All Things Go Podcast

Learning Go Through Go Fish

[00:00] Travis: I was thinking about how my experiences with learning Go take me back to these very basic concepts of reading and looking a few steps ahead.

[00:13] Travis: It reminded me of a camping trip I took with my wife and my son this past summer. We were around the campfire, it was nighttime, and we wanted to teach our son a card game.

[00:26] Travis: And this was the first time we had played cards with him, because he's now at the age where he can do that. And we played a game called Go Fish.

[00:33] Travis: And if you don't know what Go Fish is, it's where you are each handed a certain number of cards. You're not supposed to show those cards, but you're trying to get three or four of a kind, you know, a two or a five or whatever the number or face card is.

[00:50] Travis: And you ask the other players if they have any of a certain type of card. And if they have it, you get to take it from them and make those points.

[00:58] Travis: If they do not have it, they say, 'Go fish,' and you draw a card from a face-down pile on the table.

[01:06] Travis: It was really interesting to see how our son,

[01:10] Travis: who is just starting to understand numbers and symbols and kind of match and connect things,

[01:17] Travis: how challenging it was for him to just put those very simple pieces together.

[01:22] Travis: And it did remind me so much of when I was starting to learn Go for the first time.

[01:28] Travis: When I look on online forums and things on Go and see all of the new players that are asking questions about how these basic things work or that they're doing tutorials and learning about the game, but then they try to play a game and they just feel completely lost.

[01:46] Travis: It is just amazing to me that all of us, or a lot of us even survive through that initial entry period and actually get to a point where we're like, oh, this actually makes sense.

[01:58] Travis: The other piece to this whole story with my son was that he ended up not winning the first time.

[02:05] Travis: And you could see that he got very sore about it and was very upset that he didn't win.

[02:11] Travis: It also reminded me of being a gracious winner, not being a sore loser, and the forms of etiquette in Go: being polite, asking for a review even after a loss, and those sorts of things.

[02:29] Travis: I like that it teaches those things in Go, and that's something that my son needs to work on.

[02:35] Travis: So with that, we'll get started.

[02:37] Travis: And this is All Things Go.

Online Go Events with Devin Fraze

[02:57] Travis: Devin Fraze now talks with us about online Go events and how to make them more interesting and interactive through commentary, visuals, and ideas borrowed from other successful sports and online events.

[03:12] Travis: Take a listen.

[03:17] Travis: What is it like helping organize online events in terms of the knowledge, time, and effort required compared with an in-person event? Has this become more of a focus for you?

[03:27] Devin Fraze: Personally, I have generally focused on running in-person events. These days, online, I focus more on broadcasting in-person events and occasionally online events, although I have run online events in the past.

[03:42] Devin Fraze: You know, I've run various things, especially during COVID for both online and in-person events. There's actually a lot of the same stuff.

[03:50] Devin Fraze: The most important thing is essentially what every Go player should know is read ahead. Of course you can let your intuition guide you to some point, but you really, really, really need to sit down and meticulously read ahead and try to figure out what am I going to need next and when and try to read all the way to the end.

[04:07] Devin Fraze: No skimping, because on game day you do not want to realize that you forgot something essential. For example: prizes. If you do not have prizes for your tournament and reach the end, people will say, 'Cool, I won. Now what?'

[04:20] Devin Fraze: Now what? You're going to be kind of sad. So. And luckily a lot of Go players have experienced Go events and so we understand the general layout. So it should be more like reading a ladder than it should be reading some sort of super complex joseki.

[04:31] Devin Fraze: But there are different complexities and things people forget. One of the big things, it's small, it feels small. Table numbers for in-person events. You get there, all the boards and the clocks and stuff are out and you're like, okay guys, here's who you're playing.

[04:43] Devin Fraze: And they're like, okay, where do I sit? And you're like, oops.

[04:48] Travis: Do you think now that COVID has really receded, do you see that there's more of a need or a big need for more people to help with online events or having more online events?

[04:57] Devin Fraze: Yeah, I think there is still definitely a need. There are many players around the country and the world who do not live near a Go club or near places that hold Go tournaments, and they may not be able or willing to spend the time and money to travel.

[05:21] Devin Fraze: And there's also kind of like automatic online events that happen on OGS. But I've noticed that people in the forum specifically will get some idea in their head and have a fun thing to do for bringing more players in.

[05:37] Devin Fraze: More recently, I have focused less on events for the general population and more on creating spectacles for people to enjoy. I have run invitationals for strong players and created unusual events such as the Hogwarts House Hustle.

[05:50] Devin Fraze: So we all worked together and we had a bunch of people and they were each sorted by the sorting hat, quote unquote, into houses. And so we had eight players overall.

[05:58] Devin Fraze: And Albert Yen, for example, was in Gryffindor,

[06:01] Devin Fraze: As he should be. One fun twist was that resignation was either prohibited or very costly, because every point earned in a game also counted for the player's house.

[06:14] Devin Fraze: If you just get absolutely crushed by the other player, it's going to be bad. So a little bit of incentivization to try and go big or go home versus,

[06:22] Devin Fraze: you know, just lose by a little bit. Or if you're like, oh [expletive], I'm about to die everywhere, like you can kind of try to, you know, like, hey, listen, I'm just going to try to even the score as much as possible and not let my house get ruined.

[06:31] Devin Fraze: We ended up having multiple people time out, which was wild. That did not go well, although it somehow balanced out because perhaps one person from each house did it.

