You're beginning to make me think that I am the weird one now. Then again, I don't find anything particularly surprising or ridiculous about a DDK killing his own living group in gote. It is almost expected to happen in every other DDK game. Now, if you told me that a dan player did it, then I would with you.

Ugh... It seems that I derailed this thread a bit by going a bit off topic from the AGA-related stuff. I really did not want to do that. I'll end things by saying that I understand the views explained by jts/palapiku a bit better now. I might be over-thinking things as far as the my expressed views are concerned. Hopefully, the thread can now get back to its original track.

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I don't think laughter is necessarily a tangent. Unless we limit ourselves to faithful exegesis of Robert Terry's, um, unique perspective, the overall question is "Why has Go failed to prosper in the US?" Currently on the table: a mocking attitude towards beginners, anti-intellectualism, not enough attention to recruiting children, not enough attention to recruiting adults.

I would tend to focus on recruiting children.

And, by the way: what sort of statistics do we have to back up the implicit claim that Go has failed to prosper in the US, but is prospering in parts of Europe? How do these statistics decompose if we, say, compare the Netherlands to Washington and Alabama to Albania?

This is a popular sentiment, and one that I used to take as a given. Major youth activities have been going on for more than a decade, and I'm not sure it's been a success. The children that were involved in the youth activities of the late nineties should now be full AGA members, but they've vanished. Of the thousands who have played go as children, only the handful who are championship contenders seem to stick around into (young) adulthood. Something hasn't panned out the way we had hoped.

The real success of outreach seems to have been to university clubs, where young adults have taken up the game and seem to last a lot longer. Perhaps the focus should tend in that direction as we move forward?

Basically, there are declining marginal returns to scale. If a volunteer spends an hour of his time and an amortized $5 of AGA equipment teaching a classroom of kids to play go in 2012, that's probably the most efficient way of converting 2012 dollars and hours into 2032 AGA members. The more dollars and hours you spend on any particular kid in 2012, the less likely those resources will be converted into 2032 AGA members. This can be disappointing to human beings, because we would like to cultivate personal relationships with young go players and then watch them blossom. But sadly, human beings aren't flowers and can't be gardened, unless you're willing to invest Soviet levels of resources in developing talented children.

This isn't to say that investing in Go camps and youth competitions is misguided, by the way. It's probably still the relatively good way to develop the strong members of 2032. And I doubt the effect of youth subsidies are limited to the number of currently active AGA players. But the numbers of the thing make it an inefficient way to spread go.

I am not sure this is not exactly the same when you try to start a new club in a village in Korea, for example, where there are no players yet.

If you happen to move into a place with a prosperous Go Club present - all that means is that somebody before you have already put the effort into getting such club going and teaching others - so not you can benefit from it. I was in such situation in Germany once - starting a new club was easy because there were leftovers of the old club - people somebody else already taught and hooked on Go. But I still had to drum all my chess buddies and forcefully teach them Go so the club could grow.

And speaking of chess - the situation should be exactly the same, I think.

The difference between all the scenarios (Go in Asia, Go in US, chess in US, etc) is this: how much effort was spent BEFORE you showed up to make the environment nice for you.

PS>
I think that the one underlying issue - the ONLY one, I think, is this:
How much do the people WANT to learn Go? This is cultural, of course... in Asia, people might think learning Go more worthwhile than in the US. In the US, people might think learning chess more worthwhile than learning Go. In Asia, people might think learning Go more worthwhile than learning chess... and so on.

And I don't think there is any easy solution to that - asking where some money went and how come it did not make much different is pointless. Yes, in hindsight you might say - it would have been better to do this or that - but how do we know. I think those who speak about the centuries of letting particular game cultures to develop in an area - they are right on!

US is just not a very 'gamey' place - and from the games to play, Go is just not very hight on the list.

Looking into the future - I think much more is needed to change things that just proclaiming 'Go is a cool game.' More even than the money from Ing to make a difference.

Looking into the past - there is some higher reason needed to make a difference:

1.
Chess in the old USSR - heavily sponsored by the state, good/best chess players could look forward to life of opulence, even mediocre players could live good lives, and there was no harm in trying out for it and maybe you get lucky.

2.
Go in China/Korea - a lot of national pride was invoked - to overcome the Japanese dominance. In addition - in China massive state support was given. In Korea - top-notch trainers and teachers were willing to volunteer their time to make things happen. And both countries already had a rich Go culture - so it was easier.

3.
Poker in the US - the message there is 'yes, even you can make millions, no need to be a genius, just start playing!' Everybody can beat the champion and gain the glory - and with the glory there is a lot of money involved - which motivates people. As opposed - the message in Go is: 'work work hard hard and at the end of the road you will maybe be the best player in your local club nothing more.'

4. Chess in the US - has a long history, but only really got any traction during the Fisher time - when also the national pride was at stake - to beat the Russians. I don't think the game itself was important - if Fisher was doing something else which threatened Russian domination, he would be every bit as popular. Once he left, whatever he did started to decline. Once the issue became moot - the communism fell - there is very little interest in chess.

