Monty Cantsin wrote:

Zseni wrote:

...The real question under it all though is where is the game? Because it ain't in the same place for mindless Koreans as it is for mindless Americans; it's not in the same place for Kasparov or Sampras as it is for the piker. I want to suggest that not only are the games in different places, they are different games entirely, played for different goals. All the whiny whiteys want to play their particular game and know who is the best at it, but those yellow bastards have taken the gameboard and started doing something completely different and actively destructive to their game. It's not merely a question of high-level and low-level play.

Yeah, I think that a serious game played at a high level is "fun" of a particular kind, if you can even still call it fun at all. It's more like the higher-stakes and less immediately satisfying work-pleasure of a long-term creative, engineering, or theoretical project. High level players are sort of competing with each other to "solve" the game in a way (have I hedged that statement enough?) so it's not surprising that what they do can look like "breaking" the game to a casual player. Sometimes the game needs to be adjusted to compensate for imbalances (between strategies) that threaten to monopolize the gamespace. So, for example, the size and material of allowable tennis rackets and baseball bats, the legality of zone defense in basketball, the material and build-time cost of units in an rts, etc. Nonetheless, I can't imagine complaining about Boris Becker's serve or Babe Ruth's swing. I can't imagine wanting them to hold back for the good of the game, or being contemptuous of them for reducing the set of viable strategies. If you are serious player of game X it's your job to reduce that set, every match is a hypothesis about reducing that set, and your opponent's job is to test that hypothesis to the best of his or her abilities. You can think of that process as a destructive breaking down, or you can think of it as a collaborative carving away that is progressively revealing essential properties of the system.