chess and time

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Partly to satisfy testing requirements for this site's SERIES feature, I used 'chessays' as a series slug, because I'd always wanted to write essays on various interconnections among chess, the real world, philosophy, and human experience.

The essay I'm sketching here has to do with two senses of 'time' in regard to chess.

One sense is "real-time," the continuous sense of the passage of time we experience as we play. Time in that sense is continuous and, depending on our powers of concentration, can be filled with many things that don't have to do with chess.

On another plane, that of the rules and progress of an individual game on the board, there is a discreet sense of time which is the direct consequence of chess's being a "turn-based game."

Many years ago, when I had a Sega Dreamcast console, I can remember disparaging turn-based video games. They seemed old-school in the not-so-good way, concessions to an earlier era of game design limited by the technology of simulating real-time experience. I would think of Zork, its Zorky video successors, and other TBGs such as the Civilization series, as the gameplay equivalents of side-scrollers and crude sprite-based shooters like Robotron. Simulating reality was where it was at. Funny how naive that sounds today, 40 years later, when the state of the art in video games is pretty impressive in some respects but still falls far short of the hoped-for verisimilitude. The Uncanny Valley is still a mile deep and a mile wide.

Turn-based games have to earn their keep. Playing War with a deck of cards gets tiresome after a while; gin rummy, less so; and bridge can become the obsession of a lifetime. Complexity has something to do with this, and for sheer depth nothing compares to chess except Go, which is even more complex. I don't play Go and won't enter the preference debate, but I assume it shares with chess a fundamental similarity, namely, that it can take over one's mind in a peculiar way. Only something unfathomably complex can pose problems that would take a human an arbitrary amount of time to solve with total satisfaction, if they can be solved at all, so that the player must manage her real-time so as not to spend all of it playing chess—or even playing a single move in a chess game.

I take it this unfathomability, together with the human impulse to work problems out to the very end (an impulse that must have helped Og ease his worries by teaching himself to build fires and keep the wolves at bay), generates enough concern to fuel countless hours-long online blitz sessions.

Even as our real-time immersion in a chess game creates its flood of engagement, the game itself has a completely separate sense of time.

long and short

chess and time