Sure, playing chess needs intelligence, dedication, and good chess players are smarter than an average person. But it’s waaaay exaggerated in movies. I’m a math researcher, and in any movie, my department will be full of chess geniuses. But in reality, only about 10% of them even play chess.
The pared-down nature of chess really puts me off. I’m sure there’s some elegant simplicity in it but I mostly find it dull. I like an element of randomness in my games.
Chess doesn’t feel like a gateway to other, more fun games, and if it’s not a fun game for me, why would I pursue it? I’m fairly sure it doesn’t build skills that translate to anything else.
I also get that there are layers to it, although I’m adding that as apparently that’s not so self-evident as to be taken as read. I can see where the path leads and find it no more appealing than the obnoxiously boring gambling machines in casinos, or Dota2, or athletics. Learn the meta, build an understanding of the underlying concepts in order to be able to build more complex strategies based on a combination of instinctive statistical analysis and assessment of your opponent, etc. etc… I get it, I’m just not interested.
Edit: oh that’s interesting, some of you have gone into my profile and systematically downvoted my older comments. That’s what I get for not just blocking a Lemmy.ml user as soon as they chimed in.
Chess is a logic puzzle that changes as you play it, with the randomness coming from player interaction. If you’re not into solving those kinds of puzzles, you’re probably not going to have fun.
Pretty much the problem. It’s very pure but I find that puts me off rather than draws me in. I kind of have the same problem with Quake 3!
I find that I don’t like full games of chess, but chess.com has these little chess puzzles that highlight the surprising deviousness of the rules that can turn a sure defeat into a swift victory.
They also have an algorithmic engine that will calculate the general effectiveness of each move so you can get instant feedback, which I like.
I guess I need more focus in the things I play, and chess is just too broad as a game.
Elon is that you.
If you’re going to throw around an insult like that I’d like to see some working. I find chess boring, I’m not a fucking fascist.
He was ref this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi5ypuLXnVs
Regardless it’s an insult I wouldn’t throw at anyone other than a fascist.
There is! It can get REALLY cool once you get just a bit inro it.
If you’ve never learned how to read, then while you’re learning it’s difficult to imagine reading books for fun.
If I don’t enjoy stumbling on pronunciations and having to look up the meaning of words, then how will I ever enjoy books?
Well books aren’t about getting stuck in the pronunciation, you can only really start enjoying reading after you’ve already learned how and the built in rules and patterns are things you understand and can play with.
It’s up to you whether to put in the effort to learn to read, but for someone who hasn’t yet learned to say they “don’t like reading”. Sorry but you havent actually experienced what reading for fun actually is yet.
I really don’t buy this comparison at all. I think a better comparison would be to JRPGs - “it gets fun after 30 hours!” There’s also the presumption that a game like chess must be fun and everyone will definitely enjoy it. I’m really glad you enjoy it, I find it irritating that I don’t. However if the basics of it don’t draw me in, and I see no ancillary value in learning how to play it to a higher level, why would I continue? The world is full of enjoyable diversions and not everything is for everyone. I enjoy playing football (as in soccer) but find watching it to be awful. If I invested enough time I could perhaps find myself engaged enough in the bigger picture, care about the minutia, but why? There’s so many other things I found enjoyable from the outset. Reading included.
I think that’s a much worse comparison tbh.
There’s no presumption that a game like chess must be fun, all I said is that we are unable to objectively judge whether chess is fun or not before we’ve learned the rules and memorized common openings.
You shouldn’t. No one’s telling you to do things you don’t like. I’m just saying don’t accuse reading of being “unfun” because you hate learning grammer and punctuation.
If you say “i don’t see the value in chess so it’s not worth it struggling through the unfun part of learning the basics” then we have no issue. See the difference?
It’s the basics you hate. You have no clue how you feel about chess cause you haven’t really played it yet.
You’re focusing on the wrong question.
If it is possible to invest enough time that it becomes fun, then why are you trying to insist that thing is inherently just unfun.
