Even among card-carrying nerds, Go is very niche. When I told a close friend that I was getting into go two years ago, he thought I was talking about the programming language.

Well, I can't say that I fully understood your opinions, but I don't agree with you to impute the less intellectual pursuit to the fault of education system. I'm a good example. I have been immersed in China national education system for 16 years. It might be the best system to kill the willing of creation and innovation. But it can't keep me away from attempts to new experience. It's a proof that China has a great immigrant population.

In addition, half of my colleagues are Chinese, one third are French and one sixth has other nationality. They were grown under different education system, but no interest in GO is the same.

So I don't think the reason is so simple.

I'm sorry to quote your words coincidently without any comments. I am very new to tapatalk. I didn't recognize I had made a mistake till I waked up. Now, I edit the thread

And about your points of view, I agree most of them. Especially you think we make GO too complex for the beginners. I often start my introduction of GO by the philosophic concepts inside. In my opinion it is charming because playing GO is more than having fun. I never image reversely that the cultural aspects make people try to get away.

Maybe just we should let go and it can be easier for beginner to find joy which is the essential part of a game.

Thanks！I will try it today and tell you the result by a thread

Good luck!

Oh, and you can download a 5x5 and 7x7 board here:
http://www.cmgo.org/go-kit

Scroll down to
Simple-rules Starter Kit (Stone Counting)
and click "Free Download"

Prints double sided on 8.5x11 sheet of paper. It might fit on an A4, but don't shrink to fit or anything like that. It's made for regular size stones.

Let me know how it goes!

_________________
Founder, Central Mississippi Go Club
Free tips and resources for clubs and teaching
Go Kit Club Pack - pack of 13x13 go sets for clubs
Go Tin - very portable go

Seriously? I find your post a bit pretentious.

Not that it matters, but in my opinion go is about as "intellectual" as boxing.
Or a lot of computer games for that matter (starcraft and quake series come to mind).

Talking about "plot" and "graphics" of computer games imho betrays how little you know about them. Neither plot nor graphics really matter for competitively played games, though they matter in terms of generating a decent player base in the first place, I guess. Either way, looking down on another gaming community doesn't present you in the best light, again imho.

And I'm not going to go on a rant about what you said about television, I'll just leave it at that: if you're going to label yourself an "intellectual", at least demonstrate that you have the ability to distinguish between medium and content.

I'm not implying that you are, I was just commenting on the general theme. All of the examples you gave are typical traditional intellectual pursuits. I'm saying people nowadays tend to choose more modern intellectual pursuits.


Of course it makes commercial sense to make games accessible to everyone. But that does not mean you have to remove the option to think altogether. Anyone can play Starcraft, but not many can play it at a high level. Shooters often have team play, where the intellectual challenge is in the planning and execution of a well-coordinated group action.

The same is true with go. Anyone can play go, but few can play it truly well. You can play go while drinking a beer and watching a movie, no problem. You can have fun playing go at the DDK level forever, or you can study it day and night and find a continuous challenge in it.


I'm not saying it is an improvement.

Yes, you do. And I'm afraid I don't think you know what you're talking about. There are a ton of bad reality TV shows out there, you're right about that.

But I'm talking about The Sopranos, Mad Men and so on. Even a show like Lost, which I thought turned out to be rather empty, had much more narrative complexity than the shows of the past, which were typically episodic. I don't know what TV was like where you grew up (I was amazed that the Decalogue was a television miniseries), but in the US, there's more good content out there, being watched by more people.

_________________
Occupy Babel!

Yes. It seems that your perception of intellectualism is based on looking back 100 years through rose colored glasses.

And what's so intellectual about an opera anyway? It's a dumb show with a bunch of bad actors playing out a trite love story. The whole thing is so boring that to keep the audience awake they are all singing. Would you like modern TV shows more if there was more singing in them?

I don't see why you guys seem so eager to die in the last ditch over the contention that video games and tee-vee are just as intellectual as go and art museums.

One feature of "intellectual" activities is a need for focus. The typical pop song on the radio is about two minutes, with a catchy refrain repeated several times so that you don't get lost. A symphony might be broken up into several movements of ten to thirty minutes. Opera acts tend to be even longer. There are very stupid people who love opera and very intelligent people who hate opera, but I don't think there is any great mystery why people tend to think of opera as an intellectual pursuit, or why intellectually insecure people who hate opera sometimes hesitate to admit it.

There are plenty of other stereotyped features of intellectual activities, which don't always line up with each other, but which I don't think it's hard to understand why these features are stereotyped this way. How easy is it to focus on a subject? How much background or context do you need to appreciate it? How much does depth do you find with prolonged exposure? How strongly compatible is it with other intellectual activities, and how incompatible is it with anti-intellectual activities? How little does it depend on physical gifts or discipline?