[06:40] Devin Fraze: At the end, there was an even bigger twist: they played what we called Voldemort. Everyone was already signed into OGS, and they played the 9-dan AI.

[06:53] Devin Fraze: And the goal is just to earn a certain number of points because of course they're going to lose per se, but how much you lose by is going to help your house and how many points you can gain in that game per se.

[07:02] Devin Fraze: So that was a really fun, kind of unique event that we put together.

[07:05] Devin Fraze: That has become more of my interest because I have been thinking a lot about how to make Go more fun to watch, the way people watch esports or traditional sports.

[07:16] Travis: You were just talking about trying to make events more engaging for the audience.

[07:25] Travis: I believe this was during the professional qualifier, although it may have been another event. You incorporated AI analysis into the live broadcast so viewers could see more realistic win probabilities and score estimates.

[07:35] Devin Fraze: Right.

[07:36] Travis: What are some other elements you've added

[07:44] Devin Fraze: In sports and esports, there's an asymmetry of information that's given to the viewer that the players don't necessarily have. So in American football,

[07:54] Devin Fraze: you have this line of scrimmage that the people need to get to before the fourth down.

[07:59] Devin Fraze: The players are generally aware of where they need to get, perhaps because a coach tells them or they can see a marker on the sideline. Viewers, however, get a special yellow line drawn across the screen, and it even appears beneath players as they run across it.

[08:13] Devin Fraze: Why did broadcasters spend the time, money, and energy to develop that line for viewers? Because it makes the game easier to understand.

[08:23] Devin Fraze: It makes it easier and more obvious for those who are newer to understand, oh, they got to get to that line, you know.

[08:30] Devin Fraze: So instead of just saying like, hey, you know, third down, two to go or something, you have,

[08:34] Devin Fraze: you know, which any football fan, American football fan understand, but you have a visual for where that person needs to go.

[08:40] Devin Fraze: Additionally, in like, League of Legends, which I don't watch a whole lot of, but I did study to understand this better. They have typically a fog of war when you're playing.

[08:48] Devin Fraze: You can't see around everywhere. You have to kind of move to explore it. But the viewer does not have that fog of war. The viewer can see the map clearly.

[08:55] Devin Fraze: The viewer knows, oh, my gosh, these guys are about to come together in this next, you know, when they turn around the corner and there's going to be some sort of fight.

[09:02] Devin Fraze: So it helps, again, enhance the experience of the viewer. So in Go, that's the idea is like, we don't really have that. We have, you know, just this commentator giving good commentary.

[09:12] Devin Fraze: And in chess, they typically have AI as well, for example, and they have all these little arrows they can draw on the screen. But in Go, we lack a lot of these tools.

[09:19] Devin Fraze: So I've been thinking more about how do we develop tools.

[09:22] Devin Fraze: Of course we have the AI win rate graph,

[09:25] Devin Fraze: which is a circle. I've decided to use a circle to kind of clearly, you know, represent percentages and,

[09:30] Devin Fraze: you know, fills up white or black, depending on who's winning.

[09:33] Devin Fraze: There's also a bar at the bottom, much like the yellow line of scrimmage in American football, where the players are racing to the middle because they're trying to get more than half of the board.

[09:42] Devin Fraze: And so for that one, I use Chinese scoring because that's essentially, you know, what they use with the line offset a little bit for komi. And, you know, the hope is that new players can see, like, oh, like, you know, they're trying to fill the bar, and whoever has filled more of the bar is going to win.

[09:56] Devin Fraze: And that's estimating territory.

[09:58] Devin Fraze: It also gives a number count for the amount of points,

[10:01] Devin Fraze: you know, predicted for the players at the given time. It's not locked in in many cases.

[10:05] Devin Fraze: And actually, we give a gradation of color for those points based on the confidence of them. You know, if it's deep black,

[10:13] Devin Fraze: then we're sure black has these points. If it's kind of like getting lighter gray, you know, like lighter black, then it's kind of like more uncertain that black will have these points.

[10:21] Devin Fraze: And then we have also a coloring on the board itself of the last move played to tell you, oh, it's, you know, a blue move, which we've come to associate with perfect level play.

[10:34] Devin Fraze: Green for good,

[10:36] Devin Fraze: Yellow, orange, and then eventually red and even deep purple, which is kind of meant to mean a blunder. And there's a little visual rubric on the side, lining them up from top to bottom, blue to purple, giving you some sort of understanding of what that is.

[10:50] Devin Fraze: And the color changes not only on the board but inside of the winning percentage as well. So when you watch it swing around wildly, you have a, you know, different idea of why, oh, look, it's a big purple move.

[10:59] Devin Fraze: That's why black was winning, you know, by 60%. One turn to go. Now it's white winning by 70.

[11:04] Travis: So do you get any sense when you go on OGS and you click the scoring button to see what the

[11:09] Travis: score is, and you visually see the sort of shrouds of black's territory in white, which, again, is based on how well an AI could play versus the updated one that is more appropriate for your level,

[11:20] Travis: Is there any thought or ability for that sort of visualization to come into play during a game?

[11:26] Devin Fraze: We have that capability, and I've thought about using it. One of the things I've heard from viewers and from other people that we've beta tested with is that it kind of obfuscates the board.

[11:37] Devin Fraze: It blocks the view, the visuals, and makes it hard to understand what's there and open.

