I feel like I’ve been trying to focus a bit this past year. When I come home to a quiet house (four days a week) there are many things I could do. Watch shows, read books, cook interesting meals, go out and spend money being around people. But when I have all those options the tendency I have is to just kind of waste it. To work on that I’ve got three main things I’m working on filling my time with: bikes, books, and chess.
Chess is the one that is the weirdest for me. I have played games for a long time. As a teenager I worked at my hometown’s best game store and have many memories of 40K1 and RPGs2 and even some CCGs3. These days games are one of my easiest ways to fall into consumerist behaviour. I get caught up in the idea of a game and then buy it even if I have no one to play it with4. But I didn’t play chess a huge amount as a kid, even after I learned how to play. It seemed like something I should play5, but just didn’t.
A couple of years ago, though, I started hosting our library’s chess meetup. It was something people had been inquiring about as we reopened after pandemic lockdowns, and it seemed like it could be easy enough to get going. It was! It started slow but now we get about a dozen people showing up every week.
Even though this means I’ve been playing chess weekly, I have resisted getting competitive. Most of my role in this is as host and facilitator, not “chess expert.” And chess itself is pretty nakedly competitive, so preserving my library role (which is very not-competitive) means even when I’m playing games of chess I’m not playing to win. But I do want to get better, to understand things better. Because sometimes I play against one of the good players and they say things like “this is a very interesting position” and I don’t see it. I’d like to.
There’s a way of thinking about chess that sees it as limiting. Caring about 64 squares and how the pieces on them are arranged is not the most important thing in the world. Not even close. But there’s so much room to get absorbed in there, to see the difference between a boring position and an interesting one, and that room of nigh-infinite possibilities is like fractally enticing. How much of anything I do is actually important6? Why not get lost in this little square of art and competition?
I get these feelings sometimes when I’m thinking about being useful compared to being happy, which comes up a lot with caring about games, or sports, or comics, or any of the other things I get wrapped up in. Instead of Pokemon, chess feels like poetry, like something almost respectable to get lost in.
And so I’m reading more. I’m studying. I’m recording my games and analyzing them. It’s a good world for me to get into because it’s not demanding of buying more and more stuff. Chess feels outside of that whole thing. I know it’s not. But it feels like it could be.
Warhammer 40,000: a science fiction miniatures wargame that began as a parody of Thatcherite Britain’s creeping fascism but now is a corporate behemoth in the gaming world. There’s also a smaller scale gangwarfare game called Necromunda, which was our group’s favourite 20 years ago. ↩︎
Role Playing Games: telling stories with randomizers and friends. Like Dungeons & Dragons, but I preferred others like Star Wars (D6), Unknown Armies and Dungeon World. ↩︎
Collectible Card Games: you build decks of cards with special arbitrary abilities to make complicated ways to score points. Like Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon. ↩︎
My kid does play some games with me. We’ve especially liked Star Realms, Blitz Bowl and I’m getting him playing Pokemon instead of just collecting cards. ↩︎
My friends have totally assumed I know more about chess than I do. Actually, many people assume that. Maybe actually trying to know something now is just me wanting to fulfill that stereotype - the same one that gave me, the department’s guy, the chess program to run at the library. ↩︎
The answer here is obviously parenting. ↩︎