It’s unfun at the level you’re at, but the next level is a completely different game.
I’m not saying you have to go to the next level, just stop judging it based on the current level.
At no point did I seek to judge it objectively.
I have played some chess at various points throughout my life. My subjective judgement is that it didn’t grab me, unlike many, many other games. It might well have some divine beauty to it but the subjective barrier to entry is far too high. I also don’t bother with TV shows that “get good in the second season” or endure multiple chapters of tedium before bailing on a book.
You’re now putting words in my mouth.
At what point did I state anything other than a subjective opinion?
In fact I went out of my way to make it abundantly clear that these are my opinions and not a judgement on the game as a whole.
If this thread is anything to go by, I wish I’d played even less chess than I already have. Sorry that I’m enjoying my hobbies wrong?
I have not enjoyed my limited experiences with chess. They have turned me off pursuing it further. The same is not true of many other games I’ve played. To me that makes chess subjectively worse than those other games.
That was exactly the reason for my response. :)
Your subjective opinion that “chess is unfun for you” ignores the objective lack of knowledge of what chess even is. I believe something is unfun for you, I just disagree that it’s the game of chess you’re describing.
What you are calling “chess” here is the basics. It’s not the game Magnus Carlson plays.
Fair!
Once again I’m not here to convince you to play it or that it even would be fun if you did. Watch and play what you want. Just also recognize everything has a learning curve and that it is an error to misattribute frustrations in general along the learning curve with frustrstion towards the actual thing once it’s been learnt.
“Chess doesn’t feel like a gateway to other, more fun games, and if it’s not a fun game for me, why would I pursue it?”
Right in here. You don’t actually know if it’s a fun game for you or not. You just know it’s unfun to learn at your current level and don’t see it getting more fun any time soon to he worth sticking with.
Happens to me with countless games and hobbies. I used the book analogy to explain how someone learning to pronounce and sound out words complaining that “reading isn’t fun for me” isn’t actually complaining about reading, they’re complaining about learning to read. Those are different things.
You did. But there’s an objectiveness hidden in the subjective opinion.
As an analogy, if I saw a child in a burning building I could say as a subjective opinion “I will save that child”.
The problem is under pressure and actual flames of a fire, I can’t know how I would act. Maybe I’d panic and wouldn’t actually be able to do it, or maybe some switch would go off and I’d rush in.
The point is I don’t know because I’ve never been in that emergency situation. I’m unqualified to make subjective statements about how I’d react to completely unfamiliar states of mind.
Maybe chess is unfun for you, maybe it’s not. Insert ANY hobby in that statement, it’s not about chess specifically.
Until you’ve learned the thing you can’t even make subjective statements about yourself and how you’d act with knowledge you DONT HAVE.
Why are apologizing lol?
You aren’t enjoying your hobbies wrong, I just think you’re thinking about them in the wrong way.
I think you mean “X is unfun to learn” instead of “X is unfun”.
I think you admitted you don’t know enough about X to say if it’s fun one way or the other.
That’s okay I guess.
I could spend a few hours with no tutorial failing to learn Dwarf Fortress and just conclude the game is unfun and live my life that way perfectly fine.
Does it actually mean the games unfun for me? No, of course. It just means I’m preventing myself from giving a chance to things I misjudged.
What I played was called chess, followed the rules of chess, and seemed to be chess. I didn’t like it.
Building an opinion around the game I actually played rather than some hypothetical higher level game feels like an extremely reasonable approach to me. I’m sorry that you feel it’s not, I guess.
I understand you didnt like it haha. That was never unclear.
But why do you keep feeling the need to apologize to me? Don’t self flagellate, just state what you believe without worrying about upsetting me, this is just about understanding a concept. Theres no emotion here. I think you are almost there and actually nailed the point you’re just missing the nuance.
This is perfectly on the money here
Fully correct. Build your opinion around the game you actually played, which unspoken but importantly in that implies you should leave room for potential different opinions on the game you haven’t gotten to yet.