[11:42] Devin Fraze: I still really like it. I think I like it for new players. I've been trying to figure out how to do that so well that it wouldn't bother people, like maybe adding kind of like a, you know, a level of very light shading so it doesn't actually block too much,

[11:55] Devin Fraze: but it gives you a sense of, you know, what's what. Because I do think for a new player, understanding like, oh, blacks generally surrounding this, you know, white's generally surrounding that could help a lot.

[12:05] Travis: You took a really great example with the NFL. There is tons of money poured into all these.

[12:10] Travis: So you know that they are trying

[12:12] Travis: to figure out the best way to engage people, right. To watch these things with the virtual line of scrimmage.

[12:19] Travis: But then also you notice how they'll

[12:20] Travis: do the plays, right? They'll start drawing on the actual screen. Hey, you run this way, you do a pass route this way.

[12:27] Travis: I almost wonder whether that territory visualizer could be flashed onto the board briefly and then removed.

[12:34] Devin Fraze: You beat me to it. Yeah.

[12:37] Devin Fraze: My conclusion after that was not necessarily like have on or off all the time, but I give the commentators the ability to at certain times show it. But then there's additional level of commentator training that needs to happen anyway.

[12:48] Devin Fraze: And then during that, I would also suggest to them, hey, you have these access these tools to help trigger these kind of things or give it to the broadcaster behind the scenes.

[12:56] Devin Fraze: Typically, it's like myself or Jeremiah Donley sitting behind a computer, not on screen, and we're controlling the stream to make sure it goes well.

[13:03] Devin Fraze: So that could be. I love that idea. So you're already in the mindset. Yeah, we should join the team.

[13:09] Travis: Not a novel idea, I'm sure, but very cool to think that you guys are navigating that and trying to think about it.

Lightning Round with BenKyo: Study and Bots

[13:17] Travis: Here's some more fun Lightning Round questions that I had with Ben Kyo.

[13:23] Travis: When trying to improve at Go, should you focus on correcting weaknesses or developing strengths?

[13:28] Travis: improving your strengths and why?

[13:31] BenKyo: Yeah, it can depend on the player's level, maybe, but in general, I think weaknesses,

[13:36] BenKyo: on the one hand, it's kind of a balancing act because on the one hand, I encourage people to often follow what they're enjoying the most when it comes to study, because any kind of proper Go study, where you're actually learning new things and cultivating some part of your Go is A plus.

[13:50] BenKyo: Right. It's better than nothing.

[13:52] BenKyo: A lot of time people just play and don't study. So it's still going to be better than that. You're into Endgame one day and you're into joseki the other day.

[14:00] BenKyo: Right. You just follow it.

[14:01] BenKyo: Yeah. So following what you enjoy is going to have a tendency to be working on your strengths sometimes. But I think that's fine. At the same time we do need a certain amount of working on our weaknesses.

[14:12] BenKyo: I remember the first time I felt truly stuck for several months. It was around 2-dan, and that was my biggest plateau.

[14:21] BenKyo: And it's because my reading and fighting were too bad and my power was in opening and end game. So I had to balance out and I. I could not improve after that.

[14:31] BenKyo: And then once I fixed that a little bit, which it was still a weakness but it was patched up a bit, then I started to rank up again.

[14:38] BenKyo: As you go up the ladder in general and this continues all the way into the pro levels. From what I can see,

[14:43] BenKyo: reading ability and fighting skills and shape and all that kind of fighting middle game type stuff that you know as much as I don't or some version of me in the past wouldn't want to admit it or believe it.

[14:55] BenKyo: That is really the best investment most of the time because you only need so much study before your opening is okay.

[15:02] BenKyo: And endgame too. I actually haven't studied endgame like over 10 years.

[15:06] BenKyo: It's good to study endgame and move values and stuff. And I'm actually very passionate about that topic.

[15:10] BenKyo: Part of the reason I'm so passionate for people to learn it is because it's also somewhat one and done in a way. People are going to argue with me about that.

[15:17] BenKyo: Once you understand how move values are counted and remember the values of common second-line moves, you retain that knowledge. Your endgame becomes much stronger than that of most kyu players.

[15:30] BenKyo: Yeah. So even though end game is probably like one of my strengths kind of side,

[15:35] BenKyo: if anything I haven't really touched studying it in over 10 years. I just kind of improve it by playing a lot of games.

[15:42] Travis: As a new player. Should you start out playing games against

[15:45] Travis: a bot or a human?

[15:48] BenKyo: I would say human.

[15:49] BenKyo: The weaker you are, the lower level you are, the less detrimental maybe it is to focus on bots. Now of course when you're higher level, like very high-level, there's the new AIs now, which are a lot better than playing against the old bots.

[16:03] BenKyo: Right. That have a lot of issues in their play. But in my teaching experience,

[16:07] BenKyo: a lot of students and a lot of people kind of hide behind playing bots. They're afraid to get into the games with humans.

[16:14] BenKyo: It's all in part of that thing. Kind of like what I experienced when I was getting into coding, which is kind of preparation purgatory, this like endless cycle of preparing but not doing.

[16:24] BenKyo: You know, we have like game anxiety.

[16:26] BenKyo: All I can say is that game anxiety, you actually kind of experience it less and less over time as long as you face it.

[16:32] BenKyo: When I was 2- or 3-dan, I still had an enormous amount of game anxiety. Now I have almost disturbingly little.

[16:38] Travis: I think of this in my own work. Sometimes there is a recommendation that is rationally optimal for a client, but behaviorally the client is not comfortable following it.

[17:00] Travis: The same thing happens in Go. Whether we want new players to do it or not, ego and anxiety can keep us from playing another person.

