I honestly believe that socialists ought to familiarize themselves with strategy games like Chess and Weiqi (Go). I've found that many leftists approach strategic questions with more the mindset of a religious adherent than the strategist, often believing that adherence to dogma and moral purity will carry them through rather than sound strategic reasoning. Strategy often consists less of assessing the situation as it is and weighting your options thusly, and more ritualistic aping of former revolutionary movements and their doctrines. This gives me the impression that many lefties don't have much experience thinking strategically, and I think could benefit greatly from classic games of strategy, like Chess and Weiqi/Go. By which, I don't mean you should master them, at a certain point the broader lessons of strategy games have get big diminishing returns as it becomes more and more about the specific rules of the game rather than broader strategic principles, but they should become familiar, as I don't believe you can really understand strategy unless you practice it.
Strategy Games
On the contrary improvements in tactical skill and blunder avoidance increase the strategic depth of these games
either way showing is better than telling, would you like to play a malkovitch game?
Yes, but this is based around the rules of the games themselves, rather than something more general.
What's a Malkovich game?
every leftist should read this imo, this book changed my life as much as Marxist theory did
A malkovitch game is played on a forum where the players explain the reasoning behind each of their moves
generally behind spoilers so the opponent has the option of not reading them until the end of the game
You might be surprised
Anyway do you prefer chess or go?
Redpill me on Guy Debords A Game of War.
Have you actually read it? It's a piece of shit stating things that or obvious for anyone that have played only a minute of the most basic games possible.
Chess was promoted in the Soviet Union and that's something we should do again.
Was about to post about this. Wasn't there an online version a while ago? Not sure what happened to it.
Actual Kriegsspiel seems pretty interesting too, though I wouldn't know because it's one of those really niche games in an already niche hobby.
Rather play my hand at learning ML algorithms then get bogged down by capitalist AI generals in the field of combat.
pdf plz
I have a physical copy of this and it sucks. You'd get more out of reading Spookman, since a lot of it is "morals don't real" type shit telling you to press your advantages instead of caring about muh honor. I guess it's worth reading for historical perspective and because it's short (like pamphlet short).
lmao
Chess is a feudal remnant, socialists should develop a new version of chess where the black and white pieces all work together to overthrow the two kings and queens
Mao truly was the physical embodiment of a galaxy brain
Chess is garbage.
The Soviet Union fell, probably because of chess: the leadership became stupid exercising in a tedious mechanic game autisticly based only in calculation power and unnatural overstretching concentration.
Better play risk! or poker
smart dude
just play arma as a milsim roleplay tbh, teaches you good shit if you got dedicated players that try to have serious fun and dont just dick around
also its more fun, immersive, involves more people and different mindsets to take into consideration and all that
Why do chinks have such a nack for poetically saying the painfully obvious
How will playing fucking checkers stop you from being bogged down by "honor"?
Also your post is autistic as fuck, comrade shifu. Learning to play chess or waxing a car doesnt make you a better kung fu fighter.
Lol, might as well make Wilson the next lenin.
because it wasnt, two thousand years ago when it was written
is a good example of why even the most stupid person born today is smarter than masters born long ago
ideas that took years of experience and concentration are now intuitively understood
...
Hunter gatherers had bigger brains than proles today
I heavily recommend playing strategy bluffing games like the resistance or secret Hitler to make the revolution come faster
I play a lot of those hexagonal-grid strategy games but don't get too wrapped up in them. Chess is just a game but people fetishize it and think you're "smart" if you're good at chess, when what it really means is that you're good at chess.
they should read Mao, Che, etc. as well.
that's gold, is there a source for that?
Leftists should play HOI4. Grand strategy based on real life politics and government.
HoI4 is good, but it's pretty much an arcade game compared to actual government/military simulators, with memes out of the ass. Could have at least recommended HoI3 if not something more serious.
It's better than nothing and more interesting than chess
Because you can learn certain strategic principles from playing strategy games. It’s something that’s not always intuitive.
Not checkers, though, a real strategy game.
if you practice chess you become good at chess. however, being a good chess player won't help in real world politics or combat situations. you need to study politics, history, economics and combat techniques in order to become a good strategist and tactician in these fields.
I don’t disagree with this, but these games will familiarize you with the basics of strategic thinking.
In times of AI learning how to outsmart an opponent and developing new techniques becomes more important than ever. Humanity not only lost against AI in chess but also in Go. More severely, we don't understand why we lost. What sounds like a sci-fi scenario is a research which is not about learning from insight but simply rejoice at phenomena. Debug doesn't work anymore, you can only train them more or in a new way. Imagine a health system managed by AI. It does its magic and heals patients in mysterious ways. Then, adverse events occur and cannot deduce the causes. By the way, we have this kind of problems outside of Go - without AI.
Soviets learned how to sacrifice peas- ehm pawns.
I like to recommend three strategic board games.Twilight Struggle for its lesson how potential scenarios due to the Cold War could look like. Imperial for its simulation of being a Phezzanian merchant. And last but not least Risk Legacy for its development of a postmodern classic.
All three games are intersubjectively rated as of the TOP 200.
boardgamegeek.com
boardgamegeek.com
boardgamegeek.com
I love playing Go, but I'm pretty bad at it. Maybe I can hit 1 dan in a few years.. other than that I do play a lot of strategy vidya like grand strategy games, tactical games(like Xcom and Xenonauts), and SRPGs. I agree a lot of people here come across like thoughtless dogmatists. Marcyists in particular come across that way.
Yeah. I'm a bad chess player but just good enough to crush my friends (on account of playing a lot with my dad when I was a little kid). I mainly go for building a resilient defense which can absorb the shock my opponent's attack, which disrupts him and allows me to go on the offensive. That's strategy, right?
My favorite tactic is a crude Alekhine's gun which is two rooks back to back that piledrive right into the opponent's line. You will lose one or both but if you do it right, you'll do immense amounts of damage.
Named after Alexander Alekhine, who left the Soviet Union on account of being pro-Nazi. He ended up joining the Greater Germany Chess Federation during the war, and retired in Francoist Spain to escape the Red Army. His older brother stayed behind in the USSR and got "taken care of" suffice to say. Alexander then spent most of his time bouncing around Spain and Portugal, forbidden from traveling elsewhere on account of his Nazism, and died in 1946 after choking on a piece of meat.
He most certainly choked on the meat himself. Certainly! Definitely! What, you mean the piece of meat wasn't actually chewed when the coroners fished it out of his throat? Nonsense. Absolutely no Soviet agents forced it down his throat. Hey, I don't ask too many questions…
Being good at board games does not translate to being good at politics or anything else for that matter. Also Code Gayass is shit, watch better anime op
Games are fascist
I thought Mao required all his generals to play Weiqi and thought warfare was basically Weiqi.
The U.S. military has actually done exercises where they play Hearts of Iron. Not a substitute for training obviously but mainly as a way to think about strategic concepts in a different way.
While I agree that some creativity is lost with the standardized openings, and it’s obvious that Bobby Fischer hated them (in fact, a good deal of his playstyle was based around subverting these openings), I disagree that it somehow cheapens the game and makes it more about memorization. These moves are merely openings and serve to set the terms of the game, they don’t define the entirety of it.