When a little kid says “I hate math” we don’t want to take that as inate truth about them, it probably has more to do with their boring math teacher.
Get them into Minecraft, if they’re into sports get them into learning stats for their favorite players.
I am super passionate about learning and what I’ve learned about the human brain is all it takes is for the right mindset and sometimes a thing just clicks. Not always, but trying to leave room for the myself I could grow into is a huge part of growth in general as a human.
You at 40 is not you at 30 which isn’t you at 20. Accept my advice or not, you’ll look back one day and I guarantee you won’t recognize the person you once were.
…it’s not an actual apology, it’s a rhetorical device. Was that not clear?
I don’t really understand why you feel the need to second guess my own assessment of my own mind. I’m not interested in an explanation either, just to be clear. Each time you keep drawing comparisons that paint me as naïve and childlike. It’s perhaps not intentional but the end result is tremendously insulting, hence why I’m not interested in further talk on the subject.
With regards to learning new things, the world of human experience is vast. I am not shutting the door on chess out of petulance. I do so knowing the journey I would need to take is incompatible with my own preferences for discovery and growth. To my mind it is a distilled competitive logic puzzle. I don’t like logic puzzles of any complexity, and I particularly don’t like pared down ones with no set dressing or storytelling.
I am actually quite happy to engage in puzzle solving - it’s one of the things I do for a living. However there the puzzles are more cooperative and with many, many more facets to them. They can be solved in a huge number of ways and with a variety of different skills.
I’m explaining this because it seems you need it spelled out rather explicitly. Particularly as you seem to have rather strange ideas about who you’re talking to. I’m nearly 40 and your comment about not recognising past versions of myself could not possibly be further from the truth. The various iterations of myself have been built atop the old ones. The eleven year old boy is still in there, as is the teenager, twenty-something, and the several versions of me from my 30s.
I don’t necessarily know everything I like, but I’ve tried a great many things and have a firm understanding of what kinds of activities I dislike. I can also extrapolate fairly well, and it’s not like chess is an obscure interest such as shin-kicking. The journey and destination both look rather dull to me, whereas many others do not. I cannot do everything in one lifetime and must choose. Chess has had its chance with me. It blew it. The same is true for gambling, as it happens. I have tried it in various forms and found it universally dull. I also don’t enjoy ales, gloomy literature, tennis, or horror movies. There’s much about those things I don’t know and I intend to keep it that way in order to explore other potential interests. Things that I hopefully won’t be bored by, or at least I enjoy some element of the journey.
Otherwise I might as well just be working - at least then the boring bits result in a paycheque.
I’m really at a lose about how what you wrote addresses their analogy. You just say that you don’t buy it and that the basics should draw you in.
Don’t get me wrong. You don’t have to like chess. I don’t particularly like chess, but I know the basics and know that I have to play a lot of games to get to the enjoyable part. In that way, their analogy is apt.
I’m not the guy you’re replying to, but it is a bad analogy since learning to read a language leads to more exciting things, even if you don’t enjoy reading books. You can communicate, do science, watch movies with subs etc. But learning chess does not make you good at anything else. (Tbh, I’m speaking out of my ass here, and will stand corrected if presented with research showing otherwise.)
Your points are correct but I think you misunderstand what my analogy was intended to do. None of this makes it a bad analogy.
I don’t disagree with you that reading opens the doors to so many other things than chess does.
I also never intended to imply chess is a transferable skill. Chess skill, for matters of this discussion, could be entirely useless outside of the specific context of a chess game.
The reason i made the analogy betwen learning to read and reading for fun is because I’m trying to illustrate the difference of 500 ELO chess and 2500 ELO chess.
If you play 500 ELO chess you DO NOT KNOW what 2500 ELO chess is, you could not explain the reasons behind a single move which is made in strategy, you can barely identify how to move your horse.
That’s part of my point. If we were talking about painting then the skills might well be useful for other stuff, but everything I’ve read says that it’s just a game. It doesn’t build other useful skills.