Many may think that the predominant strategy game in Asian cultures is Chinese chess, or mahjong, based on popular culture and what's depicted in Crazy Rich Asians when Nick's mother challenges Rachel to a game of mahjong. Sure, mahjong is big in China, but there's one game that the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans all respect as a traditional board game: Go.
Go in Chinese literally means "surround chess," and that's always what I thought of it as: use your pieces to surround the territory of the opponent's pieces. You get more territory, you win. Turns out, it's not that simple for high-level players and Go is so complicated because the board is so large fitting more than 300 spots, so the possibilities are endless, more than even chess. It's considered a high art form by some, and was even considered the fourth art form akin to craftsmanship, aesthetic art, etc. Among its 46 million plus players around the world who know how to play are me and my father-in-law (MJ's dad) who takes it more seriously than I do.
I was first introduced to Go at Chinese school when I was in like the 5th grade, and it was pretty exciting and fast-paced, rapidly firing these stones onto a board and trying to outthink one's opponent. It looks monotonous with only black and white pebbles, but there's a lot going on. A move can be either defensive or offensive or both, and it can be a short-term decision disguised as a tactic for the long-term. I wish I had dedicated more time to it as a kid, but I gravitated more towards chess and Chinese chess for strategy games later but enjoyed them thoroughly. There's something about sitting down in a chair to play chess or another strategy game for hours on end that's appealing nowadays in our digital world where nothing lasts more than a few minutes or even seconds.......the peak of my chess playing days was all about concentration and using all of my brain power to achieve victory......of all the times in my life I wish I could go back, reliving my high school chess days ranks near the top. Something about chess appealed to my senses of strategy and competitiveness, and just like MJ likes art in art museums and the way artists express themselves through their art, I really was able to express myself in chess by winning through being careful, precise, and sometimes daring by taking risks. It was some of the best parts of me expressed through a game.
Similarly, many people associate Go with art and expressions of humanity, that the more one plays go the more one learns about humanity, and life. It supposedly opens up a whole different way of thinking and delivers truths about how things work, just from that square wooden board with pebbles on it. Amazing, and yet in 2016 a Google program called "AlphaGo" with able to master the humanity of what Go offers and beat the consensus best player in the world, South Korea's Lee Sedol, 4-1. It was a devastating setback for mankind and humans playing Go because for a long time many had thought humans would still keep beating AI at go, a spectacularly complicated game, but AlphaGo did it 10 years ahead of time. If AI can do that, than truly they're better than human beings. Is the thought. I watched a documentary called "AlphaGo" about this, but my takeaway was actually the 1 game that Lee Sedol won, after he had already lost 3 straight games and looked beaten spiritually. He was losing in the 4th game, though, but somehow pulled out what some called a "miracle move," a genius wedge maneuver that confused AlphaGo and made it make numerous mistakes afterwards, leading it to eventually resign. Lee Sedol showed a lot of human spirit there, continuing to battle despite insurmountable odds and holding hope, and thousands of years later in the war against humans and AI I think that victory may go down in history as something the human race can look back on and show as proof of humanity. Go is truly a fascinating and representative game in that way.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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