There’s a really fun game out there that I would like to wholeheartedly recommend to you, one that doesn’t conform to the trappings of the modern AAA experience. One where you don’t have to worry about the endless treadmill of updates wrecking a metagame you enjoyed, nor about the expiry of licenses or the sudden stop of development. A multiplayer
I’m talking, of course, about chess. Slowly but surely, this childhood interest of mine has taken over most of my gaming time as I leveled up my play, and while part of this no doubt has to do with aging out of the industry’s core audience, it’s also just the nature of the beast. There’s a reason why people have obsessed over chess for over a millennium.
A deep, dark forest
A noteworthy caveat here, I suppose, is that I’m fairly decent at chess, depending on who you ask. I certainly don’t think I’m any good at it, and I have no reason to suppose so when grandmasters exist in the world.
Still, from the perspective of a post-pandemic The Queen’s Gambit-enjoying casual, my experience is not representative. My long-dormant chess.com account puts me at the top 0.5% of players, and the more dedicated Lichess community has me at the top 5% depending on the format. While I learned the basics of the game as a kid, most of this is due to the effort I put in over the past few years, and it was a very different feeling compared to when I was grinding ever-changing metagames in Hearthstone or other strategy titles.
When I sit down to study something new in chess, I feel like my time is being respected, that the accumulated knowledge won’t get ripped away by an update that changes things just for the sake of it. (There’s a reason why Counter-Strike is one of the few remaining multiplayer games I still sometimes come back to.)
There’s also the ease of finding opponents at any level, at any time, in any format. I can play quick chess at 3am or slow chess in the afternoon with little to no wait or ranking mismatch. It also affords me more opportunities for IRL events and connections than most video games do. In the end, I keep finding myself having more fun this way these days. There isn’t a greedy publisher who can mess things up at any moment, depriving me of the option of ever playing the game in the form I grew to love it again.
Chess is a deep, rewarding pastime, one where you will never run out of new things to experience or discover. It also offers little quarter in apportioning blame to anyone but yourself. No microtransactions, no pay-to-win (unless you consider coaching, I suppose), and with strong chess engines available in your browser just a handful of clicks away, you can check and try the best and strongest openings and tactical calculations in a way that was never before possible.
For the brief period of practice, the gap between excellence and reality is as narrow as it gets. What else offers such a rush?
Receding into the background
My editorial role at Destructoid helps me keep up with the industry through my colleagues’ impressive work, and it gives me a good understanding of which games are truly worth one’s time. Still, I find it difficult to commit when I could be playing some more chess instead! Blue Prince was my standout gaming experience of the year, and I really hope Kingmakers is not vaporware. I’ve got Project Motor Racing coming down the pipeline, and a handful of golden oldies I sometimes pass the time with—but other than those, I’d probably need a Half Life 3-level cataclysm to take a deep dive into something.
Don’t get me wrong, there are always games I plan on jumping into. I love the Wargame series of strategy games, and I really enjoyed the few dozen hours I spent with its spiritual successor, WARNO. But I can’t see myself diving deep and learning all the strats, keeping the knowledge up to date against veterans of the franchise, as new and new content keeps getting churned out. It’s ephemeral.
Be it a big-ticket AAA live-service content treadmill or a small bespoke experience that will inevitably wither away player count-wise, no new multiplayer game really speaks to me apart from those I can wrangle a group of friends to play myself. As for single-player stuff, I can’t in good conscience jump into a massive open-world game or a deep RPG where I know full well I won’t ever finish in detail. For story-driven titles, I was burned too often by the illusion of choice, and if we’re being real, only a handful of such games offer a compelling enough gameplay loop that makes actually playing them more interesting than watching someone else’s story decisions. (They also compete with books for my story-consumption time, which is, well, tough.)
This is an odd feeling, having spent a significant portion of my teenage and early adult years with various games big and small. From MS-DOS launchers in 1997 to the pandemic years, I always had an executable spinning around in the back of my mind, looking for more. Nowadays, it’s mostly chess. And I’m quite happy with that.
