I don’t know if I actually want to answer that question. In his web serial 17776, which describes a world in which humanity has become immortal and invincible and spends its endless hours playing games of football that span state lines, Jon Bois (who has a Hobbes (the tiger) avatar on Twitter) answers with: “the point of play is to distract you from the fact that play is the point”. That answers seems scarily empty of any true “point” and most investigations into the value of games come to similar answers. Trying to ascribe value to the “critical thinking” or “teamwork” skills “developed” by gaming ends up feeling similarly empty since the value of gaming itself and using the critical thinking for things that are enjoyable has been stripped by hedging gaming’s value against traditional measure of value. So the game itself is what there is.
The word game in the title may also be disingenuous to the subject of this essay. It (intentionally) brings with it the baggage of the cultural ugliness of the modern gamer. Go, the game that the stories this essay discusses are centered around, is the opposite of that. In Go no one is playing as a fox mage with big titties and no one is blowing off people’s heads off with laser guns and no reddit commenters are complaining about the latest patch ruining the competitive integrity of the game or the server lag where they live. Go is clean, black and white, the stones are smooth.
My final confession is that I am not very good at Go. I have played games competitively, and done well, but despite a few weeks total of trying to learn the game I just play really badly. I don’t know if this is something unique to this game though since I’m bad at chess as well. Navigating the subtleties of Go and Chess is orders of magnitude more complicated than navigating the subtleties of Hearthstone. So it’s a fair criticism that I’m not even really equipped to talk about Go. But anyways. I’d like to talk about games if I can get there.
The Master of Go (1951 novel) and AlphaGo (2017 documentary) are two stories on the nobility of Go collapsing to the onslaught of modernity. The Master of Go is set around a 1938 Go match in which a retiring Go master is defeated in his final match by a young challenger and dies shortly after. AlphaGo is set around a 2016 Go match in which a computer program, AlphaGo, developed by Google defeated the widely-considered greatest Go player in the world, Lee Sedol, with a series score of 4–1, the one win by the Lee coming after three consecutive losses to open the series.
In The Master of Go, Kawabata’s narrator, who is Kawabata, as Kawabata reported on the match, meets and plays games of Go against an American who is just learning the game. The narrator disdains the American’s willingness to lose, and especially his unwillingness to adapt throughout the course of the game:
“I first tried giving him a six-stone handicap. He had taken lessons at the Go Association, he said, and challenged some famous players. He had the forms down well enough, but he had a way of playing thoughtlessly, without really putting himself into the game. Losing did not seem to bother him in the least. He went happily through game after game, as if to say that it was silly to take a mere game seriously. He lined his forces up after patterns he had been taught, and his opening plays were excellent; but he had no will to fight. If I pushed him back a little or made a surprise move, he quietly collapsed. It was as if I were throwing a large but badly balanced opponent in a wrestling match.”
The Master and his challenger, Otaké, have to navigate the intersection of issues outside of the game and the complexity of the game itself. The drama of the novel comes from these tense situations. Kawabata sides with the Master in almost of these situations. Because the master is old and this is his last game, he request a 40 hour time limit, more than twice the standard amount, which is attributed by Kawabata as the Master not wanting time to be a relevant factor in his final match. But the Master ends up under the halfway mark of the time limit, using under 19 hours when it finally ends. The challenger Otaké however, use thirty three of these hours, and the narration frequently maligns him for taking full advantage of the time window allotted even when not necessary. The Master is hospitalized at the halfway mark of the match, and the first move back after he returns is Otaké’s, and Otaké spends hours deliberating it even though in theory he had months to decide what he wanted to do without any of it counting against his allotted time. The narrator is more sympathetic here, stating that Otaké felt an ethical obligation to not take advantage of the master’s hospitalization and so didn’t practice or prepare during that time window.
But the novel makes note of Otaké’s preparation throughout, especially in contrast with the master. Otake spends his nights after the sessions of play going over the match and plotting out next moves. In contrast, the Master forgets about the match as soon as the session ends, and instead immerses himself in another game: chess, mahjong, billiards, whatever someone else will play with him. The Master’s total immersion in these games is noted too: where other players might take these casual games less seriously, the Master tries just as hard and plays as slowly as a competitive match in these friendly games.
Otaké’s style is most significantly framed as against the spirit of the game when it comes to his controversial sealed move in the latter half of the match. Because of the pauses while still in the middle of the game, sealing the final move of the session was implemented so that the player whose turn it was when the session ended was not advantaged with days of preparation and thought for his next move: the other player’s sealed move would be revealed when the next session started. The Master and the narrator and Kawabata posit that Otaké’s sealed move Black 121 took advantage of the fact that it was a sealed move: he staged an attack in an unexpected place, and the recess between sessions to plot out the details of an attack that the Master did not know was coming.
