I think it's also a matter of Chess performing it's elite signalling function over it's fun generating function in its local maximum. That also happens to correlate with mental stimulation in this case, but anecdotally as an Australian Chinese child I introduced Chinese Chess to my primary school mostly for fun purposes as children are wont and it spread like wildfire in our corner of the playground until it was promptly banned for inflaming passions too highly. Xiangqi has been viewed, and probably selected, as a pastime rather than an exercise both mechanically and culturally I think. The stereotype of players in China is old men who would otherwise be playing cards. Whilst it's a similar demographic to older men playing Chess, I think there's a status difference in that these old men are more factory workers and uh, proletarians than old hustlers or bygone products of a more sophisticated age. They are otherwise gamblers. They do in fact gamble on Chinese chess.
This is probably because the elite signalling and intellectual exercise niche was filled by Go, which is also extremely abstracted and cannot really seem to be 'improved', having been abstracted into heat death.
There was a time in which the drive for elite signalling across all areas of life was weaker than it is lately. Narcissism was definitely lower in America in the past, but there was also an implicit classism that began to vanish with the Boomer generation; there was less point in signalling your elite status when your social class was immediately legible (and largely immutable).
I suspect that the impact that status signalling has on games is profoundly negative. Games are much more fun when they can be pursued for pure pleasure and the experience of social bonding. Chess variants, and unknown games, allow players to recapture this sense of exploration and friendly competition that once made chess a game where a gnat could drink and an elephant could bathe.
And I think you are absolutely correct that Go has been abstracted into heat death. It probably happened over a thousand years ago, when skill in Go had long been known as one of the Four Cultivated Arts, and that strikes me as a real loss. Perhaps all games have only two ultimate destinies: Either to become fossilized into their host cultures like chess or go, or else (like hnefatafl, another game played with stones on an odd-sized square board, as highly regarded among the Northern Europeans as go was among the Chinese) to fall into oblivion.
thanks for this update, I had to badger my father to teach me chess when I was about 8, then had trouble finding friends to play with, in my late teens in the 80s our D&D group discovered South & East ASian variants, but not the SE ones.
In my mid twenties I learn the Suicide Chess variant. Where you win by losing first, i.e. you seek to lose pieces not capture them, and you must take a piece if you can. (As a break from the versions of backgammon & go that we played in country NSW, generally we played cards more (Bridge variants), and Risk).
Generally I lost to other people playing chess, despite badgering my father I was never captured by it.
You played D&D? I've often wondered whether that game meant something different once upon a time. The fact *you* played it suggests that it probably did. By the time I got my hands on it "game of the imagination" was no longer accurate.
I've played suicide chess; although it isn't particularly interesting once you see it works by controlling your opponent, feeding your pieces in long runs, it's a lot of fun as a puzzle to work out. Tic-Tac-Toe is similar; I sat down with #5 the other day and worked through the tree until he mastered it.
We mostly find Risk is a frustrating game with the standard ruleset. Mrs. Pie and I came up with an alternate set years ago, but when we tried the other day, we found it wasn't optimised for four players, and dragged on until everyone agreed to a tie. Back to the drawing board!
Been playing the euro games with friends for a couple of decades now, even made a trip to the Cite de Carcassonne, we stayed with a local French family, anesthetists with children hitting their baccalaureate exams. They had never heard of the German game... we sent them a copy and then had trouble finding rules in French.
I now prefer games without dice. Settlers of Catan always became a waiting game.
Go is a good game. It's also very old, and quite dry in its most basic form, since pieces are identical and don't move. I've seen images of boards with Chinese provinces on them which does help to give a feeling of context, but the actual strategy centers around positions having nothing to do with any of the images. And Go can definitely test a person's patience with the time required to play, since games usually last twice as long as chess.
The only strong opinion I have about Go is that the 19x19 boards are too large. The edges are important, not least because attack is stronger there, and the middle is vast in a board of 361 intersections. Battles in the four corners are also usually disconnected, so that there's a sense of four (or more) games happening at once. We could sit down and play four games of chess simultaneously, and I've done that against multiple weaker players before, but for that to be the usual way of playing doesn't strike me as very classy.
Before the Sui Dynasty, Go was played on a 17x17 board, giving 289 intersections, which means games should have concluded around 25% faster. Given that the middle game is, to me, a monotonous slog, 17x17 doesn't only have the advantage of being the ancient way of playing - it's also more fun.
I realize that by arguing for a smaller board, I'm leaving myself vulnerable to a dan dismissing this as the clumsy intuition of a beginner lacking any depth of understanding. And compared to the typical dan, I truly do know very little about the game.
But I have to ask whether a typical dan would *really* feel confined on 17x17. The complexity even at 13x13 is vast, with over 10^79 legal positions - that's roughly the number of atoms in the observable universe (see page 21 of Tromp & Farnebaeck's Combinatorics of Go at https://tromp.github.io/go/gostate.pdf ). So I have a sneaking suspicion that the same thing happened to Go that happened to chess: Once everybody convinced each other that Go ability was equivalent to intelligence, trying to argue against an unwieldy board size just made people seem dumb. Whatever actually happened, with more than 10^136 legal positions, 17x17 is easily enough for me.
