Life In 19x19

Bobby Fisher played chess at a time when chess was just another "battleground" in the Cold War; the media seized on his narrative and held him up as an avatar of America, ready to crush the Soviets at something that they'd dominated for decades. It wasn't that Chess held the national interest; the nationalist narrative held the national interest. This was, ultimately, a negative for chess, both because Fisher had a mental breakdown and because the game had already lost a lot of its cachet; Americans and Western Europeans no longer treated it as "just something that a man learned," so having it shown as the province of obsessives and state-funded Soviets was not the way to make it popular again.

Similarly, I think if there was a "Bobby Fisher of Go," he'd be shown going against the evil Chinese masters, produced by the omnipresent State Apparatus like Gu Li, he'd probably lose, and interest would disappear as soon as it stopped showing on Fox News.

Blake wrote:Bobby Fisher played chess at a time when chess was just another "battleground" in the Cold War; the media seized on his narrative and held him up as an avatar of America, ready to crush the Soviets at something that they'd dominated for decades. It wasn't that Chess held the national interest; the nationalist narrative held the national interest.

So what we need now is a go match between the US and the terrorists!

Blake wrote:Similarly, I think if there was a "Bobby Fisher of Go," he'd be shown going against the evil Chinese masters, produced by the omnipresent State Apparatus like Gu Li, he'd probably lose, and interest would disappear as soon as it stopped showing on Fox News.

DJLLAP wrote:So what we need now is a go match between the US and the terrorists!

[Admin: Please stop making this thread political.

2. Controversy
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tapir wrote:Why should it? You will never turn people into spectators for Go events, who never took up and learned Go at least to a certain degree and this is the main difference to all those other examples, that are either accessible to non-players or based on a game which is widely known already (I doubt people who have not played Starcraft would bother to watch Starcraft competitions or other esports). Expecting otherwise is fooling yourself.

Actually I have never played starcraft 2 or league of legends in my life yet I watch high level competition of them all the time. There are video streams that get tens of thousands of viewers and sometimes breaks 100,000 viewers. Many of those viewers have never played the game either. Just look up the website twitch.tv. Its full of people watching high level player even though many of the viewers have never played the game.

I'll tell you a story. In high school there was classmate that sat next to me in my computer class. When I didn't have anything to do in the class I would play vs a Go bot. The person that sat next to me would always watch me play Go against the bot every day. Finally after 6 months of watching me play the bot they asked me how to play Go. He still enjoys watching others play Go more than playing it himself. While I agree that Go would be less of a spectator sport than sports or video games, expecting no one to watch Go just because they haven't studied the game is fooling yourself.

DJLLAP wrote:

So what we need now is a go match between the US and the terrorists!

or china. Too bad there aren't many go players there.

So what happened to the league? It was going to start in August according to the webpage...

http://www.pandanet-igs.com/communities/agacityleague

Javaness2 wrote:So what happened to the league? It was going to start in August according to the webpage...

http://www.pandanet-igs.com/communities/agacityleague

The organizers asked for more preparation time. The starting date is now delayed until possibly November.