Thanks for the response! I don't disagree with anything you've said, so I'm just adding some thoughts.

I think the problem with comparing Go to Magic, Dominion, etc. is that they are not as abstract as Go. These games in part sell well because they have pretty pictures. Images of creatures, scenes, spells, etc. make the experience more tangible and easier to relate to than white and black stones on a square board. They are more like Euro games in that regard. Go's stark "abstractness" makes it harder to sell it to an audience increasingly used to visually rich forms of games and other entertainment.

I actually don't know how popular Magic is. Besides my boss, I don't know anyone in my age group (forty, he's nearly fifty but a professional game designer of 30+ years, so he's not a typical representative either) who plays it. I actually bought cards in the late 90s too and never played. I collected them. These days, I buy the annually Duel of the Planeswalkers PC game, play a few matches against the computer, and that's it. My interest is mostly limited because it's become a bit of a "pay to win" game where every expansion adds more powerful cards.



You're at that point after you've "worked hard", though! Most people who play games casually do not want to "work" to be able to play a decent match. They play games to get away from work. So that popular slogan of "easy to learn, a lifetime to master" is probably counter-productive, because it implies long-lasting mediocrity, required upfront work and learning, and adds to the "too old for this, maybe if I was 15 I'd be interested" thinking. (But I may base this assumption too much on my own ways of thinking, insecurities and attempts at rationalizing why I get so easily side-tracked!)

But, yes, I think abstract games are just hard to sell in an audio-visual world. Go's popularity surged after HnG, an animated show with characters people could love and hate, and relate to. No other attempt at promotion had even a fraction of this success. It removed some of the abstractness. It's not so different from what tickled my interest in chess when I was sixteen or so: Battle Chess for the Atari ST. My grandfather had taught me chess a few years before, but it didn't fascinate me. Too boring. Battle Chess did the trick, though, because it was "fun" in a game-y sense.

Perhaps what Go needs is some "modernisation". Apps and video games that add some "game-y-ness": A story line, colourful stones, fancy animations, humour, AI tournaments, trophies, characters, leaderboards, interactive tutorial sections (think Chessmaster here, or this Fritz-based chess game for children.

Less dust and weight, better packaging.

Sure - it's relative; my point still stands. Plus, as I understand, the average age of these players keeps rising.

That's exactly what Batoo was, and apparently even in Korea it didn't do so well.

Batoo was a variant, though. Battle Chess, for example, wasn't a variant of chess, it was chess -- same rules, same everything, except the presentation and all the other stuff. There was another video game of that kind where you were a knight travelling a fantasy realm, battling fantasy creatures (it started you off with simple movement puzzles, all embedded into the story, and eased you into playing real games).

So the downfall of Batoo was it was too much like Go?

No. :p The "downfall" was that it was basically just another abstract game based on Go. Why would you play Batoo instead of Go, if you're into abstract games? All the "concerns" discussed apply to Batoo just as much as Go. I think you can make Go more attractive and package it differently without changing the actual rules or watering down the gameplay (video game with story, characters, effects, etc.).

HnG had this tremendous impact because it made use of all of this and thus managed to introduce the game to an audience who would never have bothered with an abstract game that's seen as being either for Asians, old people, spleen-y intellectuals or geeks looking for a lifestyle game.

This is just a funny story about how the perception of go varies even in Asia: I immigrated to North America a long time ago, but I spent some of my early years in Korea, where I was born. Back when I lived in Korea as a young child, the adults in my family told me that go was a "lesser amusement for unemployed good-for-nothings and old men who scratch their balls and touch the stones before washing their hands." Please excuse the language, but that was literally what was told to me. They also told me not to touch go stones because of the obvious perceived hygiene issues. I understand that others may have had a different experience. I learned the rules of go many years later when I was in grad school in the US.

I suspect that the reason for perceptions like that is the association of go with gambling. In the west, Poker and earlier Backgammon fill that niche really well.

This exactly like sound bite politics and misrepresents what I said. Level is one of many factors I mention in about a paragraph and cannot stand by itself. In a healthy population the top level will be pushed up as well as the bottom levels will broaden.

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Michael Dobbins; Dragon: mdobbins, KGS: mgd, AGA#: 4253,
My Website

One of the kids in my Go club, who doesn't have a coomputer to play online with, practices with The Path of Go on Xbox, which apparently gives you a quest, and various bosses to beat.

I'm sure the Xbox sucks at Go, but it's tough enough for beginners.

There were some HNG video games, too, but I don't think any of them were released in the US, and though you can still get them off Ebay for obsolete platforms, how many people know or care to hack their Gameboy/Playstation to play Japanese releases, with no English subtitles or tranlations? I checked out a ROM of the Gameboy game, and it's impossible to know what you're doing without reading Japanese.

