Amusingly, what might be the most effective solution is the same in both cases -- get it taught in schools!

(Alternatively, have it made into a feature film...)

I agree. I've been quite annoyed at the lack of information

http://www.usgo.org/aga-professional-system

You seem to forget the two main advantages go has over most other games.

- It's almost purely conceptual: you can set up a go game with almost no material base.
- It's close to perfection as a game: you can be sure there are no intrinsic flaws you'll discover after a few million games.

I would bet that go is known in a thousand years (and I'm one of those who thinks the world will keep changing faster and faster). I would dare to bet go will exist when the English language is only a historical relic.

Go doesn't compete with videogames because go will always be there. How long can, for example, the US take to have a go world champion? A century? Five? A millenium? Who will remember individual videogames by then?

I agree with some of the points of the points you made, but disagree with a few. Firstly, I doubt English will be a historical relic unless some humanity ending cataclysm happens. I only say this because English is spoken all over the world. I'm willing to wager there is at least one person in most countries who knows English. Not that there's anything special about English (as I note in the Langauge Discussion in the off topic session).

And some video games will likely be remembered forever*. Pong. Pacman. Super Mario Bros.

But you're definitely right. Go as a single game will probably outlive the lifespan of almost any video game. But I wonder. 300 years from now will people still be playing Super Mario Bros.? 1000 years? It's possible with computers.

*- If humanity lasts that long, anyway.

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Not to derail the thread, but it depends on what you consider a flaw...

Some would point to these:

Anti-seki
Moonshine life
Basic ko anomalies
Superko anomalies
Eternal life
etc, etc

Ever? I didn't set a time limit for that sentence.

I'm sure we can agree English will not survive math.

I'm saying English won't survive go for similar reasons. Maybe English will live another ten thousand years (I don't think it will really be English by then, just as Spanish isn't Latin).



We use different concepts of "forever".

When I say "forever" I mean "in a time so ridiculously long that humans will be pure thought beings that travel between dimensions to other universes because this one has stopped existing.".

I don't think those beings will remember Mario Bross. I do think they'll remember how to do square roots and the Pythagoras theorem; and go.

Those flaws are minuscule. The flaws that can kill a game are those that make it solvable, unbalanced, or even unplayable once discovered. It's pretty safe to say go doesn't have those. It's pretty risky to say that about any game with less than some millions of games played.

I'm talking about flaws like "no komi for w". That was a pretty huge flaw in go, and how long did it take to be corrected?

I'm not even sure no Komi is a flaw, provided you are willing to play sets.

I agree with the original arguement that there is a huge opportunity for growing support with the current internet era. But understand Go does not have the resources of a Blizzardesque company.

My personal experience with SC2 multiplayer. When I was young i played SC2 with my brother and but had no idea of the strategy just massed units and killed the computer, so when SC2 came out I was excited and they did a great job promoting the ladder. I became interested... stumbled upon Day9 got interested in learning strategy and worked my way up to high diamond leagues and had a good grasp of the strategy. At that point I felt the entire game I was scrambling around the screen at all times and had to be continuously doing stuff with my keyboard and mouse. At this point I said ok I feel I have conquered the strategy of this game enough, so I stopped. Several people I know have similar experiences, so I am assuming this is somewhat normal. Luckily for me I had stumbled upon Go through a conversation about computer science and randomly had an old pente board in my basement.

Ok the point I am stumbling towards is that I believe many of the people who become infactuated with the strategy behind SC2 and enjoy the game are the people who would be naturally inclined to play go. Also go has the added benefit of not requiring a reasonably powerful computer, and crazy mouse keyboard actions at crazy paces that make your mind melt.

Therefore I feel there should be more of an effort from the Go community to focus on these groups either through advertisements on Day9s daily (how expensive can that be?) or some similar approach.

Also side note, Topazg I stumbled upon your website a while back and heard your reviews of some games, and you have the best voice I have ever heard! You should definitely find someone to regularly review games with, I would watch that all day.

I think CSamurai and topazg hit the nail on the head: What Go needs is streaming. It's not like the Day9 Dailies ever had some megacorp behind them: It was just a good player, excited as hell, in his own room, trying to share the love of the game by game commentary and teaching from the basics. (It did help that early Starcraft 2 was pretty simple metagame-wise)
Apart from the dailies or an equivalent, just have people streaming their own games, some Battousai-style, some just games without commentary. You absolutely can learn a good bit of playing just by watching games - my understanding of SC2 is proof of that. The scientists studying learning in Chess agree as well: If you remember, they concluded we basically have an unconscious valuation bot inside us that after understanding some basics just needs to be fed and that leads to learning.

I learned Starcraft by watching, and while the initial spark came from Hikaru no Go, what I know of Go is pretty much a direct result of being entertained by Battousai's videos. Light analyses, humorous commentary, reasonably paced (roughly Starcrafty) live game records. That is nice. And to whoever said Go is not pretty enough:

http://vimeo.com/37626252

One more thing that dramatically eases learning Starcraft is The Liquidpedia. It's a monstrous information collection with all unit stats laid out cleanly for easy reference, tournament info and summaries and player profiles. Lots and lots of information PRESENTED CLEANLY. We already have an equivalent in Sensei's Library (one of the few places to rival Liquipedia that I have seen), but it needs a bit of a visual makeover. Most important I think is to separate the actual wiki article from the ensuing discussion and addendums more clearly. The top left oddface also needs to have a meeting with the delete button, we need more Kaya, less '95. But the infrastructure and much of the content is there already. This is important and great.

To conclude, I think most of the pieces are already in place: We have Kaya as a pretty UI that doesn't look clunky, twitch.tv to handle streaming, L19 at least as a forum with some membership and knowledge, plus the Malkovich games. We have Sensei's as an information deposit.

The final two pieces that are needed, in my opinion, are polishing those pieces just a bit and getting something like this:
http://www.eventhubs.com/
http://www.teamliquid.net/
It's essentially a news ticker. But it has links to the important things: To the livestreams, to the forums, to the guides. And they put big news items up for big tournaments and the like so you feel something is happening. So some websites, some people streaming, we're done essentially. All that's needed is passion and perhaps the resources for one bigger website. No megacorps involved, all grassroots.

Given that video games are pretty recent, and the advances in technology that have happened during that time, I think it's impossible to predict something like that even at 300 years mark.



http://goaggregator.blogspot.pt/

I don't use RSS, so I'm not sure what it may be missing, but there is something like you describe.

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Associação Portuguesa de Go