One of my distractions from blogging duty, over the past eight months or so, has been online gaming.
Well, sort of. Although I contracted briefly at an online gaming outfit back in the mid-nineties, I've never been attracted to computer or video games generally. Out of some shapeless, inchoate, and most likely shameful need to look with-it, I've tried, intermittently, to get interested in it. Only a couple of years ago I bought, and spent a few nights with, Myst. And then Riven. I think I was attracted by the packaging. But the game was hopelessly dull to my taste.
About a decade earlier, entirely on a lunch-hour impulse, I had bought Zork II. That wasn't even a graphic game: it was text-based, and remarkably soporific.
But around July of last year I discovered online GO. I had undertaken a project to bring the game to students at a local charter school, and happened to mention this to a fellow contractor, who told me he'd been playing for several months on the web. Following his lead, I found a bunch of servers and resources.
Been playing pretty regularly ever since, usually at the Dragon Go Server. Meet me there if you like. It's "BachWorker".
GO on the web. That's an odd and remarkable fusion of ancient and modern. The game is at least three thousand years old. It originated in China, spread to Korea and then to Japan between 600 and 800 A.D., and finally became known in the West only about 150 years ago. It came to me personally during the summer of my 20th year, and I promptly lost all interest in chess.
11:23:11 AM 
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