[17:11] Travis: You do not want to fail, and you may fear that the other person will chastise or criticize you. All of those fears can get in the way.

[17:21] Travis: Right, so exactly.

[17:22] Travis: Yeah, it's. It's well said.

Go Nation with Marc Moskowitz, Part I

[17:30] Travis: A few years ago, when I was starting to get into Go, I was starved for material about Go that was not specifically about playing the game.

[17:45] Travis: I would search Google for “Go” and “Go game,” as many of us do.

[17:49] Travis: And a really interesting book came up about Go in China from the perspective of an anthropologist.

[17:57] Travis: You can also use examples, metaphors, and stories to make abstract strategic ideas more memorable.

[18:05] Travis: I decided to reach out to this professor of this book and see if he'd be willing to chat. And sure enough, he was more than happy to sit down and connect online and have a great conversation.

[18:18] Travis: And it was a fascinating conversation as well as an interesting book. So hopefully you get to read the book. I'll put it in the episode notes.

[18:26] Travis: And we will go to that conversation now with Professor Marc Moskowitz.

[18:34] Travis: Professor Marc Moskowitz, let me Just introduce you.

[18:37] Travis: You are a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina, focusing on the intersection of gender and popular culture in Chinese-speaking Asia.

[18:49] Travis: You are also a recipient of multiple awards, including Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays awards,

[18:55] Travis: and you have published three books and edited two volumes.

[18:59] Travis: You have also published in journals including The China Quarterly, Popular Music, Sexualities, and Visual Anthropology.

[19:07] Travis: And since your first trip to the People's Republic of China in the late 1980s,

[19:11] Travis: you have lived in Chinese speaking Asia for a total of over 11 years. So, Professor Moskowitz, thanks so much for being here.

[19:19] Marc Moskowitz: Well, thank you. I'm excited to have this conversation.

[19:23] Travis: First of all, I do want to say that it was really wonderful to read this book. And it actually took me back in a lot of ways because unlike you, where you had spent many years in Chinese speaking Asia, I did have the opportunity to go to China and live there for about a year back in 2008-2009.

[19:41] Travis: So right after Beijing Olympics had happened. And it was so cool to hear that you had this story where you decided to go to China after not getting a chance to go to Africa to teach.

[19:53] Travis: So that was just a really fun little connection to find.

[19:57] Marc Moskowitz: Most of the best things that happened to me in life were completely random, really.

[20:02] Marc Moskowitz: When I graduated from high school, I hitchhiked across the country. Now I think, what an idiot. But it helped make me who I am.

[20:10] Travis: Maybe we could start by just diving into your book, Go Nation.

[20:14] Travis: It was published in 2013 under the title Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China. We will refer to the game both as Go and by its Chinese name, Weiqi.

[20:32] Travis: The first thing that actually struck me as really interesting before we get into the actual argument of the book, is the nationalistic approaches to the styles of play.

[20:41] Travis: There's a really great line that you provide in the book, and it goes as follows.

[20:49] Travis: Chinese discussions of national styles of play come to represent culturally defined personalities and in a very Confucian sense, link individual manhood directly with the masculinized state. In this depiction, Japan is reserved,

[21:03] Travis: artistic, impractical.

[21:05] Travis: South Korea is aggressive and focused on winning at any cost. And China, according to the people I interviewed in Beijing, is striving for the happy balance between the two.

[21:16] Travis: I just love how you put that together.

[21:20] Marc Moskowitz: I think that, in any country you visit, the speaker will naturally make that country sound the best,

[21:26] Marc Moskowitz: but it is situated in the history of these cultures as well.

[21:29] Marc Moskowitz: Japan is seen as being more artistic because they had been dominant for 400 years and they'd really turned it into an art.

[21:37] Marc Moskowitz: Koreans were seen as wanting to win at any cost and overlapping with Chinese stereotypes of Koreans as being kind of aggressive to begin with.

[21:46] Marc Moskowitz: One of the things that struck me is that the understandings of gameplay overlap very much with kind of xenophobic understandings of other nations with this underlying competitive edge between East Asian nations.

[22:02] Travis: I thought it was really helpful when you gave this description of Chinese viewing Weiqi as a sport,

[22:09] Travis: even though we would never view it that way. And you're a chess player as well,

[22:13] Travis: but we would never view it that way here. But then when you start to look at the different cohorts that you were really interviewing and working with, so from the.

[22:22] Travis: The kids, but particularly the university students,

[22:25] Travis: that really becomes apparent in the fact that it can actually help them with their college entrance exam.

[22:32] Marc Moskowitz: Absolutely. And, you know, I mean, I think it's a sport because it's competition in the Chinese category. But you're right, as Americans, we think of sport as something physical. But I gotta say, I've had games where my heart was beating,

[22:46] Marc Moskowitz: so there is a kind of visceral reaction to this stuff.

[22:50] Marc Moskowitz: You know, the other thing that reminds me of maybe our conception of sport is kind of like Soviet era chess. These kids drop out of school at age 5 or 6 and are just devoted full time to the game,

[23:03] Marc Moskowitz: to learning.

[23:05] Marc Moskowitz: I think Russia probably still does this. China still does this for a range of sports. So in that conception of it,

[23:12] Marc Moskowitz: the sports definition makes a little bit more sense. I think.

[23:17] Travis: You then discuss the original carriers of Go and Weiqi in Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan.

