Re: Penteholics Unanimous
Posted:
Aug 1, 2009, 3:18 PM
thanks brf (and for the editing tip)
I think you have made some good points, and the coloured glass stones are appealing.
I was speaking to a newbie today and this player has logged in 176 times but had only joined on July 7 2009 and now its August 3 2009. This is 6 log-ins per day! I think 12 steps wont be quite enough for that little puppy...
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Re: Penteholics Unanimous
Posted:
Aug 5, 2009, 11:08 AM
To quickly add my 2.5 cents...
I found pente instantly compelling and addictive. Every element promotes an elegant simplicity that can chaotically develop into unexpected patterns of aesthetic and tactical beauty. It also has a pace where the gratifications of strength and the regrets of weakness come quickly. It's an empirical demonstration of competitive wit and cunning in an abstract arena of simple stones and rules.
Personally, I tend toward obsession and snobbish standards of excellence, so the chance to better my game with another 10 or 20 min round of head to head battle is quite exhilarating. I, like most people don't enjoy losing, but find it always to be exceptionally educational and humbling. All done in the hope the next round will vindicate the hours of dedication and focus with the thrill of a hard sought win.
The interpersonal competitive aspect adds flesh and blood reality to the black and white game. I can tell I'm engaged in a good match when I feel the game induced neuro-chemically heightened awareness, and faster heart rate; the fight or flight response where flight is a priori antithetical. Only the will to press forward with strength to gain the initiative and eventually the win matters. In pente, like life, every move is valuable. Every turn brings the opportunity to efficiently bring pente one stone closer. It plays like an existential microcosmic analog to competitive life in an environment of boundaries, scarce resources, limited opportunities, and finite durations of play. Also like life, the field of play is never balanced. You either have the advantage or not, and must fight with passion and intellect to prevent your opponent from effectively limiting your moves.
One other important dimension that parallels nicely between real life and pente, is that the game is one episode after another, chained together and culminating in a wealth of ever renewing experience. New opponents offer new points of view on old relationships, and new challenges to accepted patterns. Just when I think I've finally uncovered or understood some central concept relating patterns of strength and control, I find that the intricacies are so much more complicated and the implications so far reaching, and hard to calculably predict in the course of chaotic play that no matter what you think you know about pente, you can never know it all. The underlying reason is that the combinations of choices in this system of variables are virtually, if not actually, infinite. Each person sees new flavors of possibilities, creating along the way new structures, sequences, and strategies.
Yay for pente...
Message was edited by: dweebo at Aug 5, 2009 7:13 AM Fixed the ?'s, probably pasted from word.
Re: Penteholics Unanimous
Posted:
Aug 5, 2009, 6:47 PM
Thanks peter80 (aka dweebo).
It is interesting how often the metaphor for life theme comes up when describing the game playing experience. If you read the fundamentals of game theory, 'the bargaining problem', and if you study John Nash's Equilibrium Theory you start to see that games are not just a metaphor for life, but are actually a direct abstraction from it. According to game theory, Life is a game and we all play it, so we instantly recognise the essense of life in other games. It turns out that we can just as readily mathematically describe competitive events in life as we can board games. They are affectively one and the same.
I think you and the other respondants together have captured much of what makes one passionate about Pente specifically. Which is what I was hoping we could get at - that unique essense or combination of characteristics that stimulates the intellect, gets the heart pumping, and puts you on the edge of your seat. The endless complexity from simplicity, the unpredictability and subtelty, the aesthetics and the dynamics. These ingredients make for a delicious recipe that we cant seem to get enough of.
For me the only question that remains is this: Why aren't more people playing this great game? Anyone?
O&O
Message was edited by: alisontate at Aug 14, 2009 4:23 AM
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Re: Penteholics Unanimous
Posted:
Aug 5, 2009, 7:48 PM
Game Theory... yep..... a definite assumption in my response... he he..... I originally came in contact with those thoughts through Tim Leary.... it's been a while, but i also remember another interesting treatment of the subject, "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse .....
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Re: Penteholics Unanimous
Posted:
Aug 6, 2009, 9:38 PM
My interest in the game:
1. The simplicity and the difficulty, it is what you make it...fun or serious, brutal or tame, etc. I enjoy the game against my daughter and also against a great for differing reasons.
2. The possibilities. There are so many possibilities. Just when you think You have seen it all some new brain enters the circle and teaches you something new.
3. Community. The Pente community is intelligent, mostly logical, always a lil crazy, but most of all kind and generous. I like the people that flock to pente because it makes me feel like I am among others like me.
4. It gave me a reason to get up in the morning when I was facing my own mortality. I wanted to learn the next new line, or watch the greats duke it out across the board.
5. Online Pente. Love it, because I am exposed to others minds and the way they work sitting in the comfort of my own. That is hard to beat. I learned so much coming to this site and playing te. About humans, about pente, about community.
Twas and Is awesome!!! We created Pente Addiction Anonymous a few years ago with the first league Vitals created and called it Pente Anonymous, had a 5 step program. This was way before you had separate ratings for speed games and such, most people had speed accounts haha Those were the days. Or how about when we all came together and created the WPPF...those were some cool times.
I think this is worth a nickel or two, who is going to give me my dime? LOL
Re: Penteholics Unanimous
Posted:
Aug 7, 2009, 2:18 AM
Thanks Partica for those interesting thoughts and feelings. And I certainly agree that there are some great people in here and some great minds. It also sounds like there are some things from the good 'ol days we ought to try to resurrect! I hope to see you in here and playing a game or two with me sometime!
Everyone keep those posts coming, its great to hear everyone's thoughts!
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Re: Penteholics Unanimous
Posted:
Nov 2, 2010, 12:41 AM
I know I'm late to this thread, having not been here when it actually happened, but Alison brought up an interesting topic and I just wanted to add a few thoughts. It was great to see Peter mention Carse's little-known little book "Finite and Infinite Games." Another great one is "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who spent most of his life studying what people describe as their most deeply enjoyable experiences. I think the reason we find Pente so addictive is that it facilitates so many of the factors that are so common to our most enjoyable and high quality experiences as described in that book: 1) a challenging activity that requires skills; 2) the task is usually not so easy as to lead to boredom, not so hard as to lead to anxiety or frustration; 3) it involves concentration, leading to absorption in the task, with loss of self-consciousness; 4) there are clear goals and feedback. Symbolic systems, whether science or philosophy or software coding or chess or Pente, can become addictively absorbing mental worlds where psychic entropy is replaced by all of the above. Certainly with Pente 1) skill is involved; 2) you can usually experience a ongoing motivating mix of wins and losses, even as your skills continue to grow; 3) games are, for many, very absorbing, with the problems and worries of the real world temporarily forgotten; 4) the goals are certainly clear and the feedback - am I doing well, should I not have moved there? - tends to come fairly quickly. Of course different personality types will gravitate toward different 'flow' experiences; some prefer dance or Tai Chi or motorcycle maintenance or cooking or conversation, which can and very often do also involve all of the above common factors of optimal experiences. I think there are particular personality types - INTPs, in the Myers-Briggs classification system, for example - that find games like Pente or Go or chess especially addictive. But the Pente Personality is another topic.
