Really a Useful Note: Tabletop Game.Chess

Becuase of the ATT thread made by Lord Gro and the proposal of a TRS thread. I decided to make one.

The problem:

• Chess is an abstract game. Made before the idea where people realized that games could have stories and narratives, it predictably lacks a story. As such must of the tropes about it are either speculation or blatant shoehorns (With examples such as Action Girl, Total Party Kill and We Have Reserves). With that said, while chess itself is devoid of narrative it often has a role in other narratives. So I think the page should stay as an explanation for the various pieces and stratagems that might be used as inspiration for plot devices, characters and plots. Also while generalized most of the tropes on that page are player actions and run under the perspective of a player of the game (denoted by the use of second person pronouns such as the Action Girl example being simply "your queen" and the Big Bad one being "Your opponent's king."
• RL troping: Because chess lacks a story, it also lacks context. Therefore its easy to derive context from the players and fans of chess. Which is taboo because it is inherently Flame Bait.
• Other related issues are Square Peg Round Trope and Zero Context Examples
  • An edit war on the page happened because of an attempted shoehorn of New Media Are Evil claiming that the game only enables the king to be captured because it was a taboo for the king to be killed by commoners (or rather by infantry men being controlled by commoners).
  • As for Zero Context Examples. Again the use of second person perspective applies to pieces make simply sentences possible with no way to expand on those because there is no plot, no context, and the trope runs on the assumptions caused by the interactions of the player and the rules
  • Lastly, other tropes entries on the page rely on a very literal interpretation of the name such as The Chessmaster, Deliberately Monochrome and Light Is Not Good. Which is a different case of Square Pegging and considered to be misuse IIRC.

The solution seems simple enough. As it isn't a Video Game or a Tabletop Role-Playing game and it was made from an era where those were unfathomable, it does not qualify as a work of fiction. With that said this means that any and all subpages of this should be cut. However a Just for Fun subpage can (and should) be made about Chess and any narrative symbolism or joke tropes associated with the pieces and rules.

What do you think?

edited 5th Jan '17 7:47:22 PM by MorningStar1337

Opening this. I think that chess is such a free-form game that it can't really have a story or a plot.

Move to Useful Notes. Don't really care about making a JFF page for troping, but I'm not totally against it, either.

edited 6th Jan '17 2:44:10 AM by Karxrida

Seconded. We have enough misuse and straw clutching to deal with around here without clear-cut cases like this around.

I can see both sides of it. I don't think the lack of story is a problem, since we do have tropes that work for gameplay mechanics (and because otherwise video games like Pong wouldn't have pages). I also don't think misuse is a valid reason to cut something.

I don't think it not being a video game or tabletop RPG should matter. A lot of regular boardgames and card games, like Arkham Horror and Dead of Winter, have more than enough to trope, and even games like Clue and Monopoly have enough of a "flavor" about them, and so should definitely stay as work pages.

Chess on the other hand is, as some mention, too abstract, and apart from assigning meaning to the chess pieces, you're really just troping a bunch of rules, which wouldn't be that far off from troping a sport or casino game. Chess (and Scrabble, checkers, backgammon, etc.) could go either way.

edited 6th Jan '17 4:16:58 AM by supergod

Useful Notes and Tabletop Game fulfill two different roles, and chess is such a well-known work that it could easily have sufficient information for multiple pages.

• TabletopGame.Chess — How the game itself works, what gameplay tropes exist, and similar strategy games.
• UsefulNotes.Chess — The impact chess has had on the Western world, tropes created/named with chess in mind, symbology of chess motifs.
• ReferencedBy.Chess — Works that feature chess matches as part of their storytelling.

Huh, Coincidence. I just started culling the tropes on this page yesterday> Yes, lots of shoehorning. But I'm not sure that simply moving it to Useful Notes is needed. I'll come back with thoughts whenI've got them in order.

I agree that most of the "tropes" related to games like chess, checkers, backgammon, and so forth, would be about the players and the memetic environment surrounding them rather than the games themselves, which are by any modern standard extraordinarily simple. Moving them to Useful Notes would solve this problem admirably.

The Useful Notes page may be unneccesary in light if tropes like Chess Motifs and Smart People Play Chess. Either way, Chess certainly should have its own trope page due to its many incarnations, rules, and gameplay strategies, even though it does need clean-up.

If game mechanics can be troped, Chess can and should have a work page. If there are problems with people shoehorning, and cleaning doesn't help, lock the page. Moving it to Useful Notes is entirely the wrong thing to do.

Not to mention: the "flavor" of chess (this is a king, this is a bishop) may be minimal and rarely taken seriously, but it's still a real thing. Since flavor is most of what we trope in video games and especially in board games, we can't just dismiss the minimal flavor that exists.

So, mechanics tropes and some minimal flavor tropes should all be acceptable.

The vast majority of what's on the page, though, is troping players, which absolutely needs to be purged.

Agreed; players are outside of the game, directing actions. We do not trope players of FPS or directors of movies.

If other stuff that have No Plot? No Problem! like Pong, Mario Paint, Minecraft or the original Super Smash Bros can be a work then so can chess IMO, its exactly the same thing really.

A work page though would need to be just about chess itself and various rules and such. Impacts would be more of a useful note or analysis unless it affected the game itself like x impact changed the rules and such.