[23:27] Travis: You then talk about how there is this sort of lamentation of Japanese players in years closer to the 80s, into the 90s,

[23:37] Travis: having a drop in performance at the top level. And you talk about how that sort of comes into the very complicated, nuanced relationship between these countries. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

[23:49] Marc Moskowitz: Yeah. No, I mean, it's an interesting set of issues because on the one hand, nationalism in China is quite strong, like it is in the US I think.

[23:59] Marc Moskowitz: So on one hand, everybody was very excited, China was doing much better in the game,

[24:05] Marc Moskowitz: but on the other hand, everyone in the older generation had learned by studying the Japanese masters.

[24:14] Travis: Just a quick note here. I believe Professor Moskowitz is actually referring to Japanese masters, not Chinese ones. Okay. Let's get back to the interview.

[24:24] Marc Moskowitz: And so there was a certain kind of nostalgia for this past at the same moment that they were celebrating their victories about this stuff.

[24:33] Marc Moskowitz: I think when you study someone's games, you're not just learning a technique. You see the personality.

[24:40] Marc Moskowitz: So in chess, for example, the difference between Bobby Fischer, where he's a point counter, right, he's trying to get one [expletive] more than the other guy, versus Kasparov, who plays these wild, imaginary, complex moves to intimidate his opponent.

[24:56] Marc Moskowitz: And they're both beautiful in their own ways, but as you study them, you feel you get to know their personalities a little bit.

[25:02] Marc Moskowitz: And in the same way, I think most Chinese people,

[25:06] Marc Moskowitz: you know, the older generation, they learn by studying Japanese textbooks,

[25:11] Marc Moskowitz: so to speak, kind of play by play of games that have been played.

[25:16] Marc Moskowitz: The newer generation were looking more at Korean at the time of the book,

[25:20] Marc Moskowitz: because Koreans had kind of were dominating the world at that point.

[25:25] Marc Moskowitz: You see this nostalgia in the U.S. perhaps with, oh, you know, it's the end of an era when the Dream Team is no longer playing.

[25:34] Marc Moskowitz: So you could celebrate the changes and you could argue, well, these guys now are better than those guys then. But there's still this moment in time where you look back and say, that was really a magical moment in this sphere.

[25:48] Travis: And it's so interesting because you give sort of the background of Weiqi as a metaphor for so many things and for often very paradoxical or contradictory things at the same time, particularly in these three groups of men that you follow in China.

[26:05] Travis: You talk about, about this dramatic conceptual shift, particularly around its emphasis on Confucian values and Confucian ethics. So you say, from representing the game as a, quote, small skill, to a wanton waste of one's energies to one of the four high arts.

[26:22] Travis: And then it goes on to be an illustrative point on the nature of war with Mao Zedong.

[26:28] Travis: And then it goes on to turning into something different during the Cultural Revolution, which we're going to get into a little bit more, because you speak about that quite a bit as being, ironically,

[26:38] Travis: perhaps a spreader of this very elitist level game or noble art, which is interesting.

[26:46] Travis: And then you go on to these other things. You say, well, Weiqi can also be an emblem of Buddhist detachment or of Taoist celebration of cosmic significance or war, or of benevolent rule, all these sorts of things all at the same time,

[27:00] Travis: which I think is often what a lot of folks enjoy in the game.

[27:05] Travis: Does that resonate with you still? Has it changed over time for you?

[27:09] Marc Moskowitz: I Grew up playing chess as a kid. And chess has its own metaphors, right? You see it in commercials with cognac and men in suits. And it has these certain elite connotations in spite of the guys playing in parks or Bobby Fischer popularizing it.

[27:26] Marc Moskowitz: But I think with Go it really there are mythologies of deities playing it.

[27:34] Marc Moskowitz: There are origin myths of the emperor Yao creating it because he had a son that was either unruly or a little bit dense, depending on the version of the story.

[27:45] Marc Moskowitz: Buddhist monks played a good amount because they had time. And so it was linked with meditation and ways of being willing to let loose and not become too attached to things.

[27:57] Marc Moskowitz: I think these metaphors still carry on. And as you point out, you know, during the Cultural Revolution it was, was really criticized, but people had a lot of time on their hands.

[28:07] Marc Moskowitz: During the Cultural Revolution, a lot of intellectuals were sent to the countryside to get them out of the cities.

[28:14] Marc Moskowitz: And so they, you know, a lot of them just sat around playing Go for hours a day. And I think that popularized the sport, if you want to call it a sport, a game in our terminology,

[28:25] Marc Moskowitz: in ways that had never been seen before.

[28:28] Travis: That's a really interesting point that I wasn't aware of because you, in your interviews with some of the retirees in the park, but as well as university students, they were talking about how Weiqi was actually one of the reasons.

[28:43] Travis: Nie Weiping, the sort of father of Chinese Weiqi, that's how he started playing.

[28:49] Travis: You were interviewing Rui and he was, he said that he was a quote, sent-down youth.

[28:55] Travis: What does that mean?

[28:56] Marc Moskowitz: Well, the sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution, it was about 10 years where Mao Zedong, the leader of China,

[29:03] Marc Moskowitz: he was starting to lose control.

[29:06] Marc Moskowitz: And so he came up with a way of getting people who were likely to create protests, who tended to be, you know, college students,

[29:13] Marc Moskowitz: same as the US when you think about it.

[29:16] Marc Moskowitz: But his solution was send them into the countryside to learn from farmers. And in a communist state this made sense.

[29:23] Marc Moskowitz: But the underlying practical reasons for it were to just get rid of the people likely to protest.