Even so, how much did the HNG video games boost Go in Japan, do you think? Is the Hikaru boom over, or are there still plenty of new players?

I think that HNG created a surge in young players in Japan when it was new but the surge has not sustained itself. Same thing in the USA. There were innumerable players on go servers with nicks like "sai82" or "hikaru91", and message boards had many declarations of determination to become a go pro, but I think it has almost all dwindled away.

Yes.Yes.

Another post. I like how he ends with "Another model must be put in its place. One based on cultural, sociological and economic reality. The ideas offered at www.GoWizardry.com are a start.". As far as I have seen, he hasn't proposed any real ideas yet, only insulted people.

Well this was another tantalising post. He isn't insulting anyone by name, which is a fairly polite way of doing things. He isn't revealing any substantial details of what happened though. All I can understand so far, is that the AGA seemed to block, or steal, his ideas.

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North Lecale

I thought this had happened as well, but in the past year, we've had at least 2-3 players start at our local club saying they had come from HNG, and they seem to be continuing. Might just be a local anomaly, though.

HNG is still in print and is available in a lot of public libraries so manga fans will still be reading it. If it grabs them they'll want to play. All to the better. I hope it continues.

Maybe there is a need for the next Hikaru no Go, but even if another manga based on Go came out, there's no assurance that it would be as successful as Hikaru no Go.

Perhaps if there could be a continuation to Hikaru no Go, that would do quite a lot for the community at large. I know I didn't necessarily like the way the anime ended.

But even then, an anime or manga will only have a limited life cycle, and then you're back to square one.

As I've said in the past, I think a video game for Go would be great for the community. Imagine an MMO styled game where you create a player and then are put through a tutorial for beginners. The tutorial could be optional. And you could have select tournaments annually for virtual titles, ect. ect.

And offer an offline mode with a story so beginners can get the hang of the game. Maybe they start as a 30k in the beginning, but leave as maybe a 10k-15k.

Not only that but if you include micro-transactions, you could sell go resources such as ebooks and other goods that can help players in the game. It seems like this would have a positive impact on the community as a whole.

The key thing to remember is: I speak with my foot in my mouth. I don't pretend to be knowledgeable on any of this sort of thing. I'm only expressing what I would like to see and what I think could be beneficial.

I've suggested things like this before. But if you want something to succeed, you have to figure out your market demographic. And if you want to target kids, video games, manga, and anime are some of the most effective ways to get their attention.

But again, I could be dead wrong. But I think the future of Go lies in getting the youth interested in the game. I'm not trying to suggest there is anything wrong with older folk enjoying the game, but kids are obviously the next generation of potential players. Tap that market and they might grow up to be players, and then their kids could become players.

Go hasn't yet failed in the West. At least not in my opinion. I look at some of the great strides Go has made just since I started playing again back in 2010: A US pro system, a new Go server being developed.

But it could use a breath of fresh air. Anyway, I'll just reiterate once again that this is my opinion. Maybe someone will agree with something in here. Maybe not.

Have a nice day.

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Slava Ukraini!

I don't think there's any reasonable way to bring Sai back, though. I'm sure I'm not speaking only for myself when I say that another HNG series without Sai would not have nearly as much appeal. Maybe Sai could come haunt someone else, someone in the US, as a way of trying to get the game going here. Poor Sai, stuck in a nation where the average person has never heard of Go...

Ooh, and the person he's haunting would end up playing an international tournament against Hikaru!



Unless it's Pokemon.

Part of the problem is that many kids, even the ones who like anime and manga, have no interest in anything they consider old. They are at the age when anything five years old seems absolutely musty, and anything ten years old is practically a fossil. Give it another five or ten years, and HNG will be considered too ancient to even be watchable. I sometimes answer questions on Yahoo Answers, and commonly see "Recommend me a new anime to watch, but nothing older than 2008.'



Actually, that might be a pretty cool way to spread the game. But it would be even better if it were possible to get some existing, popular MMO to add a go salon to their world, where players could win huge bonuses, power-ups, loot or special items/titles by winning tournaments. (Not being a coder, I have no idea if it's even possible to do this.) It seems to me that it would be a better advertisement than creating an entire go-centric RPG. After all, the idea is to motivate newcomers to start playing, not to provide another place to preach to the choir.

Maybe the AGA should seriously look into bribing the World of Warcraft people.

More thoughts from Mr. Terry
http://gowizardry.com/?p=3476

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

This has already been announced above. It seems to me that until Mr. Terry adds anything constructive, there's not much point in calling his insults "thoughts."

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Patience, grasshopper.