This is the translation from Dutch of the chapter “The World Wonder Go” from Kris Burm’s (creator of the project GIPF games) book The Right Move. The original and other extracts were published at http://krisburm.be/nl/extracts

“The Right Move” is a manifesto on abstract games as a form of art. For the moment its full version is only published in Dutch.

The World Wonder Go

Let me share my thoughts on Go. If a strange little green creature were to land on Earth tomorrow, spend a brief, pleasant interlude here, and ask to take just one thing home upon departure, then we — the inhabitants of this blue planet — should not offer it a basket of glowing coals, nor a wheel, a catapult, a lightbulb, a smartphone, a particle accelerator, or a printout of its own genome; instead, we should offer it a game of Go.

Just try to come up with something better. But as you ponder this, bear the following in mind: depending on the source, Go is between 2,500 and 4,000 years old — some even claim it is older — and it is still played according to virtually the same simple rules as back then. Look at what has happened to the world in that time. We no longer write on papyrus scrolls, we no longer build pyramids, we long ago ceased believing the Earth is flat, and we now know we are not the center of the universe. No, today we possess the technology to shoot an apple off the head of someone we have placed on Mars; using our brains, we investigate how to improve our brains, only to use those improved brains to enhance them further — and then further still. In this age of malleability, we might be tempted to assume that eventually everything can be calculated, reasoned out, executed, and controlled; yet, we are still far from fully grasping the possibilities inherent in those white and black stones on a simple grid of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. That surely speaks volumes about the richness and timelessness of the game, doesn’t it? Go is magnificent — a monument on a par with, say, the Parthenon or the Taj Mahal. Greater still, for to the best of my knowledge, there is nothing — at least nothing of human invention so ingenious — that reaches so far back in time yet remains an unchanged part of life as we know and live it today. People still sit facing one another with a Go board between them — in the very same way, exactly as they did back then — with the sole difference being that everything around them has changed; only the game remains essentially the same. They ponder the same possibilities as people did millennia ago, engaging in battle with one another and with the unfathomable depths of the game — as if, long ago, a supreme being, seated at a Go board, decided to make a rare exception and leave one thing untouched.

So, we send that little green alien off with a Go set. And once we’ve waved it goodbye, it seems to me the perfect moment to hold a global poll to update the list of the Seven Wonders of the World. Go would be included via a wildcard, leaving the other six wonders to be decided by a vote. That is what I think of Go. Yet if someone came up with that game today, it would be immediately consigned to the trash. How can such an environment — say, a community, and its decision-makers in particular — still be taken seriously? If no one has the open-mindedness to recognize the potential of a unique, unparalleled game like Go — at once austere and majestic; if no one believes such a game must exist; if no one realizes that failing to publish it would be an indescribable and unforgivable blunder — then how can we take seriously the games that are deemed worthy of publication? I call this a culpable failure! A gaming industry that no longer has room for a game like Go is in urgent need of rethinking.

(c) Kris Burm, 2014, “The Right Move”

Original