Whenever I am asked about my
favorite game, I usually mention Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. I usually don’t
even consider chess, which I played “professionally” (as in I went to USCF
tournaments) in high school. Odds are however, there will be a point in my life
where I will stop playing Civilization IV, maybe because a different
Civilization game comes out or maybe because I can’t find 10 hours at a time to
play a single game. However I will probably always play chess. The fact that I
don’t even consider it when thinking about games means it has something transcendent
about it. Chess is universal (perhaps behind only soccer in terms of how
ingrained it is in global culture). What makes Chess so great? And will there ever be
a “new chess,” that is a game that takes the place of chess culturally?
As
Jesse Schell has mentioned a couple of times in my game design class, chess has
been perfected over centuries. Rules have been added and changed over and over
again until we have the game today. If a good game is the result of iteration,
chess has a massive head start. The history of the game adds so much to it
culturally. I’ve studied matches from the 1600s that were written down and
recorded. You certainly can’t watch replays of Soccer matches from that long
ago. Everyone, and I mean everyone,
knows chess and knows it is a deep and tactical game.
In general, Chess has been studied
a lot. I am very curious to know if there has been a game that has been studied
as much as chess. The fact that a game with 5 unique types of pieces is deep
enough that there are hundreds of names for different opening variations and
end game positions is astounding. The 5 units have been iterated over to perfection,
and both sides are nearly balanced (slight advantage to white). There is no
randomness, which is crucial, because it means the better player really is the
better player.
What
does all this mean in terms of game design? Is it possible to develop a “new
chess” that is as well regarded as chess? It’s probably possible, but very
difficult. The game would have to have fairly simple rules, but be very deep
strategically. There could not be any randomness. It would need the possibility
of being able to be studied deeply. Most importantly I think, is the medium of
the game. Chess can be played on the computer, but it isn’t (especially in
tournaments). There is something about physically moving the pieces and
physically taking your opponents pieces that makes the game so much better.
There is a reason why all sci-fi movies that have a “standard” game like chess
usually have it on a holographic, futuristic board rather than played on a
screen. The computer screen aspect may be the reason why e-sports (which are
certainly gaining in popularity) are still a niche hobby for “hardcore gamers.”
Even if
a game has all that, it will take a while for it to gain traction (especially
in today’s marketplace). Chess didn’t have to compete with thousands of other
games. But who knows, maybe in a hundred years, people are playing a game with
holographic pieces that hover or something, and no one will know what chess is.
Or the much more likely scenario, people are playing holographic chess.
I like your question 'will there ever be a "new chess"'? I would like to reference something that my Roots of Rock and Roll professor pointed out in the last few days of class: the center cannot hold. What he meant by this was generally that mass culture used to have a way of forming a center; lesser known subcultural music, in this example, would find its way to the mainstream and then become part of the larger culture. In a world where things didn't change much from year to year, or even decade to decade if you go back far enough, cultural artifacts had a long time to roll around in the collective consciousness before they were updated or replaced.
ReplyDeleteIn our digital age, though, content is created and shared at an enormous rate. People find their niches and dig into them, spitting back contributions into the ever-expanding flood of new media. There is no center anymore, at least not for long. There's always something new to grab at our attentions; it is a rare thing for a new song, artist, game, book, fashion, or form of media to hold the attention of anyone outside of a niche for more than a few years no matter how popular it was when it debuted.
Chess was here before that all happened. It had time to spread and develop and sink in its roots before the flood. It's not going anywhere, but neither is anything as specific as a board game likely to seize the collective consciousness in the same way from this point forward.
That's a good point. I like that quote. It's a pretty eloquent way of saying something I didn't communicate in my rambling post. It makes sense, but I'm not completely convinced it's impossible for there to be a new chess. Maybe as you mentioned, it might not be a mere board game, but perhaps a new medium all together.
DeleteI agree with Marlena's take on the question of whether or not a new chess will ever be created. On one hand it feels unfortunate that timeless classics are increasingly rare and maybe impossible on the same level as chess. At the same time, part of the problem is that there are so many new and amazing things being created all the time and more and more avenues to share them with each other.
ReplyDeleteThese tools at our fingertips also allow us to iterate even faster by having greater abilities to distribute our creations and to analyze their efficacy. Arguably there won't be games that can capture the world's attention on anywhere near the same level as chess, but the individual quality of our games and creations can certainly approach the simplistic brilliance of Chess.
Chess and other games like go in China and Japan are always classics and after so many years they even have turned into professions.I guess one of the reason people get endless passion about those games is that they are perfectly fair to players. Even though the rule is simple, there're so many different strategies according to the moves of players.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with mac, there are so many interesting games now and we tend to iterate faster than before. It's always good for game developers to think about doing more simple but powerful gameplays rather than a lot of not creative designs.
I wonder what it says about chess that computers are beating humans more and more often. This may point to the possibility that chess has an optimal solution. In other words, “a hypothetically determinable optimal strategy does exist for chess” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess). Supposedly this is still a long ways off due to limited computer power of even today’s strongest computers. But, what if… would chess still be the “Greatest Game”? Or even a “Great Game”? I don’t know. Maybe it would still be exciting to play as humans because we probably couldn’t memorize the optimal solution so we would still be playing mostly using our own skills. But, then again maybe it’s like a mystery novel that has the ending revealed. Would we relegate chess the the realm of tic-tac-toe which is solved and perfect play is known to result in a tie for both players?
ReplyDelete