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Topic: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa (Read 7542 times) |
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megajester
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Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« on: May 31st, 2010, 11:13am » |
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I hope nobody has done this already, but I wanted to try and express the depth I know we've all discovered in Arimaa. Right from the beginning we've seen chess players as our main potential player base. If we can express how great Arimaa is, not just in technical terms, but in philosophical, even poetic terms, perhaps this will help to show the world that Arimaa is an intellectual journey, much more than just another abstract strategy game.
I'll start by talking about other games. I've recently discovered go, and even though I'm a complete beginner, I'm completely awed by it's history and tradition. In contrast I've played chess all my life, but in Western culture it's simply a sideshow when compared with the reverence accorded go in China and Japan. It's regarded as a philosophy, a font of wisdom. Even it's strategic guidelines, which we would more likely call "tips and tricks" or "rules of thumb", are called proverbs.
I found this page featuring many "quotable quotes" about go. One of the most amusing and contoversial is probably the following:
Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double entry accounting.
(From Shibumi, bestseller by Trevanian)
I'm sure this will provoke howls of protest from the chess players among us, but I can see what he means. Success in chess depends on being very disciplined in calculating all possible permutations of the position. It's like taking turns to solve mathematical equations. Games are frequently more about lapses of concentration and technical oversights than a true clash of strategies.
This is precisely what led me on a search for a new game, a search that brought me to Arimaa.
Arimaa is one of those games where, once you've calculated the immediate threats and considerations, all your attention is focused on strategy. And that strategy is an epic struggle requiring balance, judgement, and level-headedness.
The four quadrants of the board are the scene of recurrent crises. However you can't give all your attention to the crisis around one trap, otherwise you can lose control over a different trap somewhere else, or even leave yourself open to that goal threat you forgot about 5 moves ago. You can "win the battle and lose the war."
Rather like life, you can't give all your attention to one thing, otherwise other things will slip. It's important to make a success of your career, but if you put your elephant and camel into getting that promotion you always wanted you'll start to become distant from family and friends, and even when you do get what you wanted it could be too late, the damage might be done. So you always have to remember what's really important in life...
That's perhaps not the best example, but hopefully it'll be enough to get everybody's juices going...
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Fritzlein
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #1 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 4:34am » |
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It's very true that Go is held in high reverence in Asian cultures. It makes me think well of a culture to know that it can honor its abstract strategy games. Furthermore, it is pleasing to imagine a similar future for Arimaa centuries from now.
I must confess, however, that I find most of the parallels that are drawn between Go and real life to be pretty silly, while the Go-is-to-chess analogy strikes me as crudely parochial. I don't understand why partisans of particular games need to put other games down. (There are, of course, reverse putdowns chess players have for Go. I read on Board Game Geek that Go players can't speak intelligibly about their game, and rave about "spring water dragon tactics" instead.)
This is not to say that building up some kind of mystical narrative around Arimaa wouldn't help popularize it. One man's gibberish is another man's meaning of life. I would caution, though, that if we intend to convert chess players, we should not try to puff up Arimaa by putting down chess. That might be appealing to people who, for whatever reason, never took a shine to chess, and who would therefore like an opportunity to feel superior to all of those darned chess snobs. An outsider appeal is definitely one marketing strategy that Arimaa could take, but I think it would be a mistake.
A slick presentation for Arimaa will help persuade people to give it a try. Different presentations will get different people in the door. But not everyone who tries Arimaa will actually like it, never mind love it. Our statistics from arimaa.com show that, of the people who play at least one game, close to 4% go on to play one hundred games. That's an incredible addiction rate, but it relies somewhat on getting good references rather than a stream of newcomers who have no interest in a serious abstract strategy game.
My theory is that the people you want to entice to the table are the ones who have the highest chance of eventually loving Arimaa. If I had some marketing shtick that would persuade either one thousand poker players or one hundred chess players to give Arimaa a try, I would go for the hundred chess players as the better long-term investment. I expect chess players to see something beautiful in Arimaa while the poker players would get bored because there is no money on the line, no bluffing with hidden information, no reading the opponents, and no coping with the vagaries of chance.
So I guess I'm saying that if we want to write essays about how east/west balance of forces in Arimaa taught us all to balance work and family in our lives, I will roll my eyes a little, but not strenuously object. On the other hand, if it extends to saying, "...and chess never taught me any such thing," I'll do my best to interfere with the proceedings in defense of chess, one of the great abstract strategy games of all time.
