[Poll] How go should be advertised?

Once we changed a game bar into a go bar.

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I also gave several 9x9 go sets to my son’s elementary school teachers to have in the classroom. My son enjoyed sharing how to play go with his classmates (and teachers).

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Teach the teacher(s)!

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There was an interesting case study about an American automobile town. People of the town pretty much all work on the same automobile assembly line. They are mostly uneducated, and most like to play an intellectual board game in spare time. They are pretty bad at the game, but really into it.

Why?

Psychiatrists suggest possible reason is they do boring repetitive tasks at the work all day long and need to work on their brains a little to balance their minds.

Quite like OGS huh? Except people here claim they are high educated, IT professionals, lawyers etc. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I know personally go players with other jobs as the one you mentioned. They are not a majority but they exist.

Promoting Go outside the countries it was born needs things that have pros and teachers stumped for decades and still there is no correct answer.

A lot of good ideas have been proposed - and in this topic - but in the end of the day there are two main issues:
a) Covid situation excluded, this is sadly the worst era for board games or ANY kind. Competing with computer/mobile games is hard.
b) The trend is for children nowadays to be “over-worked”. Be that exams even for primary schools, or activities or foreign languages or sports or martial arts or music or or or … the list of “things on the calendar” is endless. It is hard to attract kids and parents to a game that actually needs time and study to have a decent game. We all know some Go so we forget that a total newbie is intimidated by an empty board. Comparatively a chess board that needs emptying by good-ol’ fashioned “chaaaarge” mechanics, can be more easy to approach.
b+) The same “overworked” trend applies to adults as well. No need to get into any details in that, since I guess we’ve all had time periods where we were swamped with so many obligations that investing time in getting better in Go, or even simply enjoying a game, was not an option.

There is only one way to override those difficulties. The game needs hype, distasteful as that may be or as it may sound.

Be that movies, celebrities playing or endorsing the game, organised social media ad campaigns, Go must enter into the minds of people as something cool. Only that can make young people put down a phone or, even better, look at Go content through their phone.

As something worth investing time, instead of ballet or karate (a martial art for the mind, if you will :wink: )
As a skill that enhances your other skills.
As something fun, worth the trouble training for, like we do in sports.

It does not matter how or what it will be promoted as (the bizzare trends of eating Tide pods and tossing ice buckets on people’s heads has provent that) . It has to become cool …

That is what happened to LotR.
When I was a teenager and was reading fantasy books (Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms mainly at the time) I was a super-nerd wasting my time. Fast forward a few years and teenagers were wearing LotR shirts and talking about LotR and even paving the way for other, undeserving, books to ride the trend.
Game of Thrones - book 1 is one of the worst I have ever read - yet look at its popularity, eh? :face_with_head_bandage: Why? because now that stuff has been rendered cool, via almost two decades of “going mainstream”.

As another fantasy character says a lot “you have to be realistic about such things”.
Such is our world we live in.
The people trying to elevate Go and make a living out of it must either adapt and play by those rules, win in the meta-game of marketing, or just watch as nothing changes for the better.

Cheap boards, cheap books, easy access to teachers or gaming platforms and all the other ideas are very good indeed. As long as the game becomes cool. That has to happen first. Else, since we went into fantasy, we are akin to the people in Discworld that thought that “if we build a temple large enough, eventually some God will come around and take residence there”. Needless to say that didn’t work.

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I’m not sure chess is “cool” to most people, but it’s obviously popular on a different scale to video games. Still with chess, it isn’t what’s cool that makes it popular, it’s likely to be more the line in the op

That and people just like winning. Although the take on whether Chess is “cool” might be slightly different depending on perception of “The Queens Gambit”.

It is probably true that people don’t think of playing a game of go as a way to unwind.

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The younger the better. Schools is the real focus, go got some recognition via hikaru then alphago. Time to bring it to the youngest.

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The “get’em while they’re young” strategy has been extremely successful for organized religions and political parties.

Go, even with only a limited exposure, can significantly improve kids’ analytical thinking skills, promote self-discipline, and provide a positive example of the value of hard work. Those are some of the “selling points” I have used to convince kids (and their parents) Go is worth giving a try.