[29:29] Marc Moskowitz: But these people, these scholars, these elites go to the countryside and they were useless. These multigenerational farmers, they knew how to work, they had the work ethic, they knew how to plant and when to plant.

[29:45] Marc Moskowitz: So it was basically the people who had been sent down were politically necessary, they had to put up with them. But they weren't really very functional, they weren't very useful.

[29:55] Marc Moskowitz: And so after the day's work,

[29:57] Marc Moskowitz: no TV because they didn't have A lot of money,

[30:00] Marc Moskowitz: or maybe there'd be one community TV that everybody could go to. So people spent time playing Go with each other.

[30:09] Marc Moskowitz: The other advantage of playing Weiqi is that this was a time where wives were forced to betray their husbands and say, oh, this guy's politically wrong. And children betrayed their parents and neighbors betrayed neighbors.

[30:26] Marc Moskowitz: And so one of the advantages of sitting around playing board games all day is you're occupying. It's a very wonderful way to build a friendship,

[30:35] Marc Moskowitz: but you could avoid anything that might be used against you.

[30:39] Marc Moskowitz: You mentioned I was studying three different groups, children who were being trained to play and university students. And then I spent some time at parks with retired people.

[30:50] Marc Moskowitz: And that generation, man, they're,

[30:53] Marc Moskowitz: they're not forthcoming. And so Go gives them a way to create these very deep relationships without exposing themselves emotionally.

[31:03] Marc Moskowitz: I was kind of surprised in that way.

[31:06] Marc Moskowitz: Having said that, Again, in the U.S. you know, we have a real problem right now with opioid addiction, with working class men who, like me, were kind of trained, don't show your feelings, don't show your emotions.

[31:19] Marc Moskowitz: And as a result they become kind of isolated.

[31:22] Marc Moskowitz: So in a very different political spectrum, you see how a larger political economy can shape individual identities.

[31:29] Marc Moskowitz: And I think Go is a wonderful way to just hang out and let the politics slide by and not worry about these overwhelming politics that people were immersed in.

[31:42] Travis: So that brings us to the main part of your book, which was really this process of really examining these three different groups of men playing Go in very different contexts.

[31:53] Travis: You start the book by really presenting your thesis and this really focuses on thinking of how the game was used and perhaps still is used in China for training children in the ways of commerce, social interaction,

[32:08] Travis: proper manhood. Because it is a game that is predominantly played by men, though perhaps that's changing over time.

[32:15] Travis: And then you also talk about university students and you say that it's used, quote, to voice anxieties about the unimaginably competitive nature of the current economy and to find models of behavior that draw on age old ideals of elite gentlemen via the Confucian ideals.

[32:33] Travis: And then finally that third group, right, the senior citizens in the park,

[32:37] Travis: and they perceive it as a completely different way, right? They look at it as,

[32:41] Travis: oh, this is sort of the positive memories we have from the days of old,

[32:46] Travis: despite going through some of the most challenging and traumatic experiences that perhaps a group of people or a generation could go through.

[32:56] Marc Moskowitz: Yeah, it was so interesting. These different groups, the children, I think a lot of them were there because they're middle-class or affluent parents wanted them to learn discipline.

[33:06] Marc Moskowitz: They thought it would help them learn math, which I think is probably true. It teaches them to sit and concentrate, to use logic.

[33:14] Marc Moskowitz: I went to school in the inner city,

[33:17] Marc Moskowitz: so my education was lacking across the board. I think one of the things that got me through and into college was I played chess as a kid and my dad taught me how to play and neither of us were very good.

[33:30] Marc Moskowitz: But it taught me to think out, step by step logic. If I do this and that will happen, then that will happen and that will happen.

[33:36] Marc Moskowitz: And I think that really helped train me intellectually in a way that maybe my school system was not fulfilling.

[33:44] Marc Moskowitz: And then the college students were under so much pressure. So, so much pressure. I mean, I think with our job market in the US we obviously have our own struggles here.

[33:54] Marc Moskowitz: But imagine a nation of 1.4 billion people in a country about the same size as the US and you get a sense of just how competitive it was.

[34:05] Marc Moskowitz: And it was the first time,

[34:07] Marc Moskowitz: I think, in a long while that even if you got a degree from the best universities in China, you were not guaranteed a job.

[34:16] Marc Moskowitz: And if you got that job, would it be a good enough job for your parents investment?

[34:21] Marc Moskowitz: Would it be a good enough job if you came from a poor village where the entire village pitched in to get you special tutoring to get into college,

[34:30] Marc Moskowitz: they felt this enormous, enormous pressure.

[34:34] Marc Moskowitz: And Go in China, I think at the time, There were only 20 professionals allowed a year.

[34:40] Marc Moskowitz: So it was tremendously competitive if you wanted to become the best.

[34:44] Marc Moskowitz: And a lot of the people I interviewed at the university were actually on the team, the Go team.

[34:50] Marc Moskowitz: And, you know, a couple had been professional and they thought going to the most elite university in China was a lot less stressful than, you know, being in Go school.

[35:01] Marc Moskowitz: In the park, it was primarily working class guys who couldn't afford indoors. I mean, I went there in winter. I was wearing a leather jacket with a big winter coat on top of it and gloves and shivering.

[35:13] Marc Moskowitz: They were out there. They were out there every day.

[35:16] Marc Moskowitz: For them, I think it was social. The style of play was different as well. So the university players were super quiet when they played.