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megajester
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #2 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 7:20am » |
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on Jun 1st, 2010, 4:34am, Fritzlein wrote:| One man's gibberish is another man's meaning of life. |
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Very true. I was expecting that some people would find my post just a bunch of guff. 
I hadn't mean't to put chess down, though I completely understand why you'd think that. Perhaps using that quote wasn't the best idea, all I had wanted to say was that there are differences between chess and Arimaa and I like those differences. I also hadn't meant to say that Arimaa helps me to balance work and family, that would be silly. I was just trying to find some sort of analogy.
I suppose I'm trying to express why I love getting into "the zone" with Arimaa and why I feel it's unique. More guff, I know, but I think we all get some kind of rush when we play, some reason why we find Arimaa so intellectually satisfying. I wonder how you would describe it?
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Fritzlein
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #3 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 7:50am » |
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on Jun 1st, 2010, 7:20am, megajester wrote:| I suppose I'm trying to express why I love getting into "the zone" with Arimaa and why I feel it's unique. More guff, I know, but I think we all get some kind of rush when we play, some reason why we find Arimaa so intellectually satisfying. I wonder how you would describe it? |
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I'm not really sure that I know what makes me tick. I do get a rush from Arimaa, but why? One of the reasons is the infinite learning curve. I feel that I am learning something every time I play. I never feel like I am stalled out and just can't learn any more. Furthermore, the stuff I am learning seems to be interesting, i.e. not just memorizing a list of boring details, but formulating some kind of grand conception of what Arimaa is all about that will help across all my future games of Arimaa.
I'm fairly convinced that this isn't something Arimaa has and chess lacks. It's quite relevant, then, to ask why I have spent so much more time on Arimaa than on chess, if they are both great games, and are great for essentially the same reasons. I'm afraid the true answer is very prosaic: I am better at Arimaa than at chess. The same sort of learning curve is intrinsically present for both games, but my experience of them was different. It was easier for me to internalize truths about Arimaa strategy than about chess strategy.
I know it makes me sound spoiled and lazy to just want to play the games that I am best at, while giving up on the games that I struggle with. It's my closest guess to the truth, though. It sounds much more plausible to me than an explanation based on Arimaa being inherently more fun and more easy to learn than chess. I suspect different people have an easier time learning different games for a whole slew of personal and environmental reasons unrelated to the intrinsic merit of the game.
Also, I think I have become allergic to people touting the relative greatness of the game they happen to like for purely subjective reasons. I know that some people consider it relatively sterile and uninspiring to talk about depth, lack of draws, balance between the players, etc., but at least such things aren't just my own experience. On the other hand, if I say that Arimaa gives me a buzz that chess never did, and some chess player says chess gives him a buzz while Arimaa leaves him flat, we are at an impasse about which essentially nothing more can be said.
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megajester
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #4 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 1:30pm » |
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on Jun 1st, 2010, 7:50am, Fritzlein wrote:
Also, I think I have become allergic to people touting the relative greatness of the game they happen to like for purely subjective reasons. I know that some people consider it relatively sterile and uninspiring to talk about depth, lack of draws, balance between the players, etc., but at least such things aren't just my own experience. |
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Perhaps you misunderstood my purpose when I mentioned in the beginning that our main target player base is chess players. All I meant was, as a chess player I've enjoyed Arimaa's philosophical side so maybe other chess players will too.
When I started this thread, I had envisaged a discussion of how people experience Arimaa, what it feels like to play, how you organize your thoughts when planning the next move, perhaps some analogies, etc etc. Not a debate over whether we should be having this thread at all. If you're "allergic" to that kind of a discussion then that's OK, each to his own.
I wonder what everybody else thinks.
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| « Last Edit: Jun 1st, 2010, 1:34pm by megajester » |
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CodexArcanum
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #5 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 1:45pm » |
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I think people tend to find philosophy in everything, but that doesn't invalidate when a person feels like the metaphorical (and perhaps spiritual) connection between their lives and the philosophical subject.
I myself felt an interesting philosophical parallel to a recent arimaa game with my dad. We had both ended up attacking opposite flanks (a high aggression game!) but with our elephants in the thick of each other's attacks. It very much resembled a (somewhat square) taijitu (a yin and yang symbol). I was contemplative after about how the game itself is a balance of opposing powers, and how the elephants were small points of unbreakable strength in the midst of opposition.
More than just a basic mechanic of the game, the game as a whole is itself a push and pull. Territory is given, territory is taken, but rarely is the overall strength of forces changed. When it is (a capture) that can be a turning point of the game.