Go’s handicap system is also a good “selling point” for beginners. I would typically give newbies a 5 or 6 stone handicap on a 9x9 when playing their first game. Little kids love it when they “beat” a grownup.

Public libraries are good places to setup Go Clubs (high visibility).

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Go is really hypnotic with children. Just have to get used to see them playing fast, and to not expect that they won’t leave stones in Atari before having made some progress, which can take times.
Indeed teaching children needs patience, regularity and it’s not always fast rewarding. But at the end it’s where you put a foothold for years and a go community where you live.

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I might be misunderstanding you but I don’t think this is true? There’s been a big increase in board games as a hobby over the past 20 years and my understanding is the hobby and industry is, if not actually in a golden age, certainly not in the worst era.

Maybe I misread you… of course the hobby scene of commercial tabletop games has always been slightly apart from traditional games like Go, chess, mahjong, etc so I’m not sure if the increased interest in hobby games carries over to Go

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You beat me to it but that’s exactly what I was gonna answer. I feel on the contrary that we’re in a very successful period for board games. It might not benefit Go, but that’s another matter.

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I’m not sure chess is “cool” to most people,

It most certainly isn’t, but it is something familiar in many countries. Even people who are bored of chess and think it is lame, know it exists and know the very basic of rules. Some of them are even quite talented at it, even without really playing much.
Go doesn’t have that advantage unfortunately, so it has to enter the scene via a different avenue.

Yes, that is why I said “covid situation excluded”.
Due to covid a lot of families found themselves stuck at home for weeks and that is where board games had an amazing chance to shine, but just like the quarantines where a “not-normal” situation, the same thing applies for its positive result in the sales of board games. :slight_smile:

This is also true, but I really think that a group of people that are already in the mindset of liking board games (albeit with more complex rules, cards, models/figures, dice, RPG elements and so forth), are more likely to be attracted to another, more classic, board game.

Sure maybe the more “classical board games” fans think that the new stuff are “too gimmicky” or the “complex newest board game fans” think that the old stuff are “too simplistic” and both groups might have some preconceptions about the other, but at the end of the day, there are more similarities between those groups than any actual differences.

I’d say that a person that is willing to read 3-4 thousands of pages of DnD rulebooks and supplements already has a lot of the needed “skillset” that one might need in order to stick to learning more and playing more Go.

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I don’t want to belabor the point, but just to be clear, from what I’ve read board games were enjoying serious growth in popularity long before Covid. citations 1 2

To come back to the topic, I guess the question is how to advertise Go to these players of commercial board games. Personally, although I think the poll sets up a false dichotomy as others have noted, the comparison to chess (so leaning into the game played by intelligentsia option) should not be avoided… the experience of playing and improving at Go is closer to chess than most commercial games. It’s also maybe closer to the experience of playing competitive card games like MtG: two player high skill ceiling games with deep communities and competitive scenes

On the other hand Go is also routinely studied by people in the “game design” world from the little I’ve been exposed to it, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dSNbrd1LLw

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You know you’re a Go addict when… :rofl:

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I am somewhat disappointed there seems to be a lack of cheap plastic 9x9 magnetic Go sets. Something like this would be great for kids.

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Interpreting the Rules, especially how to end the game, determining which groups are alive, dead, or seki, and counting the score can be confusing for absolute beginners, especially kids. Karl Baker’s “The Way To Go” book is a wonderful free resource for beginners.

https://www.usgo.org/way-go

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I’d show them this :stuck_out_tongue:
image

I’m sorry, I had to. :woman_shrugging:

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I think you are on to a loser with this. Players of commercial board games are a hard sell for Go.
See from 16.48 here:

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I didn’t say one should try to advertise, or that it would be successful, just trying to answer the OP’s question of how :joy::sob:

I was actually spending a lot of time playing commercial board games and historical war games for a couple of years before getting back into Go, but my path was probably not common… I am a bit atypical among board game players (e.g. never played a real “Euro”)

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