[35:27] Marc Moskowitz: You know, kind of the rules of playing chess here. Super quiet, super respectful.

[35:32] Marc Moskowitz: The game itself, I think, was more reserved, it was more cautious.

[35:38] Marc Moskowitz: The park players were extremely aggressive. sente—the Japanese term for seizing the initiative—

[35:46] Marc Moskowitz: And that was seen almost as a kind of masculinity for the elderly people at the park. Someone who didn't really push to the very limit was seen as kind of a wimp and not a real man.

[35:57] Marc Moskowitz: To me, the most surprising thing about the part was kibitzing or sitting around in a group and telling the player, oh, this is a better move. That's a better move,

[36:06] Marc Moskowitz: was absolutely okay in the park.

[36:09] Marc Moskowitz: Not okay with the children's school, not okay at the university level.

[36:13] Marc Moskowitz: But at the park,

[36:14] Marc Moskowitz: man, that was the norm.

[36:16] Marc Moskowitz: At first. Being American,

[36:18] Marc Moskowitz: I was, you know, raised. Don't do that. That's bad. I kind of rebelled against that. But as I saw people playing more, I came to realize that this was because this group of players, they couldn't afford to go to school.

[36:31] Marc Moskowitz: They couldn't afford to go to these evening classes. They couldn't afford to.

[36:36] Marc Moskowitz: All the training mechanisms that were available to my other two groups.

[36:41] Marc Moskowitz: And so the kibitzing—talking as a group about the best move—became a form of mutual training.

[36:53] Marc Moskowitz: It became a way of showing affection for each other, like helping each other,

[36:58] Marc Moskowitz: rather than this individualistic streak that I think is more familiar to the chess world or the Weiqi world. At the children and university level,

[37:09] Travis: You were struck by the strength of the park players. In the book, you ask how they became so good without the wealth or access required for formal training.

[37:19] Travis: That was one of the things you highlighted. Even a modest one-room Weiqi school could be beyond what they could afford.

[37:27] Travis: It was just too expensive for them to pay 4 yuan, right, which is the currency at the time to do that.

[37:34] Travis: You talk about how the kibitzing really was probably the way that they had these incredible levels of improvement. And you also said there were also maybe some more challenges because perhaps memory at that age is not quite as strong.

[37:49] Travis: So their ability to go through and play each move after, to review might not have been the best way to do it.

[37:57] Marc Moskowitz: The university students, they could replay a game by memory, as many professionals can. But, yeah, I think they were playing to their strengths, and it was remarkable that they played so well.

[38:09] Marc Moskowitz: It was remarkable that they played at all. I keep making these American comparisons, but, you know, Bobby Fischer, before he came along in chess,

[38:18] Marc Moskowitz: most Americans who played were very elite people.

[38:21] Marc Moskowitz: And Bobby Fischer,

[38:23] Marc Moskowitz: suddenly people in the Bronx, like my dad, were playing because they saw that this kid from New York, this poor kid with no training, could do it.

[38:31] Marc Moskowitz: And so I'm always struck when people do Things outside of their expectations as a class in Taiwan, for example, there are no park players. This is very much something going on with China.

[38:42] Marc Moskowitz: I think it links back to the Cultural Revolution, when poorer communities were exposed to the game through the sent-down youth.

[38:51] Marc Moskowitz: When something with such elite connotations as Weiqi spreads through these wonderfully creative paths to other groups, that is exciting.

[39:03] Marc Moskowitz: The internet is another important development. I do not want to discount its cost—not everyone in China can afford a computer or internet access—but many people can.

[39:16] Marc Moskowitz: They now have access to games and instruction that would once have been available to very few people. These technological, political, and economic transformations illuminate the possibilities available to individuals.

[39:36] Marc Moskowitz: And these guys who had been sent-down youth, who knows what they might have become if they hadn't been born in such a tumultuous time in Chinese history.

[39:45] Travis: If we take a step back and go first to the kids in the Weiqi schools,

[39:50] Travis: You give us a helpful introduction to the way Weiqi embodies Confucian values. In discussing masculinity, you describe two traditional dimensions.

[40:10] Travis: You describe wen, associated with culture and intellectual refinement, and wu, associated with martial or physical strength.

[40:23] Travis: How does that distinction connect to the values associated with Weiqi and Go?

[40:28] Marc Moskowitz: You know, Wen was seen as kind of the intellectual, the cultured.

[40:33] Marc Moskowitz: Wu was associated with the martial, rugged, and physical. American culture often celebrates the physical, especially in the era when I came of age in the 1980s.

[40:44] Marc Moskowitz: You know, that was kind of a time where everybody was hitting the gym and men did what men did. And luckily we've evolved past some of that, I think happier in this generation, to tell the truth.

[40:55] Marc Moskowitz: But,

[40:56] Marc Moskowitz: you know, in China, I think there was always a prioritizing of the intellectual. And arguably that's one reason China's done so well economically is,

[41:05] Marc Moskowitz: you know, as far as technological advancement.

[41:09] Marc Moskowitz: The idea that Go trains both dimensions was embedded in children's training. Its intellectual side is obvious from what we have already discussed.

[41:21] Marc Moskowitz: It teaches you to think ahead, it teaches you concentration,

[41:25] Marc Moskowitz: it teaches you mathematics,

[41:28] Marc Moskowitz: But it was also seen as giving you moral fiber and the strength not to be dominated by other men.

[41:37] Marc Moskowitz: There is a famous historical general called Guan Gong who was later deified and is still worshipped.

