I can’t speak for real life as I don’t personally know any Go players, but many online Go players seem to be quite fanatical about their game.
If you search a little bît in this forum, you will have the answer
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I am very fanatical about go, but I also play other games sometimes 
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I would like to play other games but am focusing on grasping the basics of Go first and don’t have time to fit anything else in…
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I’m very fanatical about games, but I also play Go sometimes.
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What qualifies as a game in this context? I don’t want to take it wherever OP didn’t want to go.
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Games are games but go is go.
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Well considering the context I’m guessing OP consider Go as a game as well, either from the mind sport aspect for board game aspect.
Thus he probably meant the broad definition of game as “Interactive fun activities”. So from streetside Chinese chess to Beat Saber.
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In that case, I’ll say I enjoy Go very much, but I’ve been also regularly playing video games (from AAA to simple HOPAs) for roughly all the years of this millennium.
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I’m assuming the question excludes live sports. Being an old guy, I grew up on board games, and have never played video games except the first two versions of Civilization, which I no longer play because it is too time consuming. As a child I frequently played most of the major American proprietary games, Monopoly, Scrabble, Careers, etc. I also played a lot of non-proprietary games: checkers, Chinese checkers, backgammon, and chess (into adulthood). I played some dominoes, which I wish I had had more opportunity to play.
I have mentioned before that I had the odd experience (for an American) of playing a lot of mancala when I was in elementary school. Older kids at a quasi-rec center used to play it all the time, and they taught me.
Starting at about 12, my closest friends and I constituted an informal “club” of card players (numbering 8 in a couple years). We played every major game, including some not well known in America (e.g., skat and piquet), as well as weird variants like team solitaire for 4. This culminated in our creation of a multiple card deck version of Mah Jong (I later got a set, but we played our card version at lunch in high school).
I also learned Diplomacy as a teen. In my first game, playing Turkey, I was crushed by the alliance of Russia and Austria. The latter was played by a fellow who a few years later became a very famous science fiction writer. Our game club proceeded to play lots of Diplomacy for several years.
Our club continued as a poker group (with an occasional hearts game thrown in) for the last 50 years, though two of the circle are now dead. Oddly, I could never interest them in go, perhaps because my meager knowledge was just enough to annihilate them when they tried. I’m sorry to say we didn’t give much quarter to beginners in those days.
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I learnt GO when I was young. I usually play Kendo. Due to COVID and family, I have to give up that. I found GO on mental side is very similar to Kendo.
In Kendo, we call SEME which is similar to Sente in GO.
Kendo is the swordsmanship for personal protection and fighting on battle field.
GO is a larger scale fighting on battle field.
Both need skill and strategy.
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(I thought I would elaborate a little on my previous answer by saying a few words about my history with chess. It got longer than I expected, hopefully it’s still interesting to someone )
When I was young, I played a little bit of chess. I never got past the beginner stage, just played now and then with my grandpa and against some chess game I had on my computer. The first time I was shown go (my uncle and my cousins played a bit), I found it very confusing. Partly my uncle was not a very good teacher, but partly go is just a very hard game to teach. And partly I was just too closeminded to consider that this new game could be more fun than chess, if I just gave it some time. So I didn’t touch go again for many years.
As a teenager, I was reminded of go by a scene in the movie “Tron Legacy”. As depictions of go go, it’s not quite as bad as the one in “A Beautiful Mind”, but the actual board position shown is still one between two beginners. Anyways, the quality of the board position didn’t really matter, I was just reminded that this game existed, and of this idea that it was difficult for computers. I thought I should give it another shot.
So I started learning go, watching videos and playing on KGS every day. One time I tried to go to the local club, but there was noone there that day, so I was pretty discouraged from trying again. Many months went by before I actually went to the club and met some other players, but in the meantime I kept on playing online, improving steadily.
By now I was much better at go than I had ever been at chess, so I lost interest in chess. I still played a few times a year when I met my grandpa, but I now realized how little I knew what I was doing on the chess board. Eventually I started declining when my grandpa asked to play chess (we still played other games with other familymembers, but never anything just the two of us). It wasn’t fun for me anymore, and since he always won, I started wondering whether it was really fun for him either.
