Like seriously, if anyone here has seen Go-Soccer, a fake sport from Nichijou if you've ever seen it (which you should, it's awesome), I'm just always caught up thinking about Mahjong like that. With people staring at eachother intensely, and taking weird yoga positions, followed by balancing Go pieces on their heads and hands, and then awesome flying acrobatics and pyrotechnics, and a referee does a somersault off a two story building, and both players bust out crying as one is declared the winner. And there's like 100 people watching, and every single soul besides you is understanding everything that is going on, and it still winds up being awesome.
That's what it's like watching Akagi play Mahjong.
I swear, I have no idea how a game this complicated is popular across I-don't-know how many cultures. My quandary is further muddled, since further investigation has yielded that there's variations of Mahjong for individual countries and cities. Even more so upon finding out some of those variations have scoring systems so complicated that even professional players need to use large, unwieldy scoreboards in order to keep track.
I mean, yeah, I can see that the game offers alot in the way of variation, chance, skill, player interaction, and styles of play. It also has a long tradition, so I can see that. I just want to see though, the guy that invented it, how did he manage to sell this game to other people? People in ancient china must have been the most bored people ever to look at this game, and it's labyrinth of rules, and think that it was the greatest thing ever. Plus, the pieces probably could have been made cheaply and durably, so there was probably also that.