Heh. Then you've never played chess at the "serious" level, tgcm. All too often the attitude I find at the odd serious tournament I've played in is that the goal is to absolutely crush other people's emotional states. I'm not even talking about the Master sections, either; way down in my lowly section where half the players are hacks like myself and the other half are little kids climbing the ratings ladder, there's a viscious streak in the air. Not every player is like that, but enough are that things get ugly, even when top prize is a measly thousand bucks.

As for puzzles appealing to obssessives, chess as a game has eaten up whole lives that might otherwise be spent usefully. I understand Go can be similar, but I've never gotten deep into it myself.

If you're getting the impression that the hard-core chess world puts me off some, you're right. Yet, still I go to the big events when time and money permit. Take the personalities out of it and what you have left is a sublime, fascinating, entertaining, thrilling experience. Yes, thrilling.

When you are playing chess against a stranger and there's something on the line, things get very intense. Winning triggers rushes. Losing always feels personal: there are no dice or deals to blame, no teammates who let you down: when you lose, it's because the other guy's mind performed better than yours and there's no way around it.

I've played all sorts of other games, and was quite into them as a kid. No time, now. Puzzles, too, occasionally grab me, but only of the "mind teaser" variety. Jigsaws and the like feel to me like mowing the lawn, though my wife can spend hours at the activity.

I think, Michael, preferring games over puzzles might say that you are creative rather than scientific. Puzzles are about The Solution, whereas games (the better ones with simple rulesets leading to vast potential combinations like Chess and Go) are about constantly finding many small solutions while dealing with a growing, open-ended, constantly shifting larger challenge.

Either practice can be seen as your mind versus someone else's mind, though with puzzles it's only half so, since the puzzle designer can't step back in and adjust the puzzle in respone to your tinkering. Nothing is more surprising nor more challenging, I think, than another human mind.

Oh, and while I'm blathering about chess (there's a large tournament this week that I'm missing, and so it's on my mind), there's a whole subculture of chess puzzle creators and solvers that lose me totally. They've developed their own specialized vocabulary that even many chess geeks like myself find daunting. These chess "composers", as they are called, perhaps have a greater claim to the title of Artist than do we mere competitive players, though I'd still challenge the notion of Chess As Art altogether.

But now I'm drifting toward the "what is art" topic again. I think I'll wait patiently for the "three definitions of art" post we've been promised.

Posted by: Mac on November 26, 2002 7:20 PM

Great discussion, thanks for all the reflections. And, as it always does when the topic of puzzles comes up, my poor head hurts.

I'm still wondering about one thing, which is computer and video games. Leaving aside technicalities for a second, they have a funny effect on me -- they feel more like puzzles to me than they do games. There's some competition and some action. But it always feels to me as though the game consists of discovering (or trying to, in my case, as I always give up easy and early) what the game consists of. I just can't get fascinated.

So the feeling of most of the computer games I've tried has resembled puzzles more than games. My completely-speculative theory is that what you're really being asked to discover and explore (and un-riddle) is the nature of the computer itself -- hence all the damn corridors and levels, and my feeling that I'm always being trapped amidst puzzles.

Anyone else get that feeling playing computer games? That in many ways they aren't like bridge, or go? Let alone a sport?

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on November 26, 2002 11:28 PM

MB, you ought to give Pandroa's Box a whirl. It's an amalgam of puzzle and game, all based on travel and fine and indigenous arts. Microsoft makes it and it's been around a few years. I fell into the game and my poor husband had to physically haul me off the machine at 2am every morning! I solved every level and enjoyed it immensely, even though it is a solitary pursuit.

Oddly enough, I went back to it about a year ago, thinking to go through it all again and found that Pandora's Box held little interest for a second round. I mention this to assure you that one can recover from this particular folly. Hope you give it a try!

Posted by: Jessica McMahon on December 4, 2002 1:34 PM






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