#goygo

in the G.O.Y.G.O., i attempt to document the rough histories of competitive attitudes towards offense and defense, starting from antiquity. to summarize, the classical greek agon (ἀγών) was the closest thing the ancient greeks had to a unifying term for competition; it came to represent the competitive culture that motivated and permeated the olympics as well as their attitudes towards war, honor, etc.

in homer’s works, agon as embodied by achilles, who was invulnerable to physical attacks outside of the back of his left heel, was traditionally opposed to the inverse values found in odysseus, who had no superhuman strength or resilience but was noted for his ability to outwit even the gods themselves. early theories of war across the globe followed along these two axes; for example, much of sun tzu’s art of war deals with approaching war from an odyssean standpoint, avoiding conflict whenever possible and prioritizing positioning over head-to-head engagement. this alternative attitude towards war and conflict was called alea by the romans, and manifested itself in an unprecedented cultural fascination with chance-based dice games and other forms of gambling.

this dichotomy ceased to reflect the realities of war sometime around napoleon, who would avoid combat until an absolutely optimal position was found (traditionally defensive thought) at which point he would strike with numbers that always exceeded those of the enemy (traditionally offensive thought). this routine would traditionally culminate in the “decisive battle” in which the french armies defeated their opponents both physically and mentally, leaving them with little recourse outside of peace negotiations at napoleon’s whim. napoleon defeated every opponent he came across without exception until he finally set his sights on russia, which proved to be unfamiliar and unfavorable territory. suffering early defeats, the russian army withdrew further and further into their homeland, burning abandoned villages and farmland along the way. the latter turned out to be an effective strategy, compounding the french army’s increasing unfamiliarity with their surroundings with a new reliance on supply lines from their homeland. when napoleon finally did score the “decisive victory” that his entire theory of war revolved around at borodino, it ended up being the farthest thing from decisive, and his armies were so weakened that they ultimately had to retreat from moscow a little under a month after it was captured.

was napoleon too aggressive in the russian campaign of 1812? was he not aggressive enough? neither claim is sufficiently descriptive on its own. by napoleon’s time, war was no longer a simple tension between attack and defense; these terms became unified under the singular pursuit of absolutely optimal conditions and results of combat, and napoleon had been routed in part due to his unfamiliarity with an elusive and enigmatic opponent in russia.

around the turn of the millennium, mike flores postulated in his groundbreaking who’s the beatdown that the so-called relative roles of aggression (offense) and control (defense) were ever-changing throughout a game of magic: the gathering, even in a mirror match (a game between two of the same decks). it is not enough to play an aggressive deck aggressively 100% of the time; even the most balls-to-the-wall aggressive deck in the world must assume the role of the slow, responsive control deck at times to overcome other aggressive opponents.

consider a marth and a fox on opposite sides of final destination. if the marth dashes forward, has he made an aggressive or a defensive decision? is it aggressive because he has attempted to threaten the space closer to his fox opponent? or is it defensive because he has done so with the intent of controlling this space without ever having to throw out an attack?