Robert Terry on "Why Go has Failed to Prosper in the US"

[Bill Spight]

On laughter:

There is something funny about a dead group. I don't know why.

When I was learning go (in Japan) sometimes you would see people come up to look at a game and laugh at a dead group. I did, too. There is something funny about it. One day when I was kibitzing Takagawa -- OC, I was as still and stone faced as I could be --, one of the young 7 dans was playing against Maeda 9 dan at the next board. They had gotten into a big fight and it looked to me like the 7 dan's group was dead. Then both Takagawa and Yamabe looked at the 7 dan's group and started laughing. There is just something funny about a dead group.

[Blake]

The best long term option may be reaching out to young adults, who will in turn teach their children. I will certainly teach my daughter Go when she is old enough (five or so?), and I'm sure there are many other parents like me. The problem is, you can make efforts to reach children--but without buy-in from the parents, you won't maintain momentum. The same thing happened to chess; there are still good youth programs, but the consciousness of the middle class parent was lost in the sixties and seventies, when chess went from being something for Western European and American gentlemen to being yet another battlefield in the cold war, and one dominated by the Soviets. Chess lost its cachet and never regained it.

[jts]

Blake, you suggest chess *lost* its cachet during the cold war? That seems plausible enough to me, but one usually hears the reverse.

[tapir]

What puzzles me is the implicit relation made between level of expertise and "prosperity" (e.g. by mdobbins). In fact, a healthy go population (i.e. a growing one) always has a lower average strength than an unhealthy one (i.e. a shrinking one), take Romania (yes, Romania's average strength is lower!) and UK as examples from Europe. The healthy population will produce stronger player in the long run and on the top, but what matters is almost exclusively size not expertise. Given size sooner or later talent will show up, you can invite outside expertise etc. etc. while a lonely Bobby Fisher of Go would still have trouble to find a club in many places in the U.S.

As the basketball example was given earlier, I wonder whether someone tried to promote Go as a path to self discipline in prisons. After all in the U.S. a surprising percentage (for a continental european standard) of young people with spare time are present there.

[EdLee]

I wonder whether someone tried to promote Go as a path to self discipline in prisons.

Very nice (I'm being sincere). Many other endeavors can also be such a path (or Way):
music, calligraphy, flower arrangement, tea ceremony, writing, (the obligatory and cliched) martial arts, tennis, etc.

[hyperpape]

http://www.usgo.org/news/2010/11/the-tr ... jail-yard/

Paul Barchilon was teacher of the year many years ago (not for his prison work).

[Mivo]

The best long term option may be reaching out to young adults, who will in turn teach their children.

Younger adults (20-35) tend to live fairly busy lives today and Go is simply not a very casual activity, so I'm not sure it's really a good target group. Kids and young teens have more time and energy (not that they ever feel that way!), as do "older" people (minus the energy). The latter group also tends to have more money, so they are an attractive target group because they are able to pay for books, materials and membership fees.

If you read the comments section for Go at Boardgamegeek (here is a good start, then going back toward the higher ratings), the most commonly mentioned negative points are:

- "too complex"
- "takes too long"
- "too hard to understand"
- "no one to play with"

Those may well also be the chief reasons that stop people from exploring Go. Organizations and individuals promoting the game often emphasise its depth, complexity and how even computers perform poorly (this is by now relative and a little misleading) may in truth do the game a disfavour -- if making it more popular is the aim. Plenty of folks already know about Go, and they still don't play, and I wonder how many of them are intimidated or overwhelmed by it.

In a way, Go is much closer to a sport than it is to a recreational game, and for me, it occasionally feels like work, too. Lately I've been dabbling a little in Backgammon and once I got past the "It's all about the damn dice! *foam*" phase, I find myself enjoying the "lighter", less serious approach. You can play that game casually, but also study it properly and in depth. Even if you're a beginner or just a for-fun player, you can play against more competent players and may win a game (not necessarily a match) every now and then, thanks to the 30/70 luck/skill split.

With Go, games not only take much longer, but you need opponents roughly around your own skill level. If they are stronger, you get obliterated. If you are stronger, you obliterate. Neither is fun. Handicap helps some, but that is more applicable to higher skill levels. The game is also not as "easy to learn" as is often claimed: A beginner can typically not even see when a game is over (as opposed to chess). Counting is super confusing to someone starting out. The materials are bulky compared to the other classic games (backgammon and chess are more portable).

So, what does all of that mean? And is it even accurate? I'm not sure. But I wonder if perhaps it may be better to consider accepting that Go may never be more than an intellectual niché game that will not -- in today's age -- reach any significant market share in the west. And would it be so bad? Perhaps the effort and money could be spent better on improving the situation for existing players, such as sponsoring lectures, more actively supporting of clubs, pumping money into tournaments, sponsorships for genuinely talented folks, and so on. An increase of popularity may or may not follow, but it would lead to improvements regardless.

