2010 Leisure White Paper

[palapiku]

I'm pretty sure you are wrong here, although the last remark might serve to support your argument, in a sense.

I believe it is not the size of the community that is key here, it is the availablity of options.

Take local go clubs for example. In a country the size of the US, even if we count internet players, we have not reached the size where clubs would be swamped, or profitable enterprises or be able to succeed without the type of devotion that John talks about. Before the internet, this work was essential, and there was always a volunteer to replace the outgoing leader - because it was the only game in town. Now, while people still do the kind of work John admires - it is much more of a gamble to find someone new to replace them, because the ubiquity of the internet makes it no longer the only way to get play.
.

We're both right The community I'm talking about, the one the size of which is important for determining the attitude of the participants, is the entire collection of people interested in the same hobby and who can feasibly interact. It is not a local club, it's the entire "Western go community", which was tiny a few decades ago, and which is now quite big and mostly online. When you say "availability of options", that is what you mean - the ability to participate in this larger community, as opposed to restricting yourself to a local club.

Sure, playing face-to-face in a local club is nice, but it's obviously not essential. What's essential is interacting with somebody somehow. It's this - the possibility of any kind of interaction at all - that's rare and valuable when a community is genuinely small. And it's this rarity and value that leads to phenomena John described.

[Javaness2]

Is Go in decline in Europe? From a quick look at the EGD I am not convinced. Seems like a mixture of stagnation and growth. In the past I imagine players who became too busy to play in real life simply vanished, now they may moonlight on the internet. I imagine there are a few antisocial ones, who simply decide they prefer the internet.

NAT 2000 2005 2008 2009 2010

DE 0789 1359 1245 1295 1219
FR 0714 0722 0880 1047 1210
UK 0342 0405 0434 0372 0377
NL 0255 0330 0322 0348 0350

FI 0075 0218 0215 0223 0224
SE 0054 0139 0149 0130 0136

RO 0277 0276 0345 0462 0574
CZ 0225 0257 0271 0270 0253
PL 0205 0436 0319 0273 0238

Reflecting this back on the western scene, we may hypothesise that here too the apparent decline in go activity is more to do with internet players becoming relatively invisible. If the Japanese experience is being copied here, we can estimate that the go population as recorded by association/club memberships is some 60% higher in practice - or maybe much more, as we had fewer clubs to start with. This still does not bode well for our associations and clubs, however, or for the sense of community in go. Given, though, that there are probably lots of players out there somewhere in the ether, perhaps we will see the development of online communities - for example, kaya.gs may light the kindling furnished by kgs. The current torpor of L19 and the rise of me-me-me blogs are not encouraging signs, but things change fast on the internet.

[gowan]

The internet makes it possible for people who do not live in major urban areas in the USA to play. For many years there were poor forlorn folks living in such remote central areas as North Dakota who simply couldn't find anyone to play with at all within, say, a two-hour drive of their home. The internet solved that problem. Even in areas where there are (or were) players some small clubs didn't/don't thrive because there isn't enough diversity of strengths in the members. On the internet it is easy to find even-game opponents or someone two or three stones stronger than you are so you can improve. I might be mistaken but my impression is that attendance at go congresses is stable or increasing, so people do value over-the-board go. Don't forget the nickname "hand talk" (shudan for go. I take that nickname to mean that you can get a sense of someone's personality, emotional stability, and ways of approaching the world just by playing go with him or her.

Existence or not and state of health of go clubs is a difficult thing to understand. Even in large cosmopolitan cities it may be difficult for a self-sustaining club to form and continue. I have always been surprised that New York City has for many years had only a tenuously existing club. In the LA area the Rafu Ki-in has closed. Chicago has not been known for the existence of a large, active go club. When a charismatic energetic organizer exists then clubs form and thrive but without one ... So we are still in an era of precarious existence for clubs and organizations and, as has been mentioned above, the internet can have a negative effect on clubs.

Older, long-time players often burn out and retreat to a condition of playing only with a few friends. Such people might not show up in censuses of go players.

[tapir]

Is Go in decline in Europe? From a quick look at the EGD I am not convinced. Seems like a mixture of stagnation and growth. In the past I imagine players who became too busy to play in real life simply vanished, now they may moonlight on the internet. I imagine there are a few antisocial ones, who simply decide they prefer the internet.

NAT 2000 2005 2008 2009 2010

FR 0714 0722 0880 1047 1210
Subject: 2010 Leisure White Paper

The french numbers are in part an artifact, explainable by the recent innovation of "club tournaments". There you can send in your club games to the EGD (sth. very much used by the French), although that should be a reminder that EGD captures only the tip of the iceberg. In any case there are many other countries where the development of Go looks much more encouraging than in the English speaking world, in some of them Go pretty much didn't exist ten years ago (Turkey, Israel, Spain) and even others show constantly increasing populations if it is correct to conclude this from the tournament database (Romania, Russia, Ukraine). UK and Poland are just the sad counter-examples. I strongly doubt online play reduces club attendance (at least in countries that manage to maintain a proper list of active clubs), you just see faster progress and a playing venue for otherwise isolated players, who don't have or didn't like the local club. And to console JF a little, when I opened KGS yesterday I found a marriage invitation advertised in one of the rooms. I assume these players did meet outside KGS as well.

[jts]

Chicago has not been known for the existence of a large, active go club

This is the sort of thing that indicates to me that people come to questions of playing go, go clubs, and community from very different perspectives. If you live in Chicago and have a CTA card you can play Go, face-to-face, two nights a week; if you have a car, you have even more options. It's true that the clubs don't own real estate, they don't have clever names, they aren't presided over by dashing statesmen for the game, and (afaik) they don't have quirky customs that would make for cool entries on a wiki. How much does it matter?

Does this reflect different ecclesiologies? Does nature contrive to make every go fanatic born alive either a little bit of a Laud, or a little bit of a Prynne? Some of us seem to think that community among go players must be centralized, hierarchical, ritualistic, and sumptuous, while others are satisfied with - or even prefer - something more decentralized, uncharismatic, improvised, and spartan.

[hyperpape]

Dusk Eagle posted some stats on how often people post on L19. It does look like there's a downward trend, but the lesson I'd draw is that you can make very weak inferences about the wider Go world based on traffic here. A full 25% of posts on L19 come from 10 posters. If a single heavy poster leaves, (*cough* Topazg *cough*) that is already a noticeable hit to how active the forums are. You have 136 people who have posted 100 times (roughly equal to once every 4 days). That's a tiny number compared to the active go players in the West. So while there's no harm in citing the activity on L19 alongside other pieces of evidence, it's not so significant by itself.