But if we manage to make even 10% of a billion Westerners aware of the game, and 0.1% of that starts playing it, that's 100000 new players.
I suppose my main point is that we need wide nets. As wide as we can make them.
I think that's true as far as it goes, but it needs refinement. As others have pointed out, most people in the west are aware of chess but relatively few people play actively. We have already had many examples of so-called "mainstream" appearances of go. We even had a mega-star go player when Rod Stewart was introduced to the game by his doctor, a British dan-player, and countless examples of tv and film cameos. In Britain, thanks to the activities of Peter Wendes and his wife (ex-schoolteachers), we've has major exhibitions in the British Museum and the Imperial War Museum, and they travelled the length and breadth of the country teaching in schools, all with large audiences that attracted the attention of an education minister. I have heard of similar things in Europe and North America. They never take-off permanently. I think the example of the short-lived mah-jong boom in the 1930s (which was something much bigger than go has experienced) is instructive.
My interpretation of the state of play is that indoor games can have a sustained level of popularity (though at a minor level) only if they are regarded as part of the cultural fabric of a country. Which certainly applies to chess. Mah-jong ultimately failed because it was seen (correctly) as an oriental game, and its exoticness was both its attraction and its downfall, especially because this was the 1930s.
Go, too, waxes and wanes because of its exoticness. Very many western go players hanker after going on trips to the Orient, or decide to learn an oriental language, or do an associated oriental activity such as ikebana or taiji or taekwondo. But this very exoticness repels many more people, especially at times when attitudes to the oriental nations are complex. I was once fired from a student job for saying I was saving up my earnings to make a trip to Japan. The woman in charge had lost a fiance in a Japanese POW camp. Later, when I was starting in journalism and had to interview many people who were being given medals, bitter wartime experiences with the Japanese were often at the forefront (as they still are in China). Given the way the nisei were handled in Japan, I would imagine that feelings there were equally complex. Those anti-Japanese feelings have mostly gone but may have been replaced now by antipathy towards China for political or economic reasons.
What this seems to mean for go is that promoting the game as coming from Japan or China is, on the whole, significantly negative. Talking about the game with different names (igo, weiqi, baduk) and rulesets exacerbates that situation, quite apart from the confusion it engenders. It accentuates the idea of nationalism, too, which is one sure way to make sure the game does not become part of our own cultural fabric, especially now that the flaws of multiculturism have become evident.
I personally see no way forward for weaving go into our own fabric (even though I'm tickled pink by the idea that, for example, "clans" such as the Singh have their own registered tartans). But I have nevertheless made some minor attempts to promote inclusivity. For example, I have presented a paper on 300 years of go contact between Britain and China, which won a large first prize - but in China not Britain! I have written about women in go and promoted the Amazon thread here. But I don't think any of that has had any effect, even though I am prepared to be noisy. It is even worse if you look at the similar cross-cultural work of quieter people like Theo van Ees, Franco Pratesi and Jaap Blom. With the utmost respect to all those superb researchers, I'd confidently hazard a guess that most people here would say: who? And the more intellectually curious would then only say, where can I get the videos? Even though most of anyone's cultural heritage is in paper form! Videos, as much a bane of modern go as AI, are often just a way of putting our heritage into a wastepaper basket.
I am therefore not expecting go to be popular here, ever. Go videos may seem popular, but I'd say it's the video aspect that's popular, not the go content. Bling, bling!