New rules bring new tactics. It was not perhaps entirely accidental that each of the four sessions since play had been resumed at Itō had been ended with a sealed play on the Black side.
The Master privately confides to Kawabata after the match is over that he considered forfeiting after Black 121, that he was entirely unprepared for it. But he played his response move just minutes later, seeking to keep the spirit of the game and not undermine his opponent.
As you can probably tell from my tone, I’m not entirely sympathetic to Kawabata’s framing of Otaké as a win-at-all-costs modernist against the noble aging Master who refuses to take advantages of those rules. Maybe this is reductive of the complexity that Kawabata put into the story that allowed me to make this reading of it. To me the sadness of the novel is that these two players continue to play this stressful match for six months, through the hospitalization of an old man who dies shortly after, and that the young challenger can likely derive little pleasure from spoiling the retirement of an old man and significant culture figure. It doesn’t feel like either of them could have won the game in a meaningful sense.
But the framing of win-at-all-costs modernism versus a noble aging Master does seem to be the emotional core of the AlphaGo documentary and why it succeeds as a film. Go was considering an uncrackable game by computers not that long ago: in August 2015 in my first computer science class they cited Go as a game that computers wouldn’t crack for a long time and then AlphaGo happened a year later in 2016. Go had always been considered to be far too complex to be played at high levels by a computer.
AlphaGo as a documentary seems pulled between the two competitors in the series and what they represent: the film is narrated from the perspective of the Google team that developed the program, and filled with quotes about the value of the artificial intelligence technology behind AlphaGo for society. The final scene of the film is very cheesy shots of the professional Go player who helped design AlphaGo running through a vineyard with his daughter on his shoulders talking about the human potential that the victorious AlphaGo can unlock.
But the filmmakers seem indelibly drawn towards the Lee Sedol side of the story. The match takes place in Korea in a culture of Go, not in London where AlphaGo was developed: it feels like a foreign intrusion to master an ancient game. Before most of the five matches in the series, you see him walking with his young daughter towards the game. Before game 5 she is eating an ice cream cone. Before game 1 she tells the press “I would like it if a machine did not beat a human in Go yet”. Lee Sedol loses the first three games, making it impossible for him to win the five game series, but triumphs in the fourth in what feels like the true last stand of an era of mystique and honor around Go that is about to disappear. He comes out to the press to long applause and tells them “one time was enough”: the single win over the computer before the computers advanced sufficiently far as to never be defeated by humans again proved that there was some human intuition in Go that a computer was not prepared for.
The documentary tries to tie these two competing narratives together by arguing that Lee Sedol improved enough to beat the machine because of the ideas the machine had taught him in the earlier games, quoting Kasparov as “A good human plus a machine is the best combination”. They go back to ascribing value to the underlying technology behind AlphaGo, and how it can teach us things about Go and the world around us. Early on the documentary a developer of AlphaGo says “we don’t want to understand Go, we want to understand understanding.”
The AlphaGo documentary is just a bit scared to acknowledge that games themselves can have intrinsic value, especially the intrinsic noble competitive value that The Master of Go ascribes to them. It’s strange to see the shots of developers cheering for their program to win the individual matches (especially the fifth one, where they win but had already lost once) when supposedly the existence of the program is to better humanity in the long term: if the program was flawed shouldn’t they want it to fail so they could improve it so humanity can improve too? The competitive spirit of the game itself is necessarily officially displaced because they aren’t truly the ones competing, but they still want to be the winners.
The nobility of gaming that is ascribed to the Master in The Master of Go and Lee Sedol in AlphaGo isn’t strictly opposed to the competitive spirit and innovation represented by their victorious challengers. The spirit of competitiveness and innovation and pragmatic desire to find ways to win within and by stretching the rules has always been what drives competitive games in the first place, it’s not a slowly growing corrupting force within competitive communities. The Master of Go has a scary mix of implicit criticism of Otaké for practicing and the implicit praise of the Master for competing in every game: how do you know if your preparation or strategies for the game are going too far or outside the line if the point of a game is to give it your all? Would it have been against the game for Otaké to prepare during the three months that the Master was hospitalized? And AlphaGo brings the other half of the question of skill: if computers are better than you, why are you still playing and practicing? And actually, why did we need to design the computer program in the first place too? Why did we even play this game in the first place if it could be eventually be solved, reduced to a step-by-step decision tree? No one plays tic-tac-toe competitively, it’s solved.
I don’t think I have the answers. But this is the answer I will end with:
