Check Mating

A relatively brief post this time. I just wanted to quickly revisit disagreements with an analogy that may help to illuminate, and hopefully contribute towards unifying, what has already been said.

Games are a form of expression that operates on a radically different level to others such as music, film and literature. These other mediums of art are good at representing the world to us – generally speaking - how it ‘objectively’ appears in the case of film, what we think of it in the case of literature, how it makes us feel in the case of music. In all cases they direct our passive attention to what the creator feels is important. Games also direct what we see and hear but their defining feature is that they direct our ability to make decisions, our agency. While the language of film is written in our preconscious senses, the language of games is written in the active, decision making human consciousness – a games pace and resonance is dependant on the way in which we make decisions and the way in which we choose to act. Games makers are closer to gods than any other artists because they are not only the makers of worlds but they are also mind-makers. They make what there is to be seen in their world, how those things are seen and even the kinds of thoughts that players can have about them within their game-world. When playing chess, while I am free to make decisions I can only make decisions about the game in terms of the finite number of legal moves. If I were to play a game where I let pieces move as it was convenient for me to move them then I would no longer be playing chess or thinking in the ways that chess demands. In the same way I can only justly judge a movie in terms of the images and sounds that it presents me with – it is not a bad movie if my popcorn is sweet when I asked for salted. The designers of games are creating a world and a common language for players to engage within with each other, sometimes the opponent is another player sometimes it is the designers themselves.

Chess is a particularly pure environment for two consciousnesses to engage with one another. It is relatively unfiltered because the board and pieces obey rigid, unchanging rules, player’s start on equal footing and there is no chance. On the chessboard it is the decisions the players make, their consciousnesses alone that determine the outcome. Two minds are locked together in an abstract but easily grasped fashion. The board and the pieces are pure order and in their predictability their significance fades away; they are nothing but a medium for two minds to connect.

Chess is so enduring, in part, for this reason – the mediated connection of minds that the game requires promotes moments of love. These moments of love tend to manifest themselves as a deeper respect for the mind of the opponent to see in advance and predict our own decisions. The intense and almost primal struggle that the game abstractly represents by leaving nothing to chance can create be life-affirming in the same way camping in the wilderness can be: even just holding ones own can be satisfying.

The moments of love that chess creates are not the only reason for it’s enduring popularity as a game. Chess is a game of great elegance and beauty. The logical predictability, the law-abiding world that it creates is beautiful. We know that there is a logical limit to the number of games of chess that are playable. We know that theoretically two ‘perfect’ players should always draw – it is, after all, essentially just a more complex version of noughts and crosses. We know that given the nature of the game, there ought to be ‘right’ moves so long as you plan far enough ahead. In spite of this, there are more different possible games of chess than there are atoms in the galaxy. Even some of the best players will not see every possible outcome because although the core game is very simple, there is a cumulative complexity that builds over several moves and several games.

This is where the true beauty in chess lies – knowing that there is a right move but that we will never fully see it. It is the beauty of knowing that a thing is theoretically knowable but also knowing that you will never fully know it. It is the sublime of an incomprehensibly massive mountain range or of looking at the stars. It is also the sublime of falling in love – of trying to understand an other, to catch glimpses of the whole but know that you will likely never quite piece it all together.

In the game of chess players are set up in adversarial roles. Both players are trying to win against the other by using only their natural wits – no chance; no quantative differences in knowledge make a difference. Games including chance may simulate the external factors of the real world better than chess, providing a better representative simulation of concerns that affect real life decisions i.e. they simulate the randomness of life in the world. In stripping away chance, chess challenges the players to ‘beat’ each other in an ‘all things are equal’ environment.

I am not, however, trying to suggest that winning at chess makes you more intelligent than the loser – more likely you have just played more chess – you see the connections between moves more quickly, allowing you to plan further ahead. You may not even be better at that, it may just be that you are more consistent – you do not make ‘silly’ mistakes like accidentally giving away your queen. In situations where I have won a game of chess because my opponent accidentally threw away the game by making a silly mistake it is a hollow victory – I have not won because of my ingenuity, skill or even deception. They have not lost because they have been outsmarted. They just made a mistake. By chance. Most players take this frustration as a part of the game – we’re only human and it’s just a game. They don’t mind losing or they are confident I too will make a similar mistake – I often do, so there is usually everything left to play for.

At university, I was lucky enough to live in a chess-playing house. For a period of two or three months I would play at least two games a day. These games would always start out as a normal chess game: two players trying to win. After a while though, we started playing with a different mindset. Silly mistakes ruined the game for both the winning player and the losing player. We began to stop allowing them, with an ‘are you sure?’ to begin with, and later on we would spend time, the two of us (or more if there were spectators) going over several moves, forward and back, to prevent checkmates from happening, 6 or 7 moves in the future. Often, I would play games where I would be checkmated early on and we would take the game back to the point where I would be able to get out of it. Then, later on I would checkmate my opponent and we would do the same. Some games began to include three or more checkmates at different stages of the game, from either player.

In some ways this way of playing sucks the fun out of the game. It did, to some extent suck the fun out of the competition. It was an interesting phenomenon playing like this because although we were still playing and planning our own moves, we would also have and share awareness for the other’s possible moves. I was not exactly playing against myself but I was making up a little for my opponent’s deficiencies and vica versa. We were playing against each other because that is how the game must be played but we were working together towards a more perfect game. When mistakes crept in, or we feel events had not done our opponent’s mind justice, we put our player personas on hold and let the game play itself for a while. This style of play, while not for everyone certainly made me a far better chess player and I learned an awful lot about the game during this period. When we played where neither player had made a mistake both of us would feel a sense of satisfaction of something achieved and an affirmation of our respect for each other as good decision making minds.

What I mean then is this: a disagreement or discussion, like a game of chess, inherently sets us up against one another. In an adversarial scenario it is only natural to try to ‘win’ as we do in arguments. What I was trying to convey in my disagreements post and again here is that both parties, the relationship and the abstract goal of ‘truth’ (like our ‘perfect’ game of chess) are better served by arguing towards unity, by letting the ideas guide you rather than your desire to display dominance. The suppression of that drive can be difficult, particularly if the person we are arguing with makes a ‘mistake’ and stumbles into a contradiction. If we allow them to ‘go back’ and explore the nature of that contradiction rather than jump on it as an example of faulty logic we can probably find some value in their ideas in spite of their mistakes. Providing us with a better ‘game of chess’ to play and a far more satisfying result.

Of course in some of our games of chess, just as in arguments with the best of intentions, ego can get in the way and there will come a point where we tire or see that no matter how well we play or even work together going forward we may have lost too much too early on in the game. Sometimes we will have to resign, often to the annoyance of the person who is winning. People will always need to be able to sometimes say ‘enough of this argument’ – they have lost control and equal input so they want it at an end. This can be frustrating but there is no point in going on if nothing can be added just as sometimes a checkmate is not needed to prove who won the game.

As long as we keep in mind that the goal of the game of chess is the exploration of the near infinite possibilities of the chessboard and that winning does not mean greater intelligence, we will always enjoy a game of chess. I think we would be better off in out disagreements if we made that attitude our guide in them. If we did, it would be easier for us to achieve a greater understanding of the world and of each other. Even if fully realising that aim is impossible, it is what moments of love are made of.