And so on... the pattern is - something more than just 'cool game' needs to happen for people to take notice. Pride, money, and more money. Long term career opportunities and prosperity - THEN people would maybe start playing more.

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On the other hand, isn't advertising all about making people want something that they didn't know they wanted? It's obvious that fewer people in the West view go as as worthwhile as chess, but to say let's just wait a few hundred years isn't typical way Americans go about tackling problems. Was anyone waiting for an ipod? I can't say if the AGA is on the wrong course or not, but there must be better strategies available than waiting.

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Patience, grasshopper.

It may be a short term failure for the AGA, but it is a long term success for increasing Go knowledge in the general population. The kids who stick with it tend to raise the level of Go playing expertise more than Adults who stick with it. Kids carry the exposure to the general population for almost twice as many years as some one first learning as an Adult. There are benefits in the general education of children such as learning how to concentrate, plan and execute a plan. There are probably others, but these are the ones that come immediately to my mind.

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Michael Dobbins; Dragon: mdobbins, KGS: mgd, AGA#: 4253,
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On laughter:

There is something funny about a dead group. I don't know why.

When I was learning go (in Japan) sometimes you would see people come up to look at a game and laugh at a dead group. I did, too. There is something funny about it. One day when I was kibitzing Takagawa -- OC, I was as still and stone faced as I could be --, one of the young 7 dans was playing against Maeda 9 dan at the next board. They had gotten into a big fight and it looked to me like the 7 dan's group was dead. Then both Takagawa and Yamabe looked at the 7 dan's group and started laughing. There is just something funny about a dead group.

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The best long term option may be reaching out to young adults, who will in turn teach their children. I will certainly teach my daughter Go when she is old enough (five or so?), and I'm sure there are many other parents like me. The problem is, you can make efforts to reach children--but without buy-in from the parents, you won't maintain momentum. The same thing happened to chess; there are still good youth programs, but the consciousness of the middle class parent was lost in the sixties and seventies, when chess went from being something for Western European and American gentlemen to being yet another battlefield in the cold war, and one dominated by the Soviets. Chess lost its cachet and never regained it.

Blake, you suggest chess *lost* its cachet during the cold war? That seems plausible enough to me, but one usually hears the reverse.

What puzzles me is the implicit relation made between level of expertise and "prosperity" (e.g. by mdobbins). In fact, a healthy go population (i.e. a growing one) always has a lower average strength than an unhealthy one (i.e. a shrinking one), take Romania (yes, Romania's average strength is lower!) and UK as examples from Europe. The healthy population will produce stronger player in the long run and on the top, but what matters is almost exclusively size not expertise. Given size sooner or later talent will show up, you can invite outside expertise etc. etc. while a lonely Bobby Fisher of Go would still have trouble to find a club in many places in the U.S.

As the basketball example was given earlier, I wonder whether someone tried to promote Go as a path to self discipline in prisons. After all in the U.S. a surprising percentage (for a continental european standard) of young people with spare time are present there.

Very nice (I'm being sincere). Many other endeavors can also be such a path (or Way):
music, calligraphy, flower arrangement, tea ceremony, writing, (the obligatory and cliched) martial arts, tennis, etc.

http://www.usgo.org/news/2010/11/the-tr ... jail-yard/

Paul Barchilon was teacher of the year many years ago (not for his prison work).

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Younger adults (20-35) tend to live fairly busy lives today and Go is simply not a very casual activity, so I'm not sure it's really a good target group. Kids and young teens have more time and energy (not that they ever feel that way!), as do "older" people (minus the energy). The latter group also tends to have more money, so they are an attractive target group because they are able to pay for books, materials and membership fees.

If you read the comments section for Go at Boardgamegeek (here is a good start, then going back toward the higher ratings), the most commonly mentioned negative points are:

- "too complex"
- "takes too long"
- "too hard to understand"
- "no one to play with"

Those may well also be the chief reasons that stop people from exploring Go. Organizations and individuals promoting the game often emphasise its depth, complexity and how even computers perform poorly (this is by now relative and a little misleading) may in truth do the game a disfavour -- if making it more popular is the aim. Plenty of folks already know about Go, and they still don't play, and I wonder how many of them are intimidated or overwhelmed by it.

In a way, Go is much closer to a sport than it is to a recreational game, and for me, it occasionally feels like work, too. Lately I've been dabbling a little in Backgammon and once I got past the "It's all about the damn dice! *foam*" phase, I find myself enjoying the "lighter", less serious approach. You can play that game casually, but also study it properly and in depth. Even if you're a beginner or just a for-fun player, you can play against more competent players and may win a game (not necessarily a match) every now and then, thanks to the 30/70 luck/skill split.

