Why the game of Go defies the universe

When we think of strategically complex board games, Chess is usually the first name that comes to mind for most people. However, if we look strictly at the mathematics behind the gameplay possibilities, the Western classic looks almost simple compared to the ancient Eastern game of Go.



A fascinating trivia piece from the Brazilian book "A descoberta dos números: uma aventura matemática" (The discovery of numbers: a mathematical adventure), by mathematician Marcelo Viana, helps us put this scale into a cosmic perspective.

Numbers That Defy the Universe

In Chess, it is estimated that there are "only" 10⁴⁰ (the number 1 followed by 40 zeros) possible positions on the board. That is an enormous amount, without a doubt.

Yet, when we move to the Go board, the simple rules of surrounding territories generate an unbelievable combinatorial explosion: the number of possible positions is greater than 10¹⁷⁰ (the number 1 followed by 170 zeros).

To give you an idea of what this actually means:

• 10⁴⁰: Estimated possible positions in Chess.
• 10⁸⁰: Estimated number of atoms in the entire known universe.
• 10¹⁷⁰: Possible positions in Go.

The Game Design and A.I. Nightmare

In other words, there are drastically more possible configurations in a single game of Go than there are grains of sand on Earth, stars in the sky, or atoms scattered across the entire observable cosmos.

For anyone who studies or works with game design, this brutal difference explains why computers took so long to defeat human masters at Go. While "brute force" calculation managed to beat world Chess champion Garry Kasparov back in 1997 (with Deep Blue), a purely mathematical approach was physically impossible for Go. No machine could ever compute 10¹⁷⁰ paths.

It required the development of deep neural networks and artificial intelligence based on intuition and continuous learning (like DeepMind's AlphaGo) to finally break through the barrier of this infinite tangle of nodes and branches in 2016.

Go proves that, sometimes, the most minimalist rules yield the most vast and unpredictable systems that the human mind—and the universe itself—can fathom.

#GoGamers  

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Reference:

VIANA, Marcelo. A descoberta dos números: Uma aventura matemática. Rio de Janeiro: Tinta da China, 2025.

Understanding games as media: from McLuhan to Flanagan

The understanding of games as a media phenomenon finds one of its foundational theoretical milestones in Marshall McLuhan’s seminal work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). In the chapter dedicated to the subject, titled "Games: The Extensions of Man", McLuhan proposes a rupture with the trivialized view of play, elevating games to the same epistemological status as any other medium of communication. According to the author:

games are popular art, collective social reactions to the main drive and pressure of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism (MCLUHAN, 1964, p. 235).

This definition articulates two essential theoretical movements. The first concerns the collective and participatory nature of games: unlike other media, the game presupposes the subject's active adherence to its formal structure, what McLuhan terms interplay, meaning the dialogic quality that transforms the game into a system of symbolic exchanges among participants (MCLUHAN, 1964, p. 242). The second movement refers to the modeling function of games in relation to the culture that generates them; as the author notes, "games are faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image" (MCLUHAN, 1964, p. 235).



In this sense, the game does not represent culture from the outside; it is culture in operation, codified into ritualized rules, tensions, and resolutions. McLuhan articulates this thesis within his broader conception of media as extensions of the human body and mind. Every medium prolongs a human faculty: the wheel extends the foot, the book extends the eye, and games, as media, extend the social nervous system, offering models of collective participation that escape the fragmentation of specialized labor. This is precisely why the author states that "games are situations contrived and controlled extensions of group consciousness, which permit a release from customary patterns, as if society were holding a conversation with itself" (MCLUHAN, 1964, p. 244).

This perspective finds contemporary resonance in the work of Flanagan (2009), who situates digital games within the broader framework of hegemonic cultural media. Flanagan points out that digital games can be considered a contemporary medium, and that computers and video game consoles have become a highly significant cultural vehicle, reaching diverse audiences across different economic and social classes, ages, and genders (FLANAGAN, 2009, p. 1). The convergence between McLuhan’s and Flanagan’s theses lies precisely in the affirmation of the game as a mass communication system, not merely by the volume of transmitted messages, but by its capacity to engender forms of cultural participation and identification on an expanded scale.

