Do They Know It's Chessmas Time At All?
The WCC is taking off to little fanfare... Is this a problem?
The World Chess Championship got off the ground on Wednesday with an opening ceremony in which the pieces were picked and the players were interviewed. If you missed this, don’t beat yourself up. No less a luminary than Levy Rozman missed that it was even on:
In the event, FIDE—the event co-ordinators—only made the proceedings available on their Instagram feed.
Shouldn’t the World Chess Championship feel… a little bigger? When I put the question to my Twitter followers last month whether or not they knew the match was even taking place, less than 1 in 5 responded in the affirmative:
And let’s not forget the fact that a chunk of people from chess Twitter follow my profile and the poll was retweeted by the Chess Pit Podcast account.
If a World Championship match happens in Dubai and none of the non-chess consuming public are there to see it… did it ever even happen? Are we dropping the ball here? Missing a trick? Does the very future of chess as a form of entertainment end here?
These sorts of refrain are familiar in a world where branding has become everything. We’ve seen it in other sports. Cricket had a crisis of confidence and rebranded Twenty20 (or is it 20Twenty? Who knows?) as The Hundred (or is it The 100? Who knows?) If an audience is dwindling, so the logic goes according to the people who are paid a lot to know this sort of thing, then the solution has to be a rebrand. You need to win the audience back somehow. And that somehow has to involve all the mantras of marketing.
Chess, no doubt, finds itself in the same crisis of confidence. How do you market chess? It’s a cerebral game that has been played for *checks notes* hundreds of years often by, let’s face it, nerds. Good luck getting kids to prioritise it over [insert the things that kids are into these days that I refuse to speculate on at the risk of boomering].
Someone sent me this meme the other day:
Funny as it is, it does reveal an indirect reality about chess. It’s a very old game with very old traditions many of which, if subjected to very basic scrutiny, appear pretty odd to people who aren’t familiar with it.
Much to my embarrassment as someone who likes to think of themselves as fairly au fait with literary culture, last month I finally got around to reading Ursula K. Le Guin. The Dispossessed is a piece of counterfactual science fiction which, in an inversion of the usual ordering of things, centres around the “first man to arrive from the moon”. A few centuries before the action begins, the moon had been populated by a group of broadly communitarian settlers who build a socialist society.
This is the beauty of the book. When the protagonist, Shevek, arrives on earth, Le Guin is able to explore ideas that are completely assimilated as “normal” on earth—ideas about economics, politics, society, science, art—in a frame of reference where their normality is questioned. What would happen if someone from another world with an almost entirely dissimilar worldview arrived on earth today? Wouldn’t that present a background against which the incongruous nature of our “normality” was shown up in stark relief?
When it comes to sharing the game within a wider community, this sort of “normality” can often go unnoticed. We talk of spreading the game but that is usually tied up with ideas of what the game is “to me”. There is a tradition—a chess culture—which we confuse with chess itself. The problem is, when we talk about expanding the game, we usually mean expanding the chess culture which I find myself inhabiting.
This raises a lot of questions. Can I really adopt the attitude of “Yes, I want more people playing the game but not like that?” Does the fact that chess is becoming popular in a format that I don’t like mean that it isn’t bringing chess into the purview of a wider audience? How do I remove myself from the equation in these instances? These are tough questions and ones that deserve treatment.
We see these sorts of ideas being played out in the low-key culture wars that take place in the space which is at the forefront of chess’s expansion: the internet. One of the fascinating developments of the last couple of years, no doubt hastened by the pandemic, has been the collision course of chess culture with streaming culture. Unsurprisingly, this has generated a lot of disagreement about chess culture and “the way the game should be played”. Some people seem to think chess expansion will be achieved by dry and dreary YouTube videos tracing 34 lines of the Ruy Lopez rather than engaging streamers who play low rated games on their Twitch stream. Other people think that chess expansion will be achieved by doing flaming sambuca shots in Battersea. I wouldn’t like to cast judgement either way. But what I will say is that, many of these debates miss the point for me. Let me try to explain.
It seems to me as though what we’re seeing in chess streaming is the same sort of content represented in a different form. The assumption seems to be we have this thing “chess” and we need to dress it up in different clothes if we’re to expect people to ever like it. The proper chess men are happy to just present “chess” as it is. “We fell in love with chess this way so you can damn well do the same!” The new guard of internet chess are sexing it up. “We fell in love with chess this way but you will never fall in love with it this way so we need to spruce it up!” This is all well and good. But part of me wonders if the expansion of chess might be bettered if we allowed the content to shift as much as the form.
We’re back at the idea of “normality”. When we’re thinking of “chess” what we’re really doing is thinking of a “chess culture” which seems so “normal” to us that we simply view it as “chess”. But what if, to borrow from the meme, chess really was invented today. How would our notion of “normality” about chess be formed today? I’m not just talking about the map being a bit shit or the queen being overpowered. I’m talking about the way that people consume chess. What if chess became dispossessed from the people who own it today? How might it become repossessed—to stretch the metaphor—in the twenty-first century? Surely this is the question that should be at the heart of how we should expand chess in the present day?
Again, I am not qualified to answer these questions. At the risk of outstaying my welcome, though, I have one suggestion. It feels to me that the broadest iteration of “chess culture” that I have come across in my short fling with chess gravitates around the idea of chess as a game to be played. This might seem obvious, but for many other sports, the idea of the spectacular is also fundamental to the entertainment they offer. That is: sport as a game to be watched. I sometimes wonder whether chess is hamstrung by the fact that it is largely controlled by people who play the game to the extent that it doesn’t cater for people who want simply to watch the game.
Take football, for example. A huge chunk of the football-watching audience will never play the game with any sort of seriousness. They will not take their own “improvement” to be an important aspect of the enjoyment of the game. I suspect the opposite is true for chess.
Of course, chess is a tricky one. The line between enjoying and playing chess is far thinner than the one between enjoying and playing other sports. But I suspect that if there were more of a provision made for people who wanted to enjoy the game without, for example, knowing reams of theory or being able to parse long strings of notation, then the chess audience might grow somewhat.
This is a difficult task. As chess becomes increasingly professional, it is hard to avoid the theoretical aspects. In my last newsletter, I talked about how professionalism evacuates some of the more dramatic aspects of chess competition. But I do believe that there is a space in the chess media for more narrative-driven approaches to chess coverage. And where the narrative goes, you can be sure that an interested audience will soon follow.
So maybe all of this worrying about the form which our chess content takes is missing the point? Maybe we should spend more time worrying about the content itself?