Life In 19x19

I'm quite a keen Arimaa player, although not all that good - rating currently a shade below 1800. (In fact, while it is heresy to state this here, I actually much prefer it to Go. I've barely played Go in the past 6 months, while I've been playing quite a lot of Arimaa online.) I also struggled on the bot ladder to start with, but I later discovered the "autopostal" feature which automatically pairs you with human players of similar rank, for turn-based games. I've actually won a largeish majority of these games, which shows either I'm better than I thought or that the rating system doesn't work that well (but of course it's getting harder now as my rating goes up and I get paired against stronger players).

My personal view is that Arimaa is the only abstract game invented in the past 50-100 years which has a chance - indeed, in my opinion, deserves - to be played and studied for as long as chess and go have. I don't expect it to happen though - primarily because, as Mivo says - it's hard for abstract games to really get a foothold in the market without a major publisher backing it. And also because most of those who would be prepared to dedicate most of their time to a game like this already do so with chess or go, and don't want to devote the same amount of time to a different game

Mivo wrote:I actually wonder why the game isn't more popular.

Mivo wrote:I generally find it hard to get interested in any other strategy games ever since I learned (about) Go.

This sums it up for me. Go is a classy game with a tradition thousands of years old, (and chess apparently has a long tradition as well ) - but a game like this in comparison seems too fly-by-night for it to be worth investing the time necessary to get good. Look what happened to that online game that was similar to go but with invisible fields or something (badoo?) Gone with the wind.

robinz wrote:And also because most of those who would be prepared to dedicate most of their time to a game like this already do so with chess or go, and don't want to devote the same amount of time to a different game

Speaking of which ... just last night I was discussing with my better half(*) whether it's necessarily a good approach for me to spend a lot of time and effort on one game in the (vain or otherwise) hope to become proficient at it, instead of putting time and effort into a variety of games, aiming to become merely "decent" at them, but in return experience a wider spectrum of intellectual challenges and input.

For me personally, I think the best time I've had with Go was when progress came easy, when there was a lot to explore and discover, learning every time I sat down with the game, when new knowledge came naturally. In the SDKs, that changed, and making further progress seems, at least for myself, to take substantially more effort for substantially less gain. Or differently put, I think 80%+ of what I learned about the game, I learned in the first half year. The years that followed yielded the rest, and the effort/progress ratio only continues to get worse. I think I even enjoy "learning" more than I do "playing".

At the same time, if I'm honest with myself, I'm not even having more fun. There are still the times when I learn something new or feel that I get stronger, but it's not as frequent anymore. And actually, for the most part I'm "OK" with being able to play a game of Go, doing tsumego, and watching other people play without being confused about what's going on all the time, and I enjoy the Go community and all the cultural aspects. But do I need to get to the dan levels? No doubt, I would like to, but on the other hand it seems to mostly require hard work for relatively slow progress. Above all, when I catch myself thinking along these lines, it strikes me that I seem to be falling into the "destination more important than the journey" trap. I don't think I would enjoy the game more if I was 1dan vs. somewhere in the mid SDKs, but I am almost certain that I probably won't enjoy putting in the required effort for increasingly less noticeable gain.

I guess what I'm getting at is the question (asked to myself) whether it wouldn't make for a better intellectual experience to pick up a new game every year and learn it, enjoying the thrill of progress and fresh insights, and seeing how far one can get while the balance between progress and effort still favours progress, when learning is exciting rather than a grind.

An invention-wise young game like Arimaa, to use it as an example, also has the benefit that there aren't hundreds of years of research and all these people who were already stronger at age 10 than you know you can ever hope to even remotely become. There's the attraction of potentially new discoveries, the feeling of possibly being part of the unfolding of a game, the fumbling around with others instead of the looking up to the masters and feeling hopelessly and eternally inferior. More than forever only following footsteps.

Of course, that's also a downside. A game like Go offers an endless pool of source material, high level matches to learn from, and a wealth of philosophical and cultural beauty (then again, that is, at the end of the day, just "fluff": there is nothing inherently spiritual about a board game; it's just being projected on the game, but at the core, Go is only a highly abstract strategy game), and the knowledge that the game is one that has lasted and will last throughout time, and that won't just fizzle out because it doesn't have enough longevity.

Anyway, just some poorly structured thoughts.


(*) Fine, so I was philosophizing and she listened, nodding here and there!

Go would probably not become popular if it were invented today.

Coincidentally, I'm working on a puzzle game for the MIT mystery hunt.. and one of the puzzles is Arimaa based. What are the odds?

Any good players out there able to solve particular 'x to play and win by' problems?

CSamurai wrote:Any good players out there able to solve particular 'x to play and win by' problems?

I can solve the easier example ones on the Arimaa website... :/

Mivo wrote:I actually wonder why the game isn't more popular.

There are a huge number of abstract games out. A lot are mediocre, but some are very good. I like Arimaa, but I find, for example, Slither and Ponte del Diavolo more interesting. And the Gipf games are pretty great new abstracts as well. And of course most of my abstract game-playing time is spent on Go, like most people here. So even though I like Arimaa, I don't see myself playing very much (if any) of it in the future.

Ponte del Diavolo I found very interesting when I first played it. The rules are nothing much like go, but the strategy has many of the same concepts; good vs. bad shape, miai, urgent moves vs. big moves, sente, are all present. Because of this, it didn't surprise me when I found out that most of the top PdD players are also go players.

Thanks for the implicit recommendation, wms. I've up to my 30th (postal) game of Slither, and it's really good. I'm not going to rate it vs. Arimaa (360 games, thanks to being able to play in real time...), but they both strike me as very good and worthy of exploration.

For the first six years I played go, I had no interest in other games, but I have been splitting my attention pretty evenly for the past six months. I have no idea what changed.