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References:

FLANAGAN, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009.

McLUHAN, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

New look, new projects: my game design portfolio is live!

Building a strong portfolio is essential for any game designer. It serves as your visual and functional resume, showcasing not just the finished products, but your creative process and problem-solving skills.

Here are three fundamental advantages of having a dedicated game design portfolio:

1.Proof of versatility: it demonstrates your ability to work across different genres, mechanics, and platforms—whether digital or analog.

2.narrative of process: a good portfolio explains the "why" behind your design choices, proving your strategic thinking to potential collaborators and clients.

3.professional identity: it establishes your unique voice and design philosophy in a highly competitive industry.

I'm happy to share that my portfolio website has been completely updated with a fresh new look! Check out my latest projects and games here! Click in the image below:



#GoGamers

THE ART OF FAILING WELL: Jesper Juul and the paradox at the heart of games

There is something strange about the way we play video games. We load them up knowing full well that we are going to fail — sometimes spectacularly, sometimes painfully, almost always repeatedly. And yet we keep going. We press continue. We retry. We lose an hour to a single boss fight and call it a good evening.



Jesper Juul, in The Art of Failure (2013), offers one of the most lucid and uncomfortable explanations for this behavior: failure is not a flaw in game design. It is the point.

Two kinds of failure

Juul opens his analysis by drawing a crucial distinction that any thoughtful player will immediately recognize:

"two types of failure: 1) real failure occurs when a player invests time into playing a game and fails; 2) fictional failure is what befalls the character(s) in the fictional game world." (JUUL, 2013, p. 25)

The example he gives is about Red Dead Redemption (*spoiler alert*). To advance the story, you must die with John Marston. There is no other way. The character's death is narratively mandatory; it is a fictional failure scripted into the architecture of the game. But the player's experience of that moment is something else entirely: real time invested, real emotional weight, and a loss that is simultaneously required and felt.

This double layer (the fictional and the real running in parallel) is what separates games from most other media. When you watch a film and the protagonist dies, you grieve. When you play a game and your character dies, you also grieve, but you also feel responsible. You were there. You were in control. The controller was in your hands.

Why we want to fail (at least a little)

This is where Juul's argument gets genuinely counterintuitive. He identifies two coexisting desires at work in the player:

"In games: 1) Immediate desire – desire to avoid failure; 2) Aesthetic desire – desire for an experience that includes partial failure." (JUUL, 2013, p. 43)

These two desires are in direct tension, and that tension is productive. You want to win — every instinct pushes toward success. But a game in which you never fail is not a game; it is an animation. The resistance of failure is what gives victory its meaning. More than that: partial failure, the stumble before the climb, is aesthetically desirable. It structures the experience. It creates the narrative arc that makes the eventual success feel earned. 

Juul pushes this further on page 45, offering a deceptively simple formulation that reframes the entire philosophy of play:

"Games are a perspective on failure and learning as enjoyment, or satisfaction." (JUUL, 2013, p. 45)

Games are not about succeeding. They are about the experience of learning to succeed — and that learning is, in itself, the pleasure. This has profound implications for how we think about difficulty, accessibility, and the design of failure states. A game that punishes without teaching fails its own purpose. A game that challenges while guiding turns failure into a feedback loop, and that loop is fun.

The emotional contract

There is another dimension to all of this that Juul does not let us ignore: emotion. We are not passive processors when we play. We are invested — sometimes uncomfortably so.

"We are emotionally affected by games, and we are aware of this before we start playing." (JUUL, 2013, p. 56)

This is remarkable if you sit with it. Before we press start, we already know that we will feel something. We anticipate frustration, excitement, satisfaction, even grief. We consent to being emotionally implicated. Games are, in this sense, a form of voluntary emotional exposure — and the management of that exposure, how much failure a player can absorb before the experience sours, is one of the deepest challenges in game design.

