Chess — A Game in Metamorphosis?
Today we are looking at a familiar game to most, chess, in late of the recent boom. I suppose chess booms are not entirely unprecented. Bobby fischer vs Spasky brought chess back into media for sometime, but I suppose it can be difficult to understand in an age with computers how something as modest as a board game is keeping up to flashy new games.
It really hasn’t been, first off. We’ve heard a lot more about World of Warcraft or Fortnite than Chess for the most part. It has only been recently that Chess has appeared again, without obvious precedent I imagine.
Yet there’s something bubbling. From “The Queen’s Gambit”, to Twitch streaming popularity, to bombastic drama and media coverage speculating on vibrating suppositories possibly being used at the highest level of play.
What gives for all the fanfare?
- AI has helped reimagine what is possible in the game, reigniting curiosity in the highly untuitive but sharp theoretical lines as engines continue to improve even now.
- Digitizing chess has introduced non-trivial additions like “pre-moving”, in addition to moving pieces with a mouse, enabling the pace of the game to be played much faster. Faster time controls tends to bring out more qualities unique to the digital format, and have grown a lot more in popularity largely because of this. This positions chess well with how social media (i.e Tiktok) has been trending into more compact sharable experiences.
- There does appear to be “cycles/trends” in games as there is in music. I think in recent time as many games are dumbing down, chess remains something that is challenging yet accessible to many age groups, traditional enough yet novel with technological influence.
The Fischer vs Spasky OTB classical style of chess is not back in full swing. Viewers have gone up, but the viral chess seems to be trending in the direction of faster time controls, rapid and blitz being far more popular than 30+ minutes games — https://www.chess.com/article/view/interesting-chess-data-time-controls-and-game-results.
In addition to this, variants have also been taken more seriously. Chess.com introduced many playable variants based on interesting research papers, there was a professional Fischer Random (Chess 960) event that trended quite well in recent time, and “Chess Boxing” recently put up some big numbers.
It appears to me here that the story isn’t just “woah, chess popular again?”, but there has been an intersection of computing/social media with chess that is subtle on the surface but in reality creating a complex synthesis that is pushing the game in new directions as it adapts with the modern world.
This creating the space for something to emerge I think. I’ve been wondering if we will see a “killer-variant”, or even new game entirely. This might seems strange to think about when you consider how long it took for subtler changes like moving pawns 2 squares or en passant to popularize, but in the age of technology and hightened interest, I think we are on the precipice of uncorking something quite explosive.
