Tag: chess

Trope Tuesday: Smart People Play Chess

Why? Because Anastasia Gavrilova playing chess is HOT.
And if you’re Anastasia Gavrilova, chess gives you +10 charisma as well.

Want a fast and easy way to show that your characters are smart?  Not bookish, necessarily, or nerdy, or even the designated smart guy in the five-man band, but intellectually adept no matter what else their role in the story?  Well, you could indicate that through inordinate loquaciousness, but too much of that tends to make your dialog unreadable (not to mention, it’s way overdone).  You could have them rock a chalkboard, but not every story takes place in high school, and finding a chalkboard outside of academia is a bit of a challenge.  So what else can you do to indicate a high level of intelligence?

Show them playing chess.

It’s true.  Stereotypes aside, one of the most effective ways to indicate that your characters are intelligent is to show them playing chess.  From Star Trek to Discworld, Independence day to Doctor Who, Big Bang Theory to Harry Potter to Command & Conquer, chess is a fast, dirty, and effective way to show intelligence.  And while popular conceptions of chess nerds give the game a bit of baggage, it’s not as bad as you might think.  Sure, Sheldon might fit the stereotype, but Cain and Spock certainly don’t.  Even David Levinson from Independence Day turns out to be something of a badass in the end.

So why is chess such an effective way to show that a character is smart?  Probably because of all the other tropes associated with chess.  As one of the oldest and deepest strategy games of all time, chess is thoroughly embedded into our cultural consciousness.  Chess motifs are common in all sorts of stories, and the chess master is a significant character archetype.  There’s a reason we call the most complicated gambit pileup Xanatos Speed Chess.

Besides all the archetypal reasons for this trope, there are quite a few real-world reasons as well.  Playing chess can potentially do all sorts of interesting things to your brain, like stave off Alzheimer’s and improve your concentration and problem-solving skills.  All over the world, people associate chess skills with intellectual prowess, and after you’ve played a few games, it’s not hard to see why.  According to Carl Sagan, the game requires “strategy, foresight, analytical powers, and the ability to cross-correlate large numbers of variables and learn from experience.” If you’ve got all of those, chances are you’re at least above average.

Of course, this trope can be inverted in some clever and interesting ways.  In Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, for example, the ditzy main characters challenge Death to games of Battleship, Clue, Twister … basically, a whole host of non-cerebral games, in lieu of the expected trope.  In Foxtrot, the only character who loves chess is the Dad, who is rather dumb compared to his kids (maybe they all got bored of it?).  The classic example, though, has got to be Star Wars, where Chewbacca’s emotional impulsiveness is lampshaded over a game of <X> chess:

I haven’t used this trope a whole lot in my own work yet, but I just started work again on The Sword Keeper, an epic fantasy novel where chess tropes are going to be a major part of the story.  The mentor figure is something of a chess master, though because he’s a sentient sword he can’t experience or interact with the world except through his telepathic connection with the main character, a simple tavern girl.  She knows the basic rules of chess, however, (“chadrak” in this universe) and so one of the ways the sword trains her is through putting her through chess scenarios.  Later, it becomes apparent that the story itself is kind of like a game of chess, with the major characters loosely correlating with the different pieces, and the main character as the queen.  I’m excited–it’s going to be really cool. 😀

So yeah, this is definitely a trope you’re going to see from me in the future, and not just as a one-scene throwaway either.  Stay tuned for more!

Trope Tuesday: Chess Motifs

Chess is quite possibly the oldest, deepest, most well known and widely played board game in the world.  It should come as no surprise, then, that it’s often used as a motif in works of fiction.

The interesting thing is how well the pieces fit some of the classic character archetypes:

  • The King is like the Hero: the most indispensable character around whom the story revolves.
  • The Queen is like the Chick (or perhaps the Heart): less appreciated than the Hero but a powerful character who holds the team together (and whose loss often makes the team fall apart).
  • The Rook is like the Big Guy: the stoic, straightforward heavy-lifter who might not be quick (rooks are often the last pieces to be developed) but pulls a lot of weight, especially in the endgame.
  • The Bishop is like the Smart Guy: quick and versatile, mystical and unpredictable, striking from a long distance and often performing two or three jobs at once, but lacking the power by himself to achieve victory.
  • The Knight is like the Lancer: likely to go over the others’ heads and the one most likely to sacrifice himself for the cause (knights before bishops, after all).
  • The Pawns are like the Red Shirts: expendable minor characters who may, if they push forward bravely and stay faithful to the end, eventually become queens.

And that’s not all.  The major chess strategies also correlate loosely to major story tropes.  For example, at the beginning of the game, it’s important to move the king to safety, while in the endgame, the king becomes a much more important offensive piece.  Likewise, the hero often spends the first half of the story running away from the bad guys, while in the second half, he starts to take real action.

And the list goes on.  The more I learn about chess, the more parallels I see.  It’s gotten to the point where I want to try diagramming a novel, or perhaps a series, according to a chess game, with that fact being part of the big reveal.  Or perhaps to have one of the major characters have a long-standing chess rivalry with another character who ends up being a major bad guy.

Or something.  I’m just starting a new novel, so everything looks fresh and exciting.  The story will probably change and evolve considerably over the course of writing it, but since it’s a fantasy novel, I think that some chess motifs may be especially appropriate.  Fantasy, after all, is about taking the reader back to a golden age of magic lost in the pages of history, and chess is perhaps the oldest popular game in the world.

In the meantime, is anyone up for a game of chess?

Image (cc) from wikimedia commons.