Within the context of Go there is no board game, its just sets of possible states and transitions between valid states. Any feature of the game Go is encoded within this state space. The "meaning" of pieces, moves, captures, win, loss, etc are all encoded here. The go playing machine may not capture these concepts explicitly at a high level, but I'm not sure that's an important distinction.
Concepts like board games, people, ancient Chinese culture, etc are all external to Go.
