Essay 1: Chess Supports Roleplay

This essay is the first in a series of essays about repurposing board games for RPGs. I wrote it as part of the design process for Violent Delights: A chess-based RPG about Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.

Does Chess Support Roleplay?

In recent months, Seraphina Garcia Ramirez's blog post “What do we mean when we say a game supports play?” revisited some old tabletop RPG discourse. The original discourse, as I remember it, was about whether D&D supports roleplay: D&D presents highly structured rules around combat but few around roleplaying and socializing. And yet, much of what players do in their D&D games is not enabled or bound by rules.

Sera shifted this discussion, arguing that the game text is insufficient to explain certain acts of play — that we bring ourselves and our culture to bear on our play. Among other things, she points to the trend of players importing their coffeeshop alternate universe (AU) into D&D 5e. The term “support,” she says, brushes past "the complexity and nuance involved in how a text turns into a dynamic play experience through the interpretation and context of the readers and players.”

And this made me think about another game, although it’s not an RPG. 

It was chess. Bear with me.

Abstract Games and Placeholders

Around the time that Sera’s article came out, I read “Making Sense of Abstract Board Games,” a scholarly article about checkers and mancala — abstract games with basic layouts that do not represent a specific time, space, or story. The authors, Danilovic and de Voogt, claim that this abstraction allows these games to function as “placeholders” that “players replace with their own culturally relevant meanings and materials.” 

One example that they provided was around mancala, which is sometimes interpreted as a game about sowing seeds in a field but which has also been played in fishing communities where its boards have been recreated in the shape of fish with cowrie shells as counters. The point is that without a specific time, space, and story, players make sense of the game rules within their own contexts and cultures.

Does this apply to chess as well? Chess is an abstract board game, arguably. Danilovic and de Voogt view it that way and point out that it does not rely on the player’s storytelling so much as it is “an exercise in logical thought,” a self-contained puzzle. It also exists in many versions with different or interchangeable pieces that have been adapted to their contexts — although this readership may be most familiar with (or only familiar with) the very standardized “Western chess." 

In Power play: The literature and politics of chess in the late middle ages, Jenny Adams discusses the reception of chess pieces, noting that in India, Persia, and the Arabic world, the human chess figures were historically male. The chess queen didn’t exist prior to medieval Europe, and to this day the pieces of Western chess vaguely reflect the medieval European context that appropriated them. 

You might argue that Western chess is not an abstract board game in that it has characters and represents a kingdom, albeit only vaguely. The pieces of the game and its moves have been interpreted as depicting warfare. You have “knights,” for example, and you “capture” your opponents pieces. And so your game must represent a battle unfolding.

But the game has also been interpreted in other ways — as representing political conflict. Few queens in medieval and early modern Europe took to the battlefield (Elizabeth I at Tilbury excepted). Or bishops, I suppose? But we may easily imagine these characters embroiled in politics. Perhaps your gameboard represents political machinations?

It’s notable that chess’s characters are also gendered. And beyond that, they are stratified by class or rank. The pawn, in particular, may be interpreted as a foot soldier, peasant, or servant. And yet they are still abstract enough to imagine stories around. What does it mean when a pawn seeks “promotion” in the game? Is this a story of social mobility? What is the significance of a pawn helping trap the king in checkmate? Is this a trickster or witty servant bringing down “a great man,” as Adams has described?

This is all to say that the rules of chess are abstract enough in that they do not necessarily furnish the story or setting and are specific enough to invite interpretation. The players speculate, as they interpret its rules. This is something that makes chess beautiful to me, although I’m sure that serious chess players prefer the game’s complexities as an open-ended puzzle. I am of the unserious-chess-player variety.

In my opinion, the abstracted nature of these games is what allows its players to focus on abstract strategy. When the story is specific, it’s easy to get bogged down in the innumerable factors and exceptions. We don’t ask, “Is this really in the Bishop’s best interest? Is there a crate he can hide behind?” But that abstraction also gives the players freedom to interpret the action into whatever they like.

Filling in the Gaps

As I said, I think this point about abstract games is related to the ongoing conversation around “support” and play experience. I think the relationship between these two conversations derives from two significant points:

• First, as players, we are always making sense of games and their rules in relation to our experience of our cultures and contexts.
• Second, when we encounter a gap or a vacuum in these rules, we may be compelled to fill it in. 