I think it's also a matter of Chess performing it's elite signalling function over it's fun generating function in its local maximum. That also happens to correlate with mental stimulation in this case, but anecdotally as an Australian Chinese child I introduced Chinese Chess to my primary school mostly for fun purposes as children are wont and it spread like wildfire in our corner of the playground until it was promptly banned for inflaming passions too highly. Xiangqi has been viewed, and probably selected, as a pastime rather than an exercise both mechanically and culturally I think. The stereotype of players in China is old men who would otherwise be playing cards. Whilst it's a similar demographic to older men playing Chess, I think there's a status difference in that these old men are more factory workers and uh, proletarians than old hustlers or bygone products of a more sophisticated age. They are otherwise gamblers. They do in fact gamble on Chinese chess.
This is probably because the elite signalling and intellectual exercise niche was filled by Go, which is also extremely abstracted and cannot really seem to be 'improved', having been abstracted into heat death.
There was a time in which the drive for elite signalling across all areas of life was weaker than it is lately. Narcissism was definitely lower in America in the past, but there was also an implicit classism that began to vanish with the Boomer generation; there was less point in signalling your elite status when your social class was immediately legible (and largely immutable).
I suspect that the impact that status signalling has on games is profoundly negative. Games are much more fun when they can be pursued for pure pleasure and the experience of social bonding. Chess variants, and unknown games, allow players to recapture this sense of exploration and friendly competition that once made chess a game where a gnat could drink and an elephant could bathe.
And I think you are absolutely correct that Go has been abstracted into heat death. It probably happened over a thousand years ago, when skill in Go had long been known as one of the Four Cultivated Arts, and that strikes me as a real loss. Perhaps all games have only two ultimate destinies: Either to become fossilized into their host cultures like chess or go, or else (like hnefatafl, another game played with stones on an odd-sized square board, as highly regarded among the Northern Europeans as go was among the Chinese) to fall into oblivion.
thanks for this update, I had to badger my father to teach me chess when I was about 8, then had trouble finding friends to play with, in my late teens in the 80s our D&D group discovered South & East ASian variants, but not the SE ones.
In my mid twenties I learn the Suicide Chess variant. Where you win by losing first, i.e. you seek to lose pieces not capture them, and you must take a piece if you can. (As a break from the versions of backgammon & go that we played in country NSW, generally we played cards more (Bridge variants), and Risk).
Generally I lost to other people playing chess, despite badgering my father I was never captured by it.
You played D&D? I've often wondered whether that game meant something different once upon a time. The fact *you* played it suggests that it probably did. By the time I got my hands on it "game of the imagination" was no longer accurate.
I've played suicide chess; although it isn't particularly interesting once you see it works by controlling your opponent, feeding your pieces in long runs, it's a lot of fun as a puzzle to work out. Tic-Tac-Toe is similar; I sat down with #5 the other day and worked through the tree until he mastered it.
We mostly find Risk is a frustrating game with the standard ruleset. Mrs. Pie and I came up with an alternate set years ago, but when we tried the other day, we found it wasn't optimised for four players, and dragged on until everyone agreed to a tie. Back to the drawing board!
Risk is a game about table talk.
Been playing the euro games with friends for a couple of decades now, even made a trip to the Cite de Carcassonne, we stayed with a local French family, anesthetists with children hitting their baccalaureate exams. They had never heard of the German game... we sent them a copy and then had trouble finding rules in French.
I now prefer games without dice. Settlers of Catan always became a waiting game.
Nice article; I was not aware of the SE Asian variants of chess.
Have you tried playing go? I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that game
Go is a good game. It's also very old, and quite dry in its most basic form, since pieces are identical and don't move. I've seen images of boards with Chinese provinces on them which does help to give a feeling of context, but the actual strategy centers around positions having nothing to do with any of the images. And Go can definitely test a person's patience with the time required to play, since games usually last twice as long as chess.
The only strong opinion I have about Go is that the 19x19 boards are too large. The edges are important, not least because attack is stronger there, and the middle is vast in a board of 361 intersections. Battles in the four corners are also usually disconnected, so that there's a sense of four (or more) games happening at once. We could sit down and play four games of chess simultaneously, and I've done that against multiple weaker players before, but for that to be the usual way of playing doesn't strike me as very classy.
Before the Sui Dynasty, Go was played on a 17x17 board, giving 289 intersections, which means games should have concluded around 25% faster. Given that the middle game is, to me, a monotonous slog, 17x17 doesn't only have the advantage of being the ancient way of playing - it's also more fun.
I realize that by arguing for a smaller board, I'm leaving myself vulnerable to a dan dismissing this as the clumsy intuition of a beginner lacking any depth of understanding. And compared to the typical dan, I truly do know very little about the game.
But I have to ask whether a typical dan would *really* feel confined on 17x17. The complexity even at 13x13 is vast, with over 10^79 legal positions - that's roughly the number of atoms in the observable universe (see page 21 of Tromp & Farnebaeck's Combinatorics of Go at https://tromp.github.io/go/gostate.pdf ). So I have a sneaking suspicion that the same thing happened to Go that happened to chess: Once everybody convinced each other that Go ability was equivalent to intelligence, trying to argue against an unwieldy board size just made people seem dumb. Whatever actually happened, with more than 10^136 legal positions, 17x17 is easily enough for me.