With Go, games not only take much longer, but you need opponents roughly around your own skill level. If they are stronger, you get obliterated. If you are stronger, you obliterate. Neither is fun. Handicap helps some, but that is more applicable to higher skill levels. The game is also not as "easy to learn" as is often claimed: A beginner can typically not even see when a game is over (as opposed to chess). Counting is super confusing to someone starting out. The materials are bulky compared to the other classic games (backgammon and chess are more portable).

So, what does all of that mean? And is it even accurate? I'm not sure. But I wonder if perhaps it may be better to consider accepting that Go may never be more than an intellectual niché game that will not -- in today's age -- reach any significant market share in the west. And would it be so bad? Perhaps the effort and money could be spent better on improving the situation for existing players, such as sponsoring lectures, more actively supporting of clubs, pumping money into tournaments, sponsorships for genuinely talented folks, and so on. An increase of popularity may or may not follow, but it would lead to improvements regardless.

Mivo hits some good points, some of which I agree with. I'm not arguing with him here, but I wanted to put my thoughts down here as part of the discussion.



Is this really true? I know there are a lot of people who DO take Go very seriously, but is there no room for players who simply like to play, without worrying about improvement?

Let's look at both "Magic: the Gathering" and Chess, and the player bases there. In both games, I know a large body of players who play the games simply to have fun. The number of "for fun" payers in both Magic and Chess FAR outstrips the number of competitive-level players in either game. Both games have a thriving tournament scene and both games have pro players that are known to the more competitive community.

Why can't Go be more like the above? I do see you have a list of reasons taken from BGG:



The first and third comment could be applied to Magic with no editing. Magic is a complex game, and card interactions can be very hard to understand. It hasn't stopped adoption of the game.

The fourth one is what we're trying to fix, of course.

It's the second point that is most valid. When people are looking for something to do "just for fun", they are usually looking for a 15-minute break. When someone is looking fro something new to try "for fun", they want to get a 5-minute explanation and be able to play a "game" right then.



A couple thoughts here. First, I've found that people in general (at least those I've interacted with) don't like handicap in any sort of game. People want to believe that they should start on equal footing with their opponent even when the skill gap is huge. Perhaps it's a Western psychological trait. Offer a beginner a 9-stone game, and a good chunk of the time they will ask "why can't we just play even?".

Second, I think you hit on one of the main difficulties in Go: when does it end?

(2-player games)
Chess: One player's King is trapped (Checkmate) or cannot be trapped in the current game state (Stalemate/Draw)
Magic: One player's life total is 0 or less, or a specific card has ended the game
Backgammon: One player has got all his pieces around the board and taken them off (I don't know Backgammon terminology, though I know how to play; there's also doubling cube rules that I know next-to-nothing about)

Go has a more abstract set of end conditions. It revolves around Passing (or Resigning), which implies that the players know enough about the game to know when there are no more moves needed.

There's also no focal point for the win condition in Go. Chess has the King, Magic has a Life Total, Backgammon has the goal area where you want your pieces to end. Go is about territory; it's about "Victory Points", to borrow a term from other popular strategy games.

All that being said, it seems like comparing Go to Chess and the like is the wrong way to market the game. Comparing the game to other strategy games that use "Victory Points" like Dominion, Seven Wonders, and other such games may be more accurate, and attract players in a better way.



You may be correct; there may never be a popularity surge for Go in "the West". I'd be sad about that, though. I don't play in tournaments. I don't own an actual Go board. I own not a single Go book, and I don't really do Tsumego sets, except in a social way, solving them with friends.

I play this game for fun. I admit I'm a fairly competitive person and that drove me to work hard at the game when I started playing. I don't have time to dedicate to the game, though, and I'm grateful to be able to log on to KGS and hit "Automatch" once in a while to play for fun. It would be nice to have others in real life that I could play "for fun" over the board.

Guess I feel like Kirby does. Prosperity is localized, and prosperity to me would be local players that will play me.

I think so. Go is mostly a niche game in Asia. too, and has always been. At present time, hardly anyone plays Go in China or Japan, and as I understand it's losing popularity in Korea as well.

And look at the mythology around go's past. Go is one of the Four Arts of the Literati - the most intellectual class of ancient China. Other than that, it's played by samurai, Buddhist monks, immortals, and as entertainment for the Shogun. It's explicitly not a commoners' game.

This reputation cannot be entirely undeserved. And personally I'm okay with it. Which is why I think the real problem is with the present anti-intellectual climate.

Unsurprisingly, many of the negative comments on boardgamegeek.com are anti-intellectual in spirit, disparaging not only of go but of any mental effort, or at least the idea of mental effort possibly being fun:

* This was an unusualy boring game. Probably you need to spend TOO much time to understand it!
* It's not a game, it's a math problem. Great brains may appreciate this stuff, but mine needs more theme to enjoy a game.
* This game received it's name thousands of years ago from the saying "'Go' ahead, devote your life to it, I'd rather learn Karate."
* Great if you like your games to be too much like hard work

It's all relative. If you go to some major train stations in Tokyo, it's still not hard to find places to play Go that are well populated.

So "hardly anyone" is still enough to find many in such a dense place.