Sera’s main point in “What do we mean?” echoes Danilovic’s and de Voogt’s argument that we make sense of games in relation to our cultures and context. She talks about how we turn texts into a dynamic play experience in this way. And I will add that we do more than make sense of games in this way. We also use games to make sense of our culture, to explore the desires that our culture informs, not only designers but also players. For me, that is part of what people are doing with D&D and their coffeeshop AUs. 

Beyond this, it is not just about the game text but also about the gaps within the text, especially gaps whose absence is made evident, a fruitful void. It’s the missing puzzle piece that (intentionally or unintentionally) invites us to fill the negative space in with our imaginations. And without an authority to tell us what belongs here, we may grant ourselves that authority.

In D&D, it may be the way our characters interact with one another and the world or the tavern they started together. In chess, it’s the abstraction that allows us to interpret the game’s specificity of setting and characters. These gaps are an important element that players leverage to explore those desires that aren’t explicitly included in the game.

But chess is not a roleplaying game.

We are reminded of this in "Chess is not an RPG: The illusion of game balance," a divisive but relevant post that circulated the blogosphere in 2014. Its author, John Wick (Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea), made the controversial claim that D&D (in its first four editions) was not a roleplaying game but rather "a very sophisticated, intricate, and complicated combat simulation board game."

Dubious claim aside, Wick frames his argument in terms of chess and board games in a way that interests me:

"You can play board games such as Rex and Battlestar Galactica and even Settlers of Catan without roleplaying… but roleplaying seems to make them more enjoyable. Talking in character, making (apparent) choices based on character motives… but if you go too far in that direction, you’ll lose."

There is a desire to enjoy these games in a way that isn't codified in the rules despite the fact it can undermine the game's objective.

Chess is not a roleplaying game. But I wonder, does chess "support" roleplay? With tongue in cheek, I say, "It may!" although certainly not to the extent of D&D. As Sera says, "support" isn't a very useful term but if we take a more dynamic view of play, we can consider how chess's design invites us to make sense of the abstract action by imposing a narrative on the game pieces. There is space in that invitation — in the action of each piece and in the player's role as strategist, telling each piece how to move and competing against another strategist — for roleplay, if you so desire. 

Invitations and Desire Paths

In D&D and fantasy RPGs, players and designers have turned such invitations and "desire paths" into Coffeeshop AU games with custom rules for managing the business for D&D and tavern-keeping indies like Takuma Okada's Stewpot.

In chess, we can see these invitations turned into Okada's Chess: Two Kingdoms, a storytelling game or tabletop RPG for two players around a chessboard.

In Two Kingdoms, you play chess. But as you play chess, you take turns telling the story of two kingdoms in conflict. The game guides you in creating your kingdom (or nation or faction) and in interpreting what each of your pieces represent. For example, pawns represent the average citizens of your nation. 

Whenever you move a piece, you pick or answer the appropriate prompt, based on your move. For example, when a piece moves away from another piece, you might answer the prompt, “Are two of your groups in conflict?” Finally, when you capture an opponent’s piece, you must “do a scene for both pieces involved.”

Two Kingdoms does not tell us what type of conflict it is — war, political intrigue, etc. This conflict, whatever it is, is at the heart of chess, and where its heart should be, we find a void. Okada does what the formal rules of chess does not: they tell us to fill in the gaps.

Conclusion

This felt like a fruitful area for design and exploration, and it's part of what led me to writing Violent Delights and this series of essays.

In this series, I'll talk about various other chess-based RPGs. Some use only the pieces and board. Others keep the rules and framework of chess, the baggage that comes with the game, and they ask us to narrativize it, to roleplay with it. It’s the same gap, the abstraction of chess that led me to create Violent Delights.

I wanted to look at the board differently, not as a battlefield or royal court but as a ballroom — The Capulet’s great hall, and I wanted to enable players to wonder, “Is this really in the bishop’s character?” before they move. I wanted to see if the strategic movements could be turned into strategic storytelling and roleplay. 

I think I’ve succeeded. But as I’ll discuss at the end of this series, chess may be abstract enough to be a “placeholder,” yet the cultural relevance that we’ve given to it has created an immensely heavy baggage that weighs upon any game.