“If you don’t like ko, don’t play go” is one of the first proverbs a beginning go player is likely to hear. Like a lot of go proverbs, its meaning isn’t necessarily clear when you first hear it. “Play forcing moves before living,” for example, makes no sense when you’re a beginner with no idea what either term means. Ko is a little different. In its most basic form it’s one of the fundamental rules, but its strategic implications remain obscure for a long while.
Recently I had a discussion with one of my online friends about Go. I told him that despite my tendency to “abandon” the game for months at a time, I always seem to come back to it. I had difficulty articulating why that’s the case, but it led me to thinking about what makes a good game. In general, I think a good game should create an environment in which the player possesses the ability to affect that environment as a player, not as a character. This can include metagame elements such as completion times and scores, as in classic arcade games, or it can be based on an individual’s command of the playing environment, as in the perfect information abstract games. This concept can be called “consequentiality,” the idea that the player’s actions have a real effect on the outcome of the game. I think Go epitomizes the concept. Beyond the turn-based structure of the game, it makes few assumptions about the players or the flow of the game. For a counter-example, let’s look at online RPGs…