Virgins' Villagers

25 June 2022

• Reply: Go:: General:: Re: Go feels "alive" – why is this?

  by Jonahbone63

  slaapgraag wrote:

  Reading this thread, I'm not sure I understand what Jonah means with 'aliveness'. I've had chessgames in which the strongest, hidden, move was very beautyfull - but imho that only occur in moments in chess - not during the whole game. Several games - from Inis even to 'you're bluffing'- really sucked me so far into this game, I was almost dizzy finding myself in 'the real outside world' when the game ended. A lot of games have building aspects - from Catan to Java. (I must say Eufraat&Tigris is one of my alltime favourites - and Go my all-time #1 (though Im bad at it)). I think all games have 'best moves dictated by the game so far'. So what makes a game alive? Is that a sequence of 'best moves dictated by the game' (and even beautyfull?) . Isn't Twixt 'alive' then? Is alivenes eazier for abstract games?

  
  
  Thanks for the comment. I guess the reason for the post was that I wasn’t really sure what I meant myself! It’s more of an inchoate feeling than a clear concept, which is why I was interested if anyone had some way of explaining or accounting for it.
  
  But for what it’s worth, to me it doesn’t feel like the same thing as “beauty” in that sense. OTOH might be connected to immersion, since I feel much more immersed in living-feeling games than others. But it doesn’t *seem* to me to be the same thing as immersion — I can be very gripped by a puzzley game without feeling it to be alive. But again that’s just a report of my experiences — apologies for how nebulous and subjective it sounds!
  
  It’s definitely not the same as a sense of building or growth per se. Carcassonne doesn’t feel alive to me. But it might well have something to do with the sense of organic growth that Russ talks about.
  
  
  
  
• Reply: Go:: General:: Re: Go feels "alive" – why is this?

  by russ

  FWIW I've seen a perhaps similar (or the same?) concept discussed occasionally in the Abstracts forum, namely that some games feel "organic" (in some sense of natural growth, in contrast to some sense of ad hoc artificiality, I think, or that a game's complexity and interesting behavior emerges "naturally" and implicitly from its simple minimalist rules, instead of game behaviors being explicitly defined/initiated by a lot of rules that explicitly cause/create those game phenomena. Similar to "emergent complexity" etc.
  
  https://boardgamegeek.com/spsearch.php?action=search&q=organ...
• Reply: Go:: General:: Re: Go feels "alive" – why is this?

  by slaapgraag

  Reading this thread, I'm not sure I understand what Jonah means with 'aliveness'. I've had chessgames in which the strongest, hidden, move was very beautyfull - but imho that only occur in moments in chess - not during the whole game. Several games - from Inis even to 'you're bluffing'- really sucked me so far into this game, I was almost dizzy finding myself in 'the real outside world' when the game ended. A lot of games have building aspects - from Catan to Java. (I must say Eufraat&Tigris is one of my alltime favourites - and Go my all-time #1 (though Im bad at it)). I think all games have 'best moves dictated by the game so far'. So what makes a game alive? Is that a sequence of 'best moves dictated by the game' (and even beautyfull?) . Isn't Twixt 'alive' then? Is alivenes eazier for abstract games?