So I don't think it's a huge surprise that go is segregated as an intellectual activity. You can play it quickly once you get the knack, but you have to focus on a large number of decisions over several hundred turns, and without a clock new players can easily spend more than an hour on a game. You don't get to murder aliens, save up play-money, or in any other way use a fantasy life to focus your attention. The more you learn about the tactics and history of the game, the more room there is to appreciate it, almost without limit. There's not huge overlap with other intellectual activities, at least in the West, but reading shares many features with mental puzzles and puzzle-games; go shares concepts (like initiative and double-threats) with other abstract games; many aspects of go make more sense to people who are comfortable with math. And go is just about the least physical game in existence.

So I don't think it's unreasonable to think of go as an intellectual activity, or to think that HBO, kite-surfing, competitive Starcraft, and lots of other lovely, absorbing interests are less intellectual than go.

Classical music was making use of repetition long before the pop songs on the radio, and I think it would more sense to compare symphonies to albums but I guess it's still true that it's broken up in to smaller pieces. The thing is, a (good) symphony doesn't rely on the audience's intellectual prowess in order to hold their attention, but constantly changes in order to keep them interested. I doubt there're many symphonies which require you to concentrate on the same thing for longer than a pop song.

Watching your lawn grow long enough to get a letter from the council takes even longer, but it's not exactly intellectual.



If you mean that it's clearly a matter of cultural bias then I agree with you.



I agree that these all contribute to the perception of something as intellectual, but I think you underestimate the depth that many mainstream activities posses. Success as a pop musician may be greatly effected by non-musical factors, but that doesn't mean the genre itself is any less valid. There are many talented musicians creating it and mastery is just as hard.



The imagination is a powerful intellectual tool that is well worth exercising.

That's not fair. It only looks that way because I was playing go instead of mowing it.

Dudes, I do think your discussion goes too far.

Anyway, I come back to report my progress.

Yesterday I did't find good opportunities to lead the chat with my colleagues to GO.

Then, this lunch, I brought a set of 9 by 9 GO suit to company restaurant. I successfully attracted the attention from a group of French boys. But after my introduction of basic rules, they looked bored. One of them likened GO to 'jeu de dame'.

Minutes later, mechanical engineering manager came to me and tried to understand the basic rules. He learnt very quick but thought this game is too complex to master, he joked with me that he is too young to this game.

In addition, one lady stopped nearby and listened to my introduction quietly. She said there were some unclear questions for her and she would like to check with me another time.

Anyway I get some progress today. Thanks for your advice! I will keep trying to spread this mind sport across my company and record my progress here!

I second msgreg's approach. It's important to let beginners play (against each other, optimally) and not talk too much. Just say it's a fun game and has very few rules, sit them down and let them play a few Atari Go games. Real go can come later for those who get the game and enjoy it.

Difficult to sit them down to play Atari game without explanation of liberty concept.

I really miss my friends who play GO but left the company. Otherwise, I can demonstrate a game beyond people…

Nice to read about your experience, I’m curious to read more of your reports

Well, it just occured to me that it might perhaps help to explain nothing but instead make a riddle out of it by asking them to find out the rules for themselves, and then playing one or two demonstration games of Atari Go alone, or by placing just a few black and white stones, some of them in atari, and then capturing?

I can imagine that such a playful challenge might make it even more appealing.


Greetz, Tom

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Thank you, Tom! Your suggestion may work. I will look for a proper chance to try.

Actually, its not as difficult as you may think (as Bonobo also suggests). The hardest part is to know when to shut up and not say anything at all (we often overwhelm beginners with too much unnecessary information).

When all the stones breathing straws are blocked, the stones suffocate and die.

As a very first introduction to go: place a white stone in the center of a 5x5 board. Then give a handful of black stones to your student and say "The pieces are called stones and are placed on the intersections of the grid. Place these black stones to capture the white stone". You may have to insist a couple of times, perhaps vaguely gesture to the white stone.

They will likely either surround the stone at the four diagonals, the eight surrounding points, or the four orthogonal points.

If they get it wrong, say "you have the right idea! For capture in go, we only need to occupy the stones along the lines of the grid. Then you get to remove the captured stone."
(Have them remove the white stone.)

Then place a white stone in the center surrounded by three black stones and give them a white stone and say "If you were white, where would you place this to avoid being captured." ("Try again" if necessary).

"That's right!". Then ask "how many black stones would it take to capture this white group?"
(they will likely answer either three or seven. If they answer "seven" then reiterate about "diagonals don't count").

There. Now they know enough to start playing capture go on a 5x5 grid. They take black and start first.

A few games might end in capture, but eventually the 5x5 games will end in no captures. At some point, black will inevitably play a stone inside their own territory. As white, you can say "Pass" then tell them if there is not a good move, they can pass, too, and when both players pass the game is over.

I'm writing up the "Boley Method" of teaching absolute beginners that starts with these instructions. (I learned it from Chris Kirschner's presentation at the US Go Congress).

Another good tip from Bill Camp: "Do not answer questions that are not asked."

_________________
Founder, Central Mississippi Go Club
Free tips and resources for clubs and teaching
Go Kit Club Pack - pack of 13x13 go sets for clubs
Go Tin - very portable go

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. Of course I meant also including the capturing rule. msgreg has explained it well and it's the way I explain it too. Especially the not talking too much part is not to be underestimated