Chess Motif and co would be tropes to themselves that just get mentioned on the page and instructed to put examples there.

edited 6th Jan '17 11:45:19 AM by Memers

I forgot about the flavor aspect TBH. But the question now is. How many tropes regarding to "mechanics" are there? IIRC a work page needs 3 tropes right?

I haven't looked in detail, and I'm in the middle of something else right now, but I did skim it yesterday, and saw several that seemed reasonable. There were a couple about pawn promotion, a couple about the "en passant" rule, and one or two about kings and queens that I think might fit. I'm pretty sure it's more than three. Can take a more detailed look later.

There are a lot of tropes that apply to things in the game. Like say the Bishop is a Church Militant, a Pawn Promotion is a Field Promotion to Queen for getting behind enemy lines, The Queen is seen as Too Awesome to Use, the win condition is a We Can Not Go On Without You and a Decapitated Army.

edited 6th Jan '17 6:03:09 PM by Memers

More of a tangent, but what about House Rules or Variant Chess? Can that be added/retained as a gameplay trope?

edited 6th Jan '17 6:25:38 PM by MorningStar1337

By definition, Variant Chess should not be a trope of regular chess. Any other game that is based on regular chess, like 4-player chess or Arimaa, however, should feel free to cite that trope.

Since chess itself is public domain, I don't see a problem with citing historical rule changes as House Rules. As the wider chess-playing community accepts those House Rules, they become ingrained in tournaments hosted by chess organizations.

edited 6th Jan '17 6:38:15 PM by crazysamaritan

Ok, I did a first pass across the page, and pulled out tropes about the rules or about the flavor, and put them in Sandbox.Chess.

I did not screen for shoehorning, and I did not comment out ZCEs. I did fix some indentation problems, but aside from that, it's simply what was on the page, and wasn't about players or possible player strategies or things like that. No gambit tropes whatsoever.

It's a surprisingly long list. But as I say, it's only a first pass.

edited 6th Jan '17 9:09:45 PM by Xtifr

Game mechanics are certainly tropable. As for flavour tropes, it's more problematic. Somebody mentioned, for example, the bishop as Church Militant.

To me, that seems like a blatant shoehorn because there is absolutely nothing in the game itself that associates the piece called "bishop" with the church leader with the same title. In fact, in most languages, the bishop has totally different names: in German it's "Läufer" and in Swedish "löpare", both meaning "runner", and in Spanish it's "alfil", from the Arabic word that's called "vizier" in English, and so on.

So this association is just an association in the mind of English-speaking players and has absolutely nothing to do with the game of chess. In fact, for me, as a non-native English speaker, it just seems like a rather far-fetched shoehorn.

It is, however, part of the very rich lore of chess, and that lore should certainly be tropable. The question is just where do we trope it? If it should be troped on the Chess page, I think it should be in a separate section, apart from game mechanics and such. I think most of the "flavour" tropes mentioned are really part of the lore and not part of the game itself.

edited 7th Jan '17 6:44:40 AM by GnomeTitan

When it comes to game mechanics, there's an additional complication. The game mechanics of the game itself are very simple and while there are some tropes, there can't be very many.

I'm sure, on the other hand, that the theory of chess - openings, endgames, strategy and tactics - contains many tropes. A simple example is the concept of a gambit (where chess is the trope namer, of course) - giving up a pawn in the opening to gain some other advantage. The theroy of chess is studied by basically all serious players, and to any tournament player the basic stratagems are as much part of the game as the basic rules.

But there problem with chess theory is that it's not really a part of the game per se but is a corpus of player-generated strategy and tactics. If I'm not mistaken, we don't usually trope player tactics under the game, because it's things players do, not part of the game itself. So where do we trope it? It's certainly tropable...

edited 7th Jan '17 6:50:57 AM by GnomeTitan

Troper Tales was the place where these things were troped a long time ago.

Troper Tales was before my time, but wasn't that used to trope tropers' personal experiences? That's not really what I'm referring to when I speak of lore and theory above.

Come to think of it, much of the "lore" could probably be categorized as memes. For example, the Church Militant "example", along with the running joke of applying bigamy tropes to situations where a player has two queens, should perhaps be categorized as memes rather than anything else. And we don't trope memes, do we?

But there's also lore in the usual meaning of the word; part of the flavour that doesn't come from the game itself but from the collective way players think about the game. It's hard to explain to people who are not part of the chess scene.

But the theory part is more akin to game mechanics, only it's game mechanics that aren't inherent in the game but emerging from the interplay between the players. And there's actually a written corpus comprising millions of pages (and, more recently, thousands of hours of video) which should be tropable even though it's not fictional.

I'm still in favour of making the current chess page either a useful note without tropes, or a work page containing only game mechanics tropes. But I understand if people want to trope the lore and theory and wouldn't mind seeing a place for doing that.

What I really would like to get rid of is all the nonsensical shoehorning, memes, and troping of real people.

edited 7th Jan '17 7:18:25 AM by GnomeTitan

Such player examples were put in Troper Tales back when it existed, since they are personal experiences in a way.

Well on the whole Church Militant thing, many many chess sets depict the bishop as a guy in church robes often holding a sword and its symbol on old pc games has a cross on it.

It might not be a thing in other cultures but it is in ours and that is a decent example write up fuel.

edited 7th Jan '17 8:17:14 AM by Memers