, was not designed by a single person or a group. Instead, Go evolved over thousands of years, originating in China and then spreading to Japan and Korea before becoming popular across the globe. The systems at play in the game, while probably initially implemented by unique players for specific effects, have been tuned and twisted over the game's long life. Go works as it does not because somebody explicitly deemed that it should, but because millions of people played it over centuries, each making their own slight contribution to the game's design. And they kept playing it, because it remained somehow important to them. Go is thus a cultural practice as much as it is a game. Playing it connects me to the past in the same way singing a hymn or celebrating a holiday does. And I'm reminded that the game will continue to be played and change long after I'm gone. Go feels bigger than me and there's an inherent beauty in that.
Although, it could be that the mechanics of the game themselves are beautiful. In game design circles, you often hear about “elegant” design. To me, this has always meant that a game produces a great variety of outputs from a small number of inputs. Put another way, very few rules create very many strategic situations. Elegance is by no means the only way to measure a game's quality, but it is useful. I cannot think of a more elegant game than Go. The rules are dead simple: two players, one with white stones, the other with black; a board with a grid of intersecting straight lines; players take turns placing stones on the intersections; if ever a group of one player's stones is completely surrounded by those of their opponent, the surrounded stones are captured; play continues until neither player has a useful move to make, at which point the player with the most stones surrounding the most empty intersections wins. The game is so simple that I was befuddled when I first learned it, convinced that I was missing something. But, aside from some variations in scoring systems and some edge-case rules, that's it. And from those few rules flows the most complex pure strategy game ever made. Every turn, players are confronted with hundreds of possible plays, each with more possible outcomes depending on how their opponent reacts. An unimaginable amount of time and effort has bee spent theorizing and debating various strategies. There's beauty in getting so much from so little.
But maybe it's more straightforward than that. Go is gorgeous. The simplicity of the board and pieces allows for the procedural creation of abstract art. As stones are played and captured, shapes begin to emerge. Tendrils reach into enemy territory. Pinwheels sit mid-spin in the middle of the board. Swaths of black and white stretch across corners, pockmarked where they stopped invasions. These shapes are, in themselves, pretty. That they actually communicate something about the events of a game – failed attacks, broken defences – makes them even more beautiful. Go's visuals are so important to it that the strategic jargon of the game has incorporated them – players refer to whether a group of stones has “good shape” or “bad shape” to assess its strategic value. It's hard not to be moved by a game that has such an intrinsic visual appeal.
All that said, I've played other games that have evolved over millenia, that have elegant systems, that create tapestries through play. Go feels unique among them. Maybe that's because, beyond that combination of elements, Go is also completely foreign to me. To start, I'm a terrible player. Good strategies elude me. I've played against experienced opponents and been baffled. They place stones seemingly at random and before I know it I've been wiped from the board. The game remains inscrutable to me because I've never earnestly studied it. Knowing so little about strong play, I can fill in the blanks with magic and art which might disappear were I an expert. Likewise, Go comes from a radically different culture than my own or any that I associate with my heritage. My love for the game might just come from it's exoticism. The thought makes me uncomfortable, but there's likely a bit of truth to it. So I try to temper my feelings, not wanting to love Go simply as a talisman of the stereotypically magical and mysterious “East.”
Still, whether because of its history, its systems, its aesthetics or my own failings, there's only one word I would use to describe Go: Beautiful.
Last time: #4 - Bohnanza
Next time: #2 - Risk Legacy
Although, it could be that the mechanics of the game themselves are beautiful. In game design circles, you often hear about “elegant” design. To me, this has always meant that a game produces a great variety of outputs from a small number of inputs. Put another way, very few rules create very many strategic situations. Elegance is by no means the only way to measure a game's quality, but it is useful. I cannot think of a more elegant game than Go. The rules are dead simple: two players, one with white stones, the other with black; a board with a grid of intersecting straight lines; players take turns placing stones on the intersections; if ever a group of one player's stones is completely surrounded by those of their opponent, the surrounded stones are captured; play continues until neither player has a useful move to make, at which point the player with the most stones surrounding the most empty intersections wins. The game is so simple that I was befuddled when I first learned it, convinced that I was missing something. But, aside from some variations in scoring systems and some edge-case rules, that's it. And from those few rules flows the most complex pure strategy game ever made. Every turn, players are confronted with hundreds of possible plays, each with more possible outcomes depending on how their opponent reacts. An unimaginable amount of time and effort has bee spent theorizing and debating various strategies. There's beauty in getting so much from so little.
But maybe it's more straightforward than that. Go is gorgeous. The simplicity of the board and pieces allows for the procedural creation of abstract art. As stones are played and captured, shapes begin to emerge. Tendrils reach into enemy territory. Pinwheels sit mid-spin in the middle of the board. Swaths of black and white stretch across corners, pockmarked where they stopped invasions. These shapes are, in themselves, pretty. That they actually communicate something about the events of a game – failed attacks, broken defences – makes them even more beautiful. Go's visuals are so important to it that the strategic jargon of the game has incorporated them – players refer to whether a group of stones has “good shape” or “bad shape” to assess its strategic value. It's hard not to be moved by a game that has such an intrinsic visual appeal.
All that said, I've played other games that have evolved over millenia, that have elegant systems, that create tapestries through play. Go feels unique among them. Maybe that's because, beyond that combination of elements, Go is also completely foreign to me. To start, I'm a terrible player. Good strategies elude me. I've played against experienced opponents and been baffled. They place stones seemingly at random and before I know it I've been wiped from the board. The game remains inscrutable to me because I've never earnestly studied it. Knowing so little about strong play, I can fill in the blanks with magic and art which might disappear were I an expert. Likewise, Go comes from a radically different culture than my own or any that I associate with my heritage. My love for the game might just come from it's exoticism. The thought makes me uncomfortable, but there's likely a bit of truth to it. So I try to temper my feelings, not wanting to love Go simply as a talisman of the stereotypically magical and mysterious “East.”
Still, whether because of its history, its systems, its aesthetics or my own failings, there's only one word I would use to describe Go: Beautiful.
Last time: #4 - Bohnanza
Next time: #2 - Risk Legacy
No comments:
Post a Comment