Several years went by where I only thought about go. I wasn’t playing as much every day as I had in my first year, so I wasn’t improving very quickly anymore, but I watched hours and hours of videos, went to the go club every week, and even went to a few tournaments. I had zero interest in chess, go was clearly a much much better game.
Then one day a friend (not a go-player) had a portable chess-board with him when we met in a park, and we played a few casual games. We were pretty evenly matched, so the games were fun. I think I might have watched a chess video or two when I got home, and then you know how youtube works… suddenly I had lots of chess videos recommended to me, and I was watching just as much chess as I was watching go.
I realized that most of my “go is better than chess”-mentality just came down to the fact that I was better at go than chess. I still think go is better, it’s just… not a very important difference. Some people prefer chess and that’s fine.
I started playing some chess online. It was fun to be a beginner again. To play a game of go was something I took very seriously, it takes a long time and I wanted to do my best in every game. But a quick chess game can be played in 5-10 minutes, and since I was a beginner I didn’t mind losing at all.
So that’s basically where I’ve been the last 2 years or so. I play chess online pretty regularly, but I haven’t improved much at all, since I almost only play fast games (just like in go, playing slower games and reviewing them is needed to improve). I’ve also never been to a chess club… maybe sometime post-covid I’ll visit one.
My love for go is as strong as ever. But I’m now grown-up enough to realize that I don’t have be monogamous with one game.
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I like playing other boardgames with my non go friends (our favourite is Hero Quest), and I often play cards (Canasta) with my girlfriend. Were these the sorts of games you had in mind? Or were you thinking more of the psychological mind games I used to play with (on?) my sister?
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Lately I’ve been starting out on shogi, xiangqi, and Arimaa.
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I play a lot of other games, from computer games (shooters, grand strategy, etc.) to grognard type board games like Advanced Squad Leader.
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Fanatic? is it another way to say (Online) GO
Player only prefers GO than anything, Why do you assuming so? Might be that the case for Pro-Player, because they have right to do so, and Idk but even in Chess or Any games communities you’ll met someone who worshipped their Favorites game than any other else…
Do you mean other Games like sports or Video Games?(Well, yeah i played Video games my Favorites genres are Jrpg, survival-horrors, simulations, but most of times i played VNs if you counts them as Video Games) or Is it Just another board games…?
Well, If so, I also often play Chess. I casually play Monopoly, checkers, Sudoku, and some others else especially with my friends or relatives-online during this Pandemic time.
I know very basic of Shogi, I wanna learn it deeper but i couldn’t find time and someone that could teach me…
And Xianqi also caught my attention although i don’t even know Its rules
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I play almost all table games I can, and become a mind game trainer in Hong Kong.
I have 300+ computer games in steam, but I seldom play video game.
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Board games are basically a staple in my family. I still consider Go to be my favorite game, though I just haven’t been playing much these last couple of years and am not taking it as seriously as I used to. I am the only one in my family (or of anyone with the notable exception of one kid my age I met a couple years ago and haven’t seen since), to really find an interest in it. It is just a really different game from what we are used to and so doesn’t seem to appeal for very long when I bring it up.
Prior to the days when I discovered Go, Chess was a serious interest of mine and I would say that I was decently good at it around the age of 10. Had it not been for Go, I would have probably become more obsessed with it but I almost lost all interest in the game upon discovery of Go. That all being said, a “friend” of mine was recently talking about how much he still enjoys Chess and he told me the importance of solving puzzles for serious improvement, which is something I find ironic because I did not even realize that such puzzles existed for Chess. We will just say that he may get me a little more interested in the game again for a while depending on what happens.
At the family level, The Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, and this new game I just got called Agricola (Latin for farmer), have been of serious interest, and we usually play at least one of these games on the weekend. Every once in a while we also play a game such as San Juan, Monopoly, Mancala, Life, Risk, and Clue. It has been quite a few years since we have played some of those though.
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I play also Chess (intermediate club level – 1800 on lichess), Shogi (just started, 10k on 81dojo) and Xiangqi (casually, not very well) when it comes to board games.
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That’s absolutely the truth about pros. When I met them they always were the first to ask for a game (if they weren’t already busy playing or doing something related to go).
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