American Go E-Journal » Go Spotting

Bart Lipofsky reports that on a recent episode of Jeopardy, aired on October 16, 2020, featured Go about two minutes into the segment. “‘Category: 2 letter words – The name of the game seen here,’ with a nice view of a stone being placed on the board,” says Lipofsky.

Dave Weimer reports that in Adrian McKinty’s novel, Rain Dogs, the protagonist – a Northern Ireland detective investigating a murder – goes to Finland to interview the prime suspect. When he arrives, he finds the suspect playing Go. In a later chapter entitled “Kami no Itte” the suspect cleverly eludes trial.

Weimer further reports that on page 162 of The Vegetarian, by Han Kang (translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith. London: Hogarth, 2016. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize and one of NYT 10 Best Books of 2016), there is the following passage: “There’d been a time when she could spend hours like this weighting up all the variables that might have contributed to determining Yeong-hye’s fate. Of course it was entirely in vain, this act of mentally picking up and counting the paduk stones that had been laid out on the board of her sister’s life.”

Andrew Okun reports that Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s book This is How You Lose the Time War and its inclusion of Go features in a new tor.com article called All Is Fair in Love & Go: Strategy Gaming in This is How You Lose the Time War. In the article, author Em Nordling states that “Go, in the context of Time War, is time travel. It isn’t just the 19×19 coordinate options that lend the game its complexity (though the 3^361×0.012 = 2.1×10^170 potential moves don’t hurt), but the positionality, the contingency. With the meaning of each move changing over time, its narrative is not linear. Where most strategy games unfold with the grace of a plotted story, Go moves map like a messy history, where meaning is made only in hindsight, where brilliance can turn obsolete and banality groundbreaking.” The book was first featured in Go Spotting by Adam Anaya in June of this year.

Tyler Keithley, president of the Southwest Missouri Go Club, reports that the second episode of The History of Home Narrated by Nick Offerman includes a mention of Go at 48:27 in a transition between explaining the historical importance of board games and the modern pastime of playing video games, and is again mentioned by Twitch streamer Sonja Reid (OMGITSFIREFOXX) around 50 minutes and 30 seconds into the episode.

Ted Terpstra reports that in Sara Paretsky’s 2009 collection, Windy City Blues, there is a 13-page story called “The Takamoku Joseki” beginning on page 246, in which her female private detective, V.I. Warshawski, solves a murder mystery at a Go gathering of Japanese, Korean, and American Go players at an apartment in Chicago.

Larry Russ reports that in this documentary about the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma Af Klint, from about 1:15 to 1:30 at the beginning of the documentary there is a Go board with bowls in the room where the speaker is being filmed. The documentary can be rented to view online here.

Adam Anaya reports that “Go is referenced many times in this creatively entertaining novella. ‘She decides she would describe it using terms from Go: You place each stone expecting it may do many things. A strike is also a block is also a different strike.'” This Is How You Lose the Time War was written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2019.

“There’s an amusing Go reference in the latest Order of the Stick, a Dungeons and Dragons style strip I’ve followed for years,” reports Mark Gilston. The storyline involves one of the characters finding a Go stone, whereupon another character recognizes it as a piece from a lesson that devolved into some confusion over what the game of Go was called in the vein of Abbot and Costello’s Who’s on First? Read it here.

“The one minute trailer for the 2018 Chinese historical drama The Rise of 
the Phoenixes: Season 1 references Go four times,” reports Joel Sanet. “The first time shows a beautiful woman looking downward then cuts to a single black stone wobbling on an otherwise empty go board. The second time shows two men talking. One says, ‘Are you going to let one stone destroy your entire Go Board?’ The 3rd time shows a man placing the 3rd corner stone but it’s white! (Were the rules different back then or were the film makers just being lazy?) The 4th time is similar to the 3rd. The 3rd and 4th time go appears are preceded, separated, and followed by action scenes so at the least it is being used metaphorically. Hey, that’s better than just window dressing!”