The World of War

I have talked, in an earlier blog, in praise of video games, or at least, in praise of one series of games, the Final Fantasy series. I am well aware that, in our open-minded, classless society, video games rank low, something regretable that the kids do when you'd rather they were reading a good book!


The genre of games that I particularly enjoy comes in for particular disaproval, on grounds of violence and blood-thirstyness. These are role-play, and adventure games, and they are usually very difficult to play, but, by golly, you do not know what you are missing! At the simplest of levels, they have everything that a good adventure film has (seen PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN, or such classics as APOCALYPSE NOW, or SCHINDLER'S LIST?) and a lot more .... and considering the films I have just put behind parenthesis, I am inspired to point out to violence-objectors that I have not yet encountered a game that takes liesure to linger on cruelty and torture the way many films, such as the last mentioned above, that purport to be doing humanity a service, so often love to do ... video games tend to be more Monty python: 'and the blood goes pshhhh' than high-brow.


However, what I had in mind when I began this blog was to point out that the most reputable, and acceptable, and everyone-would-like-to-be-good-at-it game in the world, ie CHESS, is a WAR GAME. Just because it was invented before there were such graffic ways of depicting the battles makes it none the less a game of war, imbued with the psychology and values of war, and if you do not know that, then you will never be a good chess player ... never better than a computer that can memorise the rules, but does not understand the game. I speak here from experience. I struggled for years with chess, always feeling a complete duffer, then I discovered that it is a war game, and suddenly the lights came on .... ah, so that is what it is about: you marshal your forces to defend your king, and attack mine, and I marshal mine etc. Knowing what the game is about allows you to sit back and get a perspective on it, so that you are not playing move-by-move, move and counter-move, you are playing by strategy, so, eg, you might decide that 'attack is the best method of defence' and make that your strategy, or you might play a defensive game, etc and notice that the game now includes such skills as 'risk taking' and so on, battle skills.


So is it so bad that the kids are playing games that develop all the skills that chess does and lots more besides? Yeah, your right, 'video games' doesn't look as good as 'chess' on the CV!