This evening I've been thinking about abstract gaming and abstract gaming online. What got me thinking was a particularly thorny situation in a game that required a great deal of thought -- thought that I couldn't muster while staring at my computer.I think that when I play a game over the board, I can read deeper and more consistently. I'm curious why this might be. My first guess is that while I play, I get used to reading //that particular game// and I develop mental models of the game that get updated during //that game//. I don't seem to do this when I play online. At best I can look at a few variations in my head before I give up and play a move.
I feel like if I wanted to succeed in each round I play online, I would need to lay out the physical pieces or slowly replay the moves a number of times before ultimately deciding on a move. This seems a little baroque.
Has anyone else thought about this before? Does anyone else feel like online gaming pales in comparison to over the board gaming for this reason? How do you compensate for it?
I concentrate a lot more OTB but I think it is mostly a function of ego: face-to-face, you have to crush your opponent or concede that he/she is smarter than you (at least in the realm of chess, or whatever). ...Ultimate clash of wills and all that. On LG, I'm lazy and it's easy to rationalize. After all, you are all just occasional blurbs of text on a screen, not real people.
I don't find a difference between how I play on LG and how I play in real life so much as a big difference between how I play real-time and how I play postal. I can't play postal very well probably because I tend to lose track of what I'm doing in a postal game, I might have a strategy worked out but by the next day its gone. I can't establish flow. Also my prowess in any game will decline if I don't play it on a regular basis. This is why I don't play Arimaa anymore.
We're all different, thank Whoever Is Up There. I like turnbased play because I dislike distractions. I play at iGGC and hey, the phone rings, the dog needs a walk, I need coffee ... , it's 'be right back' all the time, not to mention opponents who suffer similar problems. Not that I actually hate it, but I prefer the less demanding pace of turnbased play.
From what I read, most of you don't know what spending an entire afternoon on a move is and deciding that it is not in any sense ripe, postponing the answer to the weekend to spend an entire extra day on it. I must confess, I am an addict. I only play go, I have played a couple of times on a real board and it makes me very uneasy, the stones imprecisely placed hurt my brain and the perspective effect is awful: I tend to forget things because a cannot look at the whole board at a time (well I can, but for some reason I don't). I have met people in a go club that have the opposite feeling and feel uneasy at the computer.
And the best (at my level) is that computers don't spoil the fun. Programs with which I may lose some games (if I cannot undo) make an incredible amount of mistakes and are close to useless at the opening (not even elementary notions are implemented) and in the endgame (if the endgame is close they are horrible, if winning by large they play for a small win). At most, programs can be used for sparring: to play things out and have a reasonable outcome of the game scored with which you can compare later decisions. I also profile my opponents, analyze the other games of the tournaments I am playing and exploit vacation days to breathe a little. So you can imagine that with 9 ongoing games like now, I get stressed ;-) So my LG games are the best games I ever played. I this deep thinking also improved my understanding of go.
I now play all games by feel, not by thinking. Just occasionally, I'll force myself to think, but that's very rare. I just thought for 15s over a move in a Dvonn game, that's about my limit. I don't play anything OTB at all, but I do know that when I'm playing other deep strategy games, like tiddlywinks, again, I like to just play by feel and not get too analytic. (Except in rounds, when the clock's stopped.)
Ancient Chinese painted the moves on a paper spread on the window, so they don't have to cope with the perspective effect.
Strangely, usually I play some king of fast games on LG, playing very fast after I see the opponent's move. Sometimes I leave difficult positions for several days and look at them two, three times a day for some minutes, until I get bored and play anything come to me. Sometimes I also do this when is not my move.
I align with Dustin a fair deal. I find it much easier to experiment and play by instinct when I'm firing through 100 games on here, whereas OTB I go really deep (tho' still often experiment). Tho' at the same time, I remember much of my games on here, and I generally know who I'm playing based on board appearance and style before looking at the name (at least for my regular opponents). So in some ways, this rapid-fire instinct method has helped my memory retention of positions and sequences. And since Go is about the biggest move at this time, this is perhaps a good way not to get as caught up in local situations.
erratic, I know exactly what you mean about the perspective and the stones. I learned a great deal on KGS before getting into live play, and it was really tripping me out. But then I learned that the stones aren't *supposed* to fit perfectly. If you have the proper size stone, you shouldn't be able to align them on a full board. So it's a way of helping us OCD-types find the zen. :)
Sadly I haven't played OTB in a while, but I MUCH prefer it to online, now that I'm used to it. I feel more connected to the stones, and am more in tune with the depth of options. It's closer to the heart of the game, playing it with the same pieces people have been touching for thousands of years. Plus, I dig the psychological aspect of facing another human. I recommend you try to get used to it, it's very much worth it.
Little Golem