I think you'd have to be very lacking in poetic sense to miss that symbolism. How forces in life and nature always struggle, but are in balance. Until some disruption (the traps in life) up-ends the balance and put things spiraling towards a conclusion, unless a balance can be reasserted.
That works heavily in my strategic thoughts. I divide the board into halves and quarters, contemplating where the strength lies, where the balance is shifting to, and how I can apply the right counter pressure to tilt in my favor.
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| « Last Edit: Jun 1st, 2010, 1:47pm by CodexArcanum » |
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FireBorn
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #6 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 1:47pm » |
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I feel like arimaa is some sort of in-between of chess and go in a sense. It is a game of "balance" like go, but it looks and feels more like chess due to the pieces and the way they move around the board. I suppose this is why I like it. Go is too abstract for me, and chess is too rigid. Arimaa is a nice in-between.
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SpeedRazor
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #7 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 1:59pm » |
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As an Chess Player first and foremost, I probably should not chime in, but I feel that maybe I'm looking at two people crossing and diverging and crossing the same paths... [...]
I'm not a writer, and was once considered Autistic (whatever that means; and other crap too); Maybe Megajester is just asking for a dialogue about the Aesthetics of Arimaa? (Form dictates Function should have produced a random gaming mutant monster with Arimaa. It didn't, it seems )
...ere, sorry for butting in where I don't (yet) feel I belong.
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ocmiente
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #8 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 2:39pm » |
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Fireborn's comments about Arimaa being in between Go and chess rang true for me. Arimaa has more clarity than Go to me, and I like it more than Go. <EDIT>Go can also take a long time to play. After thinking about it for a while, I think that's really the reason I haven't invested a lot of time in playing Go.
And Fritz' observation that he enjoys the game partially because he is good at it also sounded right. The fact that it is still possible for a human to beat the best computer program at Arimaa makes me like it more than Chess in that respect.
When I think about Arimaa, I see it as an act of improvisation. As with any good music, there are points at which you can just tell what the next move (or chord) is going to be, and other times when a whole range of options are open to the player. The move that is selected can lead to development that will make others who watch nod and say "yes, yes!" - or lead to uninspired ramblings - or even tragic consequences. Improvisation may or may not be a type of philosophy - but I quickly searched for that and found a book titled "The Philosophy of Improvisation", so I'm sticking to that.
On a different, but related note, I remember hearing, when I was younger, about chess being like a battle between two armies. I guess that makes sense to some people, but I never did make that connection because I never saw the blood on the board I would guess that the same is true of any philosphical attributes people want to apply to the game. Some will see them clearly, others will see differently.
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| « Last Edit: Jun 11th, 2010, 11:32am by ocmiente » |
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leo
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #9 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 3:19pm » |
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What I like in Arimaa is I can relate everything in it with something in the real world. Moving, pushing, pulling, freezing, trapping, are very straightforward to understand. The friendly piece preventing freezing or trapping is a bit more abstract though.
I can't relate as strongly to games where pieces seem to exist in an abstract space where computers are more at ease, being unconcerned with the real world. Actually a vacuum cleaner robot that manages to not get stuck in the furniture seems to me a greater achievement than Deep Blue 
When I see a pawn rushing to the goal, I really see a rabbit hopping to the goal with its little heart pounding, I don't see a shortening of some graph path. OK, that might not be some life-encompassing philosophy but it works for me. 
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| « Last Edit: Jun 1st, 2010, 3:21pm by leo » |
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FireBorn
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #10 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 5:13pm » |
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I imagine pieces "holding" friendly pieces over traps so that they don't fall in.
For unfreezing, I imagine them playing a game of freeze tag. Although I suppose you can unfreeze a friendly by "shaking" it free from the grasp of the enemy too.
I also like the improvisation aspect. When I first started playing there were points where I thought I'd learned all there was to learn about Arimaa, but there were always surprise lessons along the bot ladder. Learning about the existence of the elephant blockade is one of the things that really got me into Arimaa. If Fritz's comment is true, I am in for even more revelations as I continue to play.
As for philosophy...ahh...maybe next time
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Fritzlein
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #11 on: Jun 1st, 2010, 10:11pm » |
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on Jun 1st, 2010, 1:30pm, megajester wrote:| When I started this thread, I had envisaged a discussion of how people experience Arimaa, what it feels like to play, how you organize your thoughts when planning the next move, perhaps some analogies, etc etc. Not a debate over whether we should be having this thread at all. If you're "allergic" to that kind of a discussion then that's OK, each to his own. |
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I have no objection to discussing the subjective experience of Arimaa. I took your opening post, however, as an invitation to develop a subjective narrative about why Arimaa is better than chess, along the lines of the narrative some people have as to why Go is better than chess. I think it is legitimate for me to give the reasons why I think developing such a narrative would be a net negative for the Arimaa community.