Responsibility and the fictional world

The most philosophically rich passage Juul offers on the subject comes near the end of the book, in a reflection on fictional tragedy:

"The problem with fictional tragedy also showed that it is failure that makes us feel responsible for the events in the fictional world." (JUUL, 2013, p. 117)

And then, almost as a counterpoint:

"Hamlet dies but it is not our fault." (JUUL, 2013, p. 118)

The contrast is sharp and clarifying. In theater, in film, in literature — we witness. We may be moved, we may be changed, but we are not culpable. Hamlet's death happens to him. In a game, your character's death happens because of you. The failure is yours, even when it is fictional. The agency that makes games uniquely engaging is the same agency that makes their failures uniquely personal.

This is why the death of John Marston lands differently than the death of any movie hero. You did not just watch it. You lived it, failed at it, and then had to choose to press continue.

What this means for design

Juul's framework has direct implications for anyone thinking seriously about game design. The management of failure — its frequency, its cost, its legibility, its emotional register — is not incidental to the game. It is the game. A well-designed failure state teaches, resets, and motivates. A poorly designed one exhausts, obscures, and alienates.

The games we remember most vividly are often those that failed us most meaningfully. The boss that took forty attempts. The level we thought was impossible. The narrative moment that demanded we lose before we could continue. These are not bugs in the experience. They are the experience.

Jesper Juul's The Art of Failure is a short book with a long argument, and that argument is this: to understand games, you must understand failure not as a negative outcome to be avoided, but as the generative force that makes play meaningful.

We load the game. We know we are going to fail. We press start anyway.

That is not masochism. That is game design.

#GoGamers

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Reference:
JUUL, Jesper. The Art of Failure: an essay on the pain of playing video games. Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2013.

From game to the big screen: the minimalist horror of Iron Lung

Last year, I had the privilege of presenting my research on the indie Iron Lung at the Video Game Cultures conference in Prague. It was an incredible opportunity to discuss how creative constraints can redefine digital dread with scholars from around the world. I am now thrilled to share that this research has been expanded and transformed into a full book chapter, set to be published very soon, providing a deeper academic dive into how minimalism can maximize psychological horror.

While adapting the original conference paper into this upcoming book chapter, I saw a unique opportunity to expand the analysis by including the recently announced Iron Lung film adaptation. Observing how this indie narrative is transitioning to the cinema not only enriched the academic text but also served as the primary inspiration for this blog post. It is awesome to see how a project rooted in extreme digital minimalism is now evolving to challenge audiences in a completely different medium.

Check the content below!

• • •   

Minimalism, dread, and the leap to cinema

The timing of this publication couldn't be more appropriate. This month, David Szymanski’s oppressive masterpiece makes its debut in theaters, marking a significant milestone where indie game narratives occupy diverse media spaces. Iron Lung (2022) is a masterclass in what I term "horror ludens"—a playful yet terrifying engagement with fear that thrives not on high-fidelity graphics, but on the power of restraint.



The game’s transition to film underscores a core argument of my study: that the most unsettling stories are those that leave the most to the imagination. In the game, players are confined to a rusted submarine in an ocean of blood, forced to navigate using only a grainy, low-fidelity camera and rudimentary sonar. This "meta-diegetic" interface—where in-world tools are the only source of information—forces the player to become a co-author of their own terror. As Iacovides et al. (2015) suggest, removing traditional non-diegetic overlays (like HUDs) prevents immersion breaks, making the character's struggle identical to the player's cognitive labor.



Whether in the cockpit of a virtual sub or a seat in a dark theater, Iron Lung leverages "cosmic dread" by restricting sensory input. This forces our minds to fill the vast visual gaps with personalized forms of terror. As the film brings this desolate, blood-submerged moon to a wider audience, it continues to prove that in horror design, "less is more". By subjecting ourselves to these "unnecessary obstacles," we find a unique ludic pleasure in navigating existential despair.