[Marcus]

Mivo hits some good points, some of which I agree with. I'm not arguing with him here, but I wanted to put my thoughts down here as part of the discussion.

... Go is simply not a very casual activity ...

Is this really true? I know there are a lot of people who DO take Go very seriously, but is there no room for players who simply like to play, without worrying about improvement?

Let's look at both "Magic: the Gathering" and Chess, and the player bases there. In both games, I know a large body of players who play the games simply to have fun. The number of "for fun" payers in both Magic and Chess FAR outstrips the number of competitive-level players in either game. Both games have a thriving tournament scene and both games have pro players that are known to the more competitive community.

Why can't Go be more like the above? I do see you have a list of reasons taken from BGG:

If you read the comments section for Go at Boardgamegeek (here is a good start, then going back toward the higher ratings), the most commonly mentioned negative points are:

- "too complex"
- "takes too long"
- "too hard to understand"
- "no one to play with"

The first and third comment could be applied to Magic with no editing. Magic is a complex game, and card interactions can be very hard to understand. It hasn't stopped adoption of the game.

The fourth one is what we're trying to fix, of course.

It's the second point that is most valid. When people are looking for something to do "just for fun", they are usually looking for a 15-minute break. When someone is looking fro something new to try "for fun", they want to get a 5-minute explanation and be able to play a "game" right then.

With Go, games not only take much longer, but you need opponents roughly around your own skill level. If they are stronger, you get obliterated. If you are stronger, you obliterate. Neither is fun. Handicap helps some, but that is more applicable to higher skill levels. The game is also not as "easy to learn" as is often claimed: A beginner can typically not even see when a game is over (as opposed to chess). Counting is super confusing to someone starting out. The materials are bulky compared to the other classic games (backgammon and chess are more portable).

A couple thoughts here. First, I've found that people in general (at least those I've interacted with) don't like handicap in any sort of game. People want to believe that they should start on equal footing with their opponent even when the skill gap is huge. Perhaps it's a Western psychological trait. Offer a beginner a 9-stone game, and a good chunk of the time they will ask "why can't we just play even?".

Second, I think you hit on one of the main difficulties in Go: when does it end?

(2-player games)
Chess: One player's King is trapped (Checkmate) or cannot be trapped in the current game state (Stalemate/Draw)
Magic: One player's life total is 0 or less, or a specific card has ended the game
Backgammon: One player has got all his pieces around the board and taken them off (I don't know Backgammon terminology, though I know how to play; there's also doubling cube rules that I know next-to-nothing about)

Go has a more abstract set of end conditions. It revolves around Passing (or Resigning), which implies that the players know enough about the game to know when there are no more moves needed.

There's also no focal point for the win condition in Go. Chess has the King, Magic has a Life Total, Backgammon has the goal area where you want your pieces to end. Go is about territory; it's about "Victory Points", to borrow a term from other popular strategy games.

All that being said, it seems like comparing Go to Chess and the like is the wrong way to market the game. Comparing the game to other strategy games that use "Victory Points" like Dominion, Seven Wonders, and other such games may be more accurate, and attract players in a better way.

So, what does all of that mean? And is it even accurate? I'm not sure. But I wonder if perhaps it may be better to consider accepting that Go may never be more than an intellectual niché game that will not -- in today's age -- reach any significant market share in the west. And would it be so bad? Perhaps the effort and money could be spent better on improving the situation for existing players, such as sponsoring lectures, more actively supporting of clubs, pumping money into tournaments, sponsorships for genuinely talented folks, and so on. An increase of popularity may or may not follow, but it would lead to improvements regardless.

You may be correct; there may never be a popularity surge for Go in "the West". I'd be sad about that, though. I don't play in tournaments. I don't own an actual Go board. I own not a single Go book, and I don't really do Tsumego sets, except in a social way, solving them with friends.

I play this game for fun. I admit I'm a fairly competitive person and that drove me to work hard at the game when I started playing. I don't have time to dedicate to the game, though, and I'm grateful to be able to log on to KGS and hit "Automatch" once in a while to play for fun. It would be nice to have others in real life that I could play "for fun" over the board.

Guess I feel like Kirby does. Prosperity is localized, and prosperity to me would be local players that will play me.

[palapiku]

I wonder if perhaps it may be better to consider accepting that Go may never be more than an intellectual niché game that will not -- in today's age -- reach any significant market share in the west.

I think so. Go is mostly a niche game in Asia. too, and has always been. At present time, hardly anyone plays Go in China or Japan, and as I understand it's losing popularity in Korea as well.

And look at the mythology around go's past. Go is one of the Four Arts of the Literati - the most intellectual class of ancient China. Other than that, it's played by samurai, Buddhist monks, immortals, and as entertainment for the Shogun. It's explicitly not a commoners' game.

