Maybe it’ll be a learning experience
Something I’ve been working on for a while now - I’m trying to learn the game of Go. Part of this is actively engaging with the content of the games I play. In the past, I’ve been content to download igowin and play a few games for a day, or look at a site that talks about it for a short period of time.
this time, though, this time I’m trying something different.
First off, I’ve gota few low-key games running in the background with a friend of mine. We’re using Dave Peck’s wonderful site. I’ve actually gotten a Go set for myself, and a book to read. I’ve found people at work who are interested in playing.
And an idea that came to me - with how much (relatively) I’ve been writing recently to get better at documenting and explaining my hobbies - is the idea of doing writeups of the games that I’ve played.
There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it’ll be an enlightening for me. I might not really know what I’m talking about, especially at the start, but by (hopefully) naming a concept and running with it, it will help deepen my understanding of what the hell is happening in this game.
Secondly, though this may be hubris - there’s the chance that my critique of the games I’ve played will help my opponent. For the aforementioned friend, they’re pretty new - I’m pretty confident I can help there. Even against more experienced opponents, though, I’m hoping my critiques won’t be entirely worthless.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, if I have a critique written up I may be able to convince some more experienced players to take a look at it. Getting critiqued on my critiques seems both meta, and rather helpful.
Next steps?
Displaying games. I’m thinking I may take a page out of Dave Peck’s book, and get a history-enabled go-game viewer to parse .sgfs of the games I’ve played. Ideally, I should be able to annotate those files directly and plug it into a preexisting library (WGo.js, anyone?) and get most of the functionality I need out of the box.
For so long as I’m using Github’s native hosting solution, I’m not going to be able to do dynamic games. I’ll just have to live with that for now.