 

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References:

Iacovides, Ioanna, Jon Cox, Richard Kennedy, Paul Cairns, and Charlene Jennett. 2015. “Removing the HUD: The Impact of Non-diegetic Game Elements and Expertise on Player Involvement.” In Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, 13–22. London: ACM.

Mastrocola, Vicente Martin. 2014. Horror Ludens: Medo entretenimento e consumo em narrativas de videogames. São Paulo: Livrus.

Suits, Bernard. 2005. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Toronto: Broadview Encore Editions.

#GoGamers

The strategic pivot: integrating uncertainty into the game design process

In the realm of functional design, predictability is often viewed as the ultimate benchmark of quality. As Costikyan (2013, p. 16) argues, in real-life situations—such as shopping online, electing a congressman, or utilizing software for work—we demand a lack of ambiguity, noting that "we prefer simplicity, surety, and consistency." In these contexts, uncertainty is a defect to be mitigated, as users prioritize efficiency and the seamless achievement of specific goals. However, the architecture of game design operates on a fundamentally different logic, where the elimination of the unknown would result in a sterile and unengaging experience.

While we strive to minimize unpredictability in quotidian services, within the ludic context, "a degree of uncertainty is essential" (COSTIKYAN, 2013, p. 16). This element serves as the primary catalyst for player immersion and entertainment, transforming a static system into a dynamic challenge. By strategically withholding information or complicating the path to victory, designers create a "possibility space" that compels players to remain cognitively engaged. Without this tension between the player's intent and the outcome's volatility, the experience loses its competitive and emotional resonance.



The implementation of this uncertainty is not monolithic but is derived from various structural layers. Costikyan (2013) analyzes different kinds of games and explains that sometimes uncertainty comes from programmed random results, such as dice rolls or procedural generation; other times, uncertainty lies within opponents and how they perform, particularly in multiplayer environments. Ultimately, uncertainty may result from the player's own abilities in the game, where the execution of a maneuver or the solution to a puzzle remains in doubt until the moment of fruition.

Therefore, the game design process must be viewed as the calibrated management of these various "sources of doubt". A successful designer does not merely create a set of rules, but rather orchestrates a sophisticated balance between agency and chance. By understanding that uncertainty is not a flaw to be corrected, but a strategic tool to be leveraged, developers can craft experiences that transcend simple utility, providing the meaningful struggle that defines the very essence of play.

#GoGamers

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Reference:
COSTIKYAN, Greg. Uncertainty in games. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013.

My most played mechanics of 2025: why trick-taking and climbing stole the show

In 2025, my journey through the world of tabletop gaming was defined by a deep dive into two specific mechanics: trick-taking and climbing. Looking back at the hundreds of hands played, these genres provided the most tension, strategy, and pure excitement at my table. There is an undeniable elegance in how these games use a simple deck of cards to create complex social dynamics and tactical puzzles, making them my most-played styles of the year.



My fascination with trick-taking reached new heights through titles that pushed the boundaries of the traditional formula. Sáng Dèn stood out for its incredible atmosphere and the way it forced me to rethink how I managed my hand, while Salty provided a sharper, more competitive edge that kept my gaming group coming back for "just one more round." Perhaps the most experimental highlight was Match-fixer’s High, a game that brilliantly subverted the goal of winning tricks, turning every lead into a psychological battle of manipulation and calculated risks. These games proved that even within a centuries-old mechanic, there is still so much room for innovation.

On the other side of the coin, climbing and shedding games offered a completely different kind of rush. The feeling of jumping over an opponent's play with a stronger combination is unmatched, and Odin was undoubtedly the king of this experience for me in 2025. Its clever system of incorporating played cards back into your hand transformed the math of the game into a fluid, evolving strategy. I also found myself captivated by the high-stakes combinations in Haggis (excellent for two players, by the way), which remains a masterclass in card play, and the chaotic, inventive energy of Inchiki Daifugo. Whether I was trying to master a lead in a trick-taking game or aiming to be the first to empty my hand in a climbing match, these titles defined my year in gaming and solidified these mechanics as my absolute favorites.

#GoGamers