In MP, "Treatise of Nomadology," D&G write about the distinction
between Go and chess as examples of rhizomatic and arboreal thinking
(pp. 352-353):
"Ches is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China
played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature
and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and
confrontations derive... Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks,
simple arithmatic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or
third-person function: "It" makes a move. "It" could be a man, a
louse, an elephant. Gp pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine
assemblage... All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire
constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so
diachronically only)."
So I thought to experiment with this on my computers. My chess
program is verypoor, and I have no Go game. So I improvised with
two common games, each running on one machine, me going from one
to the other. EMPIRE, a game of military expansion and conquest,
ran on the Amiga; MINESWEEPER, a game ofuncovering an encrypted
minefield using numerical cues and spatial relations, on the
Gateway. I was rapidly made awareof the diachronic nature of the
wargame: long sequences of units marching over terrain, gradual
changes in the battlefield, the distinct identities of each "piece":
army, troop transport, etc. MINESWEEPER became a lesson in synchronic
thought: every move threatened to uncover potentially vast swathes of
the board, or to destroy everything. There was of course a blur
between the two: I could manipulate EMPIRE so as to have many units
proceed simultaneously, and my progression in MINESWEEPER became
diachronic by reason of strategy. I'm not sure if this is a
limitation of my analogical experiment or an expression of the
interpenetration D&G consistently express about their oppositionary
models.
-Bryan
------------------
between Go and chess as examples of rhizomatic and arboreal thinking
(pp. 352-353):
"Ches is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China
played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature
and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and
confrontations derive... Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks,
simple arithmatic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or
third-person function: "It" makes a move. "It" could be a man, a
louse, an elephant. Gp pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine
assemblage... All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire
constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so
diachronically only)."
So I thought to experiment with this on my computers. My chess
program is verypoor, and I have no Go game. So I improvised with
two common games, each running on one machine, me going from one
to the other. EMPIRE, a game of military expansion and conquest,
ran on the Amiga; MINESWEEPER, a game ofuncovering an encrypted
minefield using numerical cues and spatial relations, on the
Gateway. I was rapidly made awareof the diachronic nature of the
wargame: long sequences of units marching over terrain, gradual
changes in the battlefield, the distinct identities of each "piece":
army, troop transport, etc. MINESWEEPER became a lesson in synchronic
thought: every move threatened to uncover potentially vast swathes of
the board, or to destroy everything. There was of course a blur
between the two: I could manipulate EMPIRE so as to have many units
proceed simultaneously, and my progression in MINESWEEPER became
diachronic by reason of strategy. I'm not sure if this is a
limitation of my analogical experiment or an expression of the
interpenetration D&G consistently express about their oppositionary
models.
-Bryan
------------------