[41:43] Marc Moskowitz: so people actually worship him now. But there's a famous painting of him playing Weiqi as a poison arrow is getting removed. Not just an arrow, but a poison arrow is getting removed from his arm.

[41:56] Marc Moskowitz: The image of this general affirming his martial prowess through an intellectual pursuit shows the blending of wu and wen—of the martial and the cultured.

[42:12] Marc Moskowitz: General Guan Gong is a powerful embodiment of the two.

[42:17] Marc Moskowitz: But at the end of the day, the soldier was always to serve the emperor.

[42:21] Marc Moskowitz: The physical was always to serve the intellectual.

[42:25] Marc Moskowitz: I think a lot of this training of that balance is seen in the ways people conceptualize Weiqi.

[42:33] Travis: Near the end of the book, you return to the Western image of the suffering, mad genius, especially the chess player.

[42:43] Travis: And perhaps this is provided as an example because in some ways, that's what happened to Bobby Fischer.

[42:49] Travis: There may have been a mental breakdown or paranoia; we do not know exactly.

[42:56] Travis: In China, however, exceptional ability at a game like Weiqi is not necessarily viewed negatively. It can signal intelligence and the cultivation of the skills you have described.

[43:09] Travis: So I think that's just a really striking aspect of what you talked about in your book.

[43:14] Marc Moskowitz: Fischer was absolutely mentally ill; there is no question about that. To some degree, I think we take pleasure in narratives about the genius who suffers—A Beautiful Mind, for example.

[43:27] Marc Moskowitz: this movie about a mathematician with schizophrenia or, you know, there are a million examples of this. And to some degree, I think we, as audiences watching films, enjoy.

[43:39] Marc Moskowitz: You know, okay, he's better than us, but yet not. He suffers, too. And this is a good thing in the book, I overstated a little bit because there's still the cool kids who are, you know, they're dating and they're playing music, and they're probably still the ones who are more successful romantically.

[43:56] Marc Moskowitz: But you're absolutely right that what we would call nerdy kids are also celebrated in their own way.

[44:04] Marc Moskowitz: I think today it makes more sense in the US as well, since the tech guys hit the scene. I think before them,

[44:12] Marc Moskowitz: Aggressive Wall Street businessmen or weightlifters once represented an idealized masculinity. Then the tech world changed the narrative and showed that success could be purely intellectual.

[44:26] Marc Moskowitz: And so I think these dynamics in China,

[44:30] Marc Moskowitz: I think I've been more long standing. I think there is an almost universal respect for education.

[44:36] Marc Moskowitz: Where I grew up, people who went to college were teased by their parents, by friends, as putting on airs. You know, this kind of working class value.

[44:46] Marc Moskowitz: And I just didn't see that in China.

[44:50] Marc Moskowitz: The son of or daughter of a truck driver, that truck driver wanted their kid to go to college.

[44:56] Marc Moskowitz: They might not be able to afford it. There may be obstacles where they said, look, this just isn't for you because I just can't pay for school, I can't pay for your books, these kinds of things.

[45:06] Marc Moskowitz: But as far as a universal desire,

[45:09] Marc Moskowitz: I would say it's almost universal in China,

[45:12] Marc Moskowitz: whereas in the US we're descendants of criminals and other kind of rugged people.

[45:19] Marc Moskowitz: Australia as well. And as a result, I think the US and Australia probably have a longer standing undercurrent of anti-intellectual sentiment, knee jerk reaction against the intellectual in favor of doing things with your hands and these things.

[45:36] Marc Moskowitz: And in China, I think through every era that I'm aware of, I think it wasn't like that. There was much more of a celebration of intellectual prowess.

[45:46] Marc Moskowitz: Even Mao Zedong,

[45:48] Marc Moskowitz: he grew up in a farming community and he took over, led the communist revolution. He was the first leader of communist China.

[45:57] Marc Moskowitz: But he created legitimacy for himself as a de facto emperor after the imperial system had ended.

[46:05] Marc Moskowitz: He wrote poetry and used Go metaphors, as you pointed out. He adopted elite forms of intellectual expression to validate his authority.

[46:18] Marc Moskowitz: being a nerdy guy at heart,

[46:20] Marc Moskowitz: somebody who spends more time with books than people. There's something to be said for that.

[46:25] Marc Moskowitz: Smart people don't have to be apologetic.

[46:28] Marc Moskowitz: Most of the leaders in Taiwan, for example, have PhDs or degrees from the best institution, National Taiwan University.

[46:40] Marc Moskowitz: Most of the presidents in China have had PhDs in things like building bridges and these very practical things. But they still were highly, highly educated people.

[46:52] Marc Moskowitz: And the idea of pretending to be one of the masses, which our politicians tend to do even when they go to Harvard and such,

[46:59] Marc Moskowitz: you know, it's just a different dynamic.

[47:01] Marc Moskowitz: Intellectual prowess is how to get ahead.

[47:05] Marc Moskowitz: And it's a different value system.

[47:07] Marc Moskowitz: To me, it's exciting to look at these cultural values and not say one's better than the other, but to say what a different world they grew up in than say, the world I grew up in.

[47:20] Marc Moskowitz: And that's kind of exciting to see.

Closing Question

[47:24] Travis: As we wrap up the episode, what could make top-level professional Go games more engaging, easier to understand, and easier to connect with?

[47:33] Travis: What could Go borrow from sports or other activities that communicate competition particularly well? Thanks so much, and I will talk to you next time.