Birth of the Chess Queen is similar to last week’s readings in that it traces how the development of a society’s game can mirror other elements of that society. One anecdote I found particularly thought provoking was how the increased mobility of the queen and bishop had the unintended effect of limiting women’s access to chess. Yalom tells us on that the increased mobility changed gameplay by making it much faster. As a result, chess lost its status as a social, courtly game. It was professionalized and played in public at the same time that women were being relegated to private spaces (p. 228-9). This was a tangible gameplay change that had real effects on the game’s role in society, as well as who played the game.

Yalom’s narrative of the spread of chess from India and the Middle East into Europe also demonstrates something that seems to have been lost in the world of contemporary games—at least digital and table games. Before games became commercialized products, they had a chance to evolve and hybridize. It’s almost as if it was a giant crowd-sourced enterprise: a rule change here, an added piece there, and repeat for a few hundred years until a really compelling game emerges. This happened with pachesi and playing cards in our readings from last week as well as with sports, especially football/rugby and stick-and-ball games. (Though interestingly, unlike Chess, which globally incorporated regional changes so that the game is still played the same around the world, sports seem to have split into somewhat different games by region. For instance, American football, rugby, and Australian football are all derived from the same game, but retain distinct identities.)

Nowadays, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Games are pretty much in their finished state upon release (with the exception of post-release bug fixes in the case of video games). Game players don’t have a chance to improve on the games. Sure, some video games allow for the inclusion of some user-generated content, but as far as I know that stuff is simply cosmetic; nothing about the gameplay itself is altered. (If I’m wrong about this, please let me know with a comment!) Instead, games are designed by teams of professionals and tend to remain pretty firmly under the control of the entity that produced them. Monopoly’s tradition of house rules is one of the few democratic exceptions to this that I can think of.

I’m not necessarily trying to claim that capitalism is a horrible thing and that one of these systems is any better than the other. It just seems like a fairly significant difference in the pre- and post-industrial cultures of games.