The [Wall Street] Opinion Journal interviews Susan Polgar – one of the two famous chess-playing Polgar sisters.
She airs the idea that Chess is a tool for personal improvement:
Chess is a wonderful tool to increase concentration, self-control, patience, imagination, creativity, logical thinking and many more important and useful life skills
It’s an idea that pops up now and then, that a game can improve you as a person. I would love to see somebody write a history of this, I would guess it can be traced, at the very least, to ancient Greece.
At the same time, whenever you spend years focusing on something specific, I think you always end up feeling that what you learned could be used in other contexts. Video game theory for me, certainly, but it’s just like literary theorists or film scholars for whom their medium of choice is a privileged space for all kinds of existential and philosophical thinking.
It’s an idea that pops up constantly – Sutton-Smith covers this quite well in The Ambiguity of Play, devoting two full chapters to the ‘Rhetoric of Progress’.
Some versions of the Chinese myth of King Yao (c.2100 BC) include him teaching the game of Go to his eldest son, so I think the idea of playing games as personal improvement is at least more general than something that can be traced back to a single cultural history.
Good point about Sutton-Smith (d’oh).
A quick search for King Yao:
“The presentation of the literary history of go in popular books usually begins with the myth of King Yao teaching his eldest son Dan Ju to play the game c. 2100 BC.”
http://www.usgo.org/resources/downloads/originsofgo.pdf
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/igo_e/037.htm
In a more modern context, the manga and anime series Hikaru no go presents a boy’s journey towards mastery of go as being also one of self-improvement and maturation. This theme, which equates mastery of a skill with mastery of oneself, is a common theme in sports manga, and also in Japanese RPGs, where the heroes overcome their personal issues while gaining the battle-experience they need to save their world.
a personal view on the mind-changing effects of chess was described by scott mccloud in a free online comic:
http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/chess/index.html
the “chess novella” by stephan zweig (an austrian author), published eg. as part of the collection “the royal game”, might also be an interesting read for you:
“The Schachnovelle (Chess Novella) concerns a chess game between a young chess master and a remarkably talented passenger on board a ship. For the chess master, the game is a livelihood, but for his Austrian opponent, it is a matter of survival. We learn of the passenger’s captivity and interrogation by the SS in Vienna and the psychological torture he endured through an ingenious but risky use of the game of chess” (from http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/sub/v04/nsb.04.07.html)
regards
peter purgathofer
Good point, I realize that I read the Zweig story as a child – though I only remember it as a story of being obsessed with a game and having to give it up or else.
I think the passenger has played chess against himself when he was in captivity? At the time, I thought that sounded really strange.