Gaming Lessons

64 Squares: The Gamer and the Game of Chess

Our egos might not like it, and our minds might rewrite history to make it appear ridiculous, but the cold hard truth is that there is a lot more behind a victory than the actions of one lone individual.

We may play as competitors and marvel at our multi-kills and clutch moments at winning games, but we hardly take the time to understand exactly why we won, or how we lost. What you have to understand is that the position we were in when we got that multi-kill or clutch moment came about for one reason: the actions taken earlier on in the game.

The actions of our teammates, and ourselves, in past battles are what set the stage for those later battles. So, while we may feel glorious grabbing that triple kill that cleared the route for our flag runner, there was a lot more behind that win than our triple kill. You had taken control of the map, put them on the respawn, and moved in for the grab.

But even before that, countless smaller decisions were made—decisions that hardly seemed important, hardly seemed noteworthy. Yet these were the actions that set the stage for that precious moment of total control.

Before I try to further explain the concept behind our wins and losses, lets take a stroll back to the 1400‘s when a game called Chess became modernized and popular across the world.

A Quick Primer on the Game of Chess

For those of you who are not familiar with Chess, it’s a board game played between two players.

The board consists of 64 squares (8x8) and each player starts with 16 pieces taking up two rows on opposite sides of the board. The object of the game is to move your pieces through the board to trap the enemy’s king in a position where he has nowhere to go.

On face, it is an incredibly simple game once the rules are understood. But, as you look beneath the surface, its complexity becomes apparent. And so, what makes chess the ultimate game of strategy is that there are only 20 possible moves on the first turn, and from there the possibilities grow exponentially.

As such, 600 years later, there are still an unimaginable number of strategies possible, and that number is still growing. If I were a betting man, this dynamic nature, the sheer number of possibilities present with every move and how they all interact, would be the reason the game is still popular today, still so challenging—600 years after the fact.

Putting it all to Use

Now what does all this about Chess have to do with competitive gaming? To be honest, everything.

Chess is a competitive game, arguably the most popular one of all time; Now we are living in a future world where insane video games with story-driven plots and realistic graphics and animations come out nearly every week but despite all these futuristic wonders, games still operate on the same foundations of a chess game.

Take a look at MLG’s leading game: Halo 3. Released way back when in September of 2007, it is now 2010 and the top players have pretty much reached their peak or close enough to it for the difference to be nill.

What do we really see at tournaments?

All we typically see decide wins from tournament to tournament is mental breakdowns from the players or wins caused by the actions of one individual who simply out-skilled his opponents in a moment of crisis. Granted, these moments are exciting to watch, but that’s not the exact reason a team won or lost.

What really wins games is the overall strategy of the team, and the tactics used by the individual players as they take part in the strategy.

The usual approach

First-person shooters generally rely more on tactics than strategies due to the players having complete control of their battles.

In such situations, players usually have to out-play or out-smart their opponents to win the individual battles, but those battles are only one small part of the bigger picture; the team’s strategy.

The strategy is the plan of action to achieve total victory by winning battles as a whole or completing an objective.

There are times where a team may win a battle to gain control of a position and times when a team creates a diversion to deceive the enemy to win a battle or complete an objective.

Strategies are determined from the foundations of the game; the gametypes. For each different gametype, there’s an often radically different goal at hand, and so the strategies of one gametype are likely to be different, sometimes radically so, than that of another gametype.

Taking this to the next level, I’m going to explore how some of the basic strategies of chess can be carried over directly to an FPS.

Far more similar than you might think

Shooters are actually very similar to Chess: the map is the board and the players are the pieces.

What makes chess so complex is that it is 16 coordinate pieces which all battle in their own unique way under the orders of their commander, the player.

In competitive games, you are typically dealing with 4-6 coordinated players who are usually commanding themselves as a unity.

So why do the strategies of Chess seem far superior than today’s shooters? It’s because games are played at such a fast pace that we hardly take the time to think out our actions and the repercussions of our actions.

We are the pawns, the bishops, the knights, the rooks and so for us to see the picture as the commander it is nearly impossible. We’re not watching the game from the bird’s eye view making one turn at a time, we are on the battlefield and calling things as we see them in a matter of seconds, with nary a moment for planning. In the truest sense of the word, we are blind.

We’re looking at each battle individually, and rarely the larger picture; thus we rarely see beyond the actions of that one “clutch battle” or individual as we look for what determined the end results of the game.

You can win nearly every battle in a game and still lose, don’t forget that. The strategy is what allows to even be in position to start that battle. Unfortunately, and in many ways this is the key problem that to this point no pro teams have even attempted to consider looking at, is that we approach competitive gaming as just that, a game, and not a martial activity. We focus on the individual actions, the individual tactics, and lose the ability to relate them to the very thing that they are a part of.

Worse yet, such arrogant short-sidedness can still win games, and as such, is ignored as common; and, in the worst cases, embraced.

Reflect, Reflect, Reflect

You should understand by now that our strategies in the end allow us to be in situations that may benefit us, whether we intentionally did these strategies or not.

The most important thing for us as competitive gamers to do is to understand why we won and why we lost. We must watch the game as a whole and understand the strategy our team took and their team took whether they were planned or not.

In a game like Halo 3, it is very difficult for the leader of the team to know why his team lost or won right after a game and so it is imperative that the team or leader watches the films to take note of the entire game as it happened, taking into account each individual battle and how it led to another one, and ultimately, how it impacted the end game.

Most importantly, we must never forget that each individual battle will have consequences and that those consequences will lead to more battles, just as in the game of chess.

What we must take special note of is how to influence the positions of enemies, drawing them into a position where we want them and using it to ultimately defeat them. In a sense, we must think. We must strategize. Else we will lose, and lose greatly at that.

Only the beginning

In the end, you realize that one battle is insignificant when compared to the game in its entirety

The battles of the game influence how strategy is implemented, and that implementation is generally the influencer of the end game.

Just as in chess, the winner is the one who can think further ahead and deceive his enemy more efficiently than they can deceive him.

Remember that our modern day shooters are no different than a game of Chess, and that sometimes, it it necessary to sacrifice the battle in order to win the war. Chess matches are never won in the opener; the same holds true in Halo.

With that, Godspeed.

About the Author: x 8thful