go!

(no, this isn't a post about the abominable moby.)
I've written about the differences between chess and another boardgame called othello or reversi elsewhere, attempting to appropriate the thought of Deleuze and Guattari in the process. But I thought I'd lay out a little more accurately what they have to say about how chess compares to go, the 4,000 year old Chinese game of supreme complexity and subtlety, as I've recently begun to play and enjoy it. Don't worry, I'm not going to delve into the history, or rules, or quasi-mystical, universalising descriptions of the game (which are nonetheless intriguing). What follows is a summary of Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of this from A Thousand Plateaux (pp 389-90).
Let's start with chess. Chess is a game that involves a number of pieces that are coded with different abilities and therefore functions. These codes are invariable, that is, they do not change. Obviously, this has many profound consequences for the game and how it operates. The effect this has on the space of the chess board is that it becomes striated, it becomes coded according to the pieces that are spread across it and movement is generally in one direction, ie. towards one's opponent's king.
On the other hand, go pieces are utterly uncoded (aside from being black or white). They only have significance through their relationships with other pieces; a go piece has very little structured being. The space of a go board is smooth because the go pieces are in relationship with each other and so the space itself becomes almost entirely secondary to the action that occurs upon it (this is also because go pieces can be placed at almost any point on the board). (Incidentally, the sentence where D+G say that chess codes and decodes space, whereas go territorialises and deterritorialises is saying something really important about de/territorialisation.)
So chess is a statist game, whereas go is much more one for the anarchist (despite its popularity with ancient Chinese rulers).
Strikes me that this post would be dead boring for someone who has never played go or read Delueze and Guattari. Fuck it.
If you want excellent information about go, check out this link. If you want a brilliantly lucid brief intro to the rules of go, check out this link, which contains a chapter from a text called Way to Go, by Karl Baker from the American Go Association.
An interesting blog post? I'd buy that for a dollar!
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (2004) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Part Two, Continuum: London.
now playing: monty python - the brian song