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Games, Books and Gamebooks
  • ISSN: 1757-191X
  • E-ISSN: 1757-1928

Abstract

The novel Go (Kawabata 1954) tells about a soon-retiring professional player of the board game . Loosely documenting a single yet nearly six months long match of that took place in 1938, the book explores an exciting game that reflected the changing times of post-war Japan. Intriguingly, the ‘master’ Hon’inbō Shūsai is also an avid player of games other than . This article demonstrates how the concepts ‘coincident play’ (Wirman 2021) and ‘continuum of play’ (2014) help to unpack how games co-exist in people’s lived experiences and thus support and relate to each other in non-trivial ways. My interest is in where Go carefully describes how other games, namely the Japanese form of chess called , billiards, and , exist in relation to the ‘main game’ of played in the book. When discussing temporally adjacent play in relation to digital games, we should look for instances of play and games more broadly. The instances of coincident play in Go are not unlike how Chinese gold-miner players are reportedly playing the same game at their leisure (cf. Dibbell 2007), for example. We are players of games, not of a game. Our play traverses from one game to another and each game gives us something different. This is also why different life contexts and moments in person’s daily life call for different games. It is this traversing between games that is examined in this article.

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/content/journals/10.1386/jgvw_00105_1
2024-11-30
2025-02-17
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