Now you have clarified that your proposal was merely to talk about what Arimaa feels like, including how it feels different from other games. I'm cool with that, and wouldn't want to interfere. Heck, I've done it myself, saying that Arimaa is to chess as wrestling is to boxing. I apologize for the extent to which my post came across as saying, "Because I don't care to discuss mushy subjective stuff, no one should."
From my first post in this thread, I had two separate reactions that I apparently didn't keep separate well enough: a reaction to talking about games philosophically per se, and a reaction to using nebulous criteria to put down one's non-favorite games. I'm sorry for the extent to which I let those bleed into each other.
I'm glad for the direction the thread has taken since then. <bows out>
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| « Last Edit: Jun 1st, 2010, 10:39pm by Fritzlein » |
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megajester
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #12 on: Jun 2nd, 2010, 2:25am » |
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on Jun 1st, 2010, 10:11pm, Fritzlein wrote:
I have no objection to discussing the subjective experience of Arimaa. I took your opening post, however, as an invitation to develop a subjective narrative about why Arimaa is better than chess, along the lines of the narrative some people have as to why Go is better than chess. I think it is legitimate for me to give the reasons why I think developing such a narrative would be a net negative for the Arimaa community.
Now you have clarified that your proposal was merely to talk about what Arimaa feels like, including how it feels different from other games. I'm cool with that, and wouldn't want to interfere. Heck, I've done it myself, saying that Arimaa is to chess as wrestling is to boxing. I apologize for the extent to which my post came across as saying, "Because I don't care to discuss mushy subjective stuff, no one should."
From my first post in this thread, I had two separate reactions that I apparently didn't keep separate well enough: a reaction to talking about games philosophically per se, and a reaction to using nebulous criteria to put down one's non-favorite games. I'm sorry for the extent to which I let those bleed into each other.
I'm glad for the direction the thread has taken since then. <bows out> |
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[sighs] Yeah, and it's entirely my fault you got that impression. Sorry... You know, that's part of the Arimaa experience as well: the fantastic Arimaa community, where even when we disagree we're still such cool guys... Thanks Fritz.
I'm surprised myself at the level of reaction this thread's got. I'm sure things will come to mind as we go along.
Like this one:
The Elephant. Most powerful piece on the board, free to do as he pleases. Everybody wants to be the elephant.
Or would you? He's more busy than anyone else, constantly flitting back and forth trying to juggle all the balls. He's not really free to do what he likes, because when the smaller, naiver pieces get themselves into trouble it's him who's got to go and save them. And heaven help him when the camel gets into trouble! The commander of the board becomes a prisoner, forced to camp out next to a trap to save his deputy. The two most powerful pieces in the army can only stare at each other while their comrades get demolished.
Oh, the burdens of leadership...
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Hippo
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #13 on: Jun 2nd, 2010, 2:39am » |
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I have liked to play chess when I was child, but at age around 15 it seemed to me I got the level memorization become much more important and I have chosen to prefere being better mathematican than chess player with better database.
Arimaa is really young game and this is why it's theory is only in beginning. Having been undersood as chess, it would not interest me. I have discovered it previous year and I was very surprised how fast I get near the top. The only reason is ... so far we are all beginners.
I am eager to learn and I am so busy ... so I have no option to learn as much as possible from each game I play/or study. I am not sure how long I would stay in the comunity (as currently it took almost all my free time), but may be having some students to code bots would be enough incentive ...
I love go, but I have not played it at any turnament. I consider it to be lost time for me.
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leo
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Re: Musings on the philosophy of Arimaa
« Reply #14 on: Jun 2nd, 2010, 12:46pm » |
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@Fireborn: Yes it makes sense to see friendly neighbor's help that way. There's somewhat of the Lion and Mouse fable in it too, for even a rabbit can free the camel from the elephant.
After a long time without playing I've discovered that my way of perceiving the board and playing has evolved in a radical way. I'm making horrible blunders the kind I made when I first played but I feel more confident about positioning and feeling the balance of forces. Fritzlein just reminded about his wrestling metaphor, and it's really what I feel: the game's "state of matter" is somewhere between solid and liquid, full of surprises but not eerie.
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