So my good friend Greg suggested that I learn Go recently. After being schooled multiple times (both by him and my computer game on easy), I figured that I should actually go out and learn something about it in a more organized way.

Then it got me thinking… What is it that really makes a sandbox game?

Something where you have a large amount of freedom to play in the style you want, but more importantly where you have large amount of freedom to play in the way you want, doing anything you want before the world impinges on you and makes that impossible?

Examples that come to mind are the Ultima series, Oblivion, Arcanum/Fallout, but all of these have a large variety of types of ‘moves’ that you can make.

Go has “two simple rules”:
– You can place a piece on the board anywhere where it will not be immediately taken by your opponent
– You can take your opponent’s pieces by completely surrounding one or more of them them with no empty spaces in the group

But out of this, you can make the most elegant patterns, and so many emergent properties, in a “Conway’s Game of Life” way. You can make so many different shapes, that all mean different things, and that your opponent will respond to in different ways, depending on who they are.

Maybe it’s more of a co-operative sandbox game.

Investigation is ongoing.