This reputation cannot be entirely undeserved. And personally I'm okay with it. Which is why I think the real problem is with the present anti-intellectual climate.

Unsurprisingly, many of the negative comments on boardgamegeek.com are anti-intellectual in spirit, disparaging not only of go but of any mental effort, or at least the idea of mental effort possibly being fun:

* This was an unusualy boring game. Probably you need to spend TOO much time to understand it!
* It's not a game, it's a math problem. Great brains may appreciate this stuff, but mine needs more theme to enjoy a game.
* This game received it's name thousands of years ago from the saying "'Go' ahead, devote your life to it, I'd rather learn Karate."
* Great if you like your games to be too much like hard work

[oren]

I think so. Go is mostly a niche game in Asia. too, and has always been. At present time, hardly anyone plays Go in China or Japan, and as I understand it's losing popularity in Korea as well.

It's all relative. If you go to some major train stations in Tokyo, it's still not hard to find places to play Go that are well populated.

So "hardly anyone" is still enough to find many in such a dense place.

[Mivo]

All that being said, it seems like comparing Go to Chess and the like is the wrong way to market the game. Comparing the game to other strategy games that use "Victory Points" like Dominion, Seven Wonders, and other such games may be more accurate, and attract players in a better way.

Thanks for the response! I don't disagree with anything you've said, so I'm just adding some thoughts.

I think the problem with comparing Go to Magic, Dominion, etc. is that they are not as abstract as Go. These games in part sell well because they have pretty pictures. Images of creatures, scenes, spells, etc. make the experience more tangible and easier to relate to than white and black stones on a square board. They are more like Euro games in that regard. Go's stark "abstractness" makes it harder to sell it to an audience increasingly used to visually rich forms of games and other entertainment.

I actually don't know how popular Magic is. Besides my boss, I don't know anyone in my age group (forty, he's nearly fifty but a professional game designer of 30+ years, so he's not a typical representative either) who plays it. I actually bought cards in the late 90s too and never played. I collected them. These days, I buy the annually Duel of the Planeswalkers PC game, play a few matches against the computer, and that's it. My interest is mostly limited because it's become a bit of a "pay to win" game where every expansion adds more powerful cards.

I play this game for fun. I admit I'm a fairly competitive person and that drove me to work hard at the game when I started playing. I don't have time to dedicate to the game, though, and I'm grateful to be able to log on to KGS and hit "Automatch" once in a while to play for fun. It would be nice to have others in real life that I could play "for fun" over the board.

You're at that point after you've "worked hard", though! Most people who play games casually do not want to "work" to be able to play a decent match. They play games to get away from work. So that popular slogan of "easy to learn, a lifetime to master" is probably counter-productive, because it implies long-lasting mediocrity, required upfront work and learning, and adds to the "too old for this, maybe if I was 15 I'd be interested" thinking. (But I may base this assumption too much on my own ways of thinking, insecurities and attempts at rationalizing why I get so easily side-tracked!)

But, yes, I think abstract games are just hard to sell in an audio-visual world. Go's popularity surged after HnG, an animated show with characters people could love and hate, and relate to. No other attempt at promotion had even a fraction of this success. It removed some of the abstractness. It's not so different from what tickled my interest in chess when I was sixteen or so: Battle Chess for the Atari ST. My grandfather had taught me chess a few years before, but it didn't fascinate me. Too boring. Battle Chess did the trick, though, because it was "fun" in a game-y sense.

Perhaps what Go needs is some "modernisation". Apps and video games that add some "game-y-ness": A story line, colourful stones, fancy animations, humour, AI tournaments, trophies, characters, leaderboards, interactive tutorial sections (think Chessmaster here, or this Fritz-based chess game for children.

Less dust and weight, better packaging.

[palapiku]

It's all relative. If you go to some major train stations in Tokyo, it's still not hard to find places to play Go that are well populated.

Sure - it's relative; my point still stands. Plus, as I understand, the average age of these players keeps rising.

[palapiku]

Perhaps what Go needs is some "modernisation". Apps and video games that add some "game-y-ness": A story line, colourful stones, fancy animations, humour, AI tournaments, trophies, characters, leaderboards, interactive tutorial sections (think Chessmaster here, or this Fritz-based chess game for children.

That's exactly what Batoo was, and apparently even in Korea it didn't do so well.

[Mivo]

Batoo was a variant, though. Battle Chess, for example, wasn't a variant of chess, it was chess -- same rules, same everything, except the presentation and all the other stuff. There was another video game of that kind where you were a knight travelling a fantasy realm, battling fantasy creatures (it started you off with simple movement puzzles, all embedded into the story, and eased you into playing real games).

[phrax]

So the downfall of Batoo was it was too much like Go?