Jason Lee (Blog Assignment 1, topic B)
Throughout history, as Yalom’s Birth of the Chess Queen points out, the game of chess has both symbolized and formed various understandings of society and morality, ranging from the sacred to the profane and the elite to the common. However, it is through the rules of the game and representation of the pieces (especially the queen) that has served as a force that’s glorified Christian morals to harboring courtship. Fast forwarding over fifteen hundred years from Chess’s beginning, we are now talking about digital games and their ability to create models, representations, and social messages through rules and representation. I would like to focus on Ian Bogost’s idea of “Procedural Rhetoric” as a lens to help understand how an ancient game such as chess was able to work as a social model and representation of morality through the church, for procedural rhetoric explains how representation vs. procedurality makes a game an expressive medium, and a tool for learning and teaching social and religious ideologies.
I will attempt to summarize Ian Bogost’s ideas on procedural rhetoric in order to frame Yalom’s investigation of Chess. Bogost, in his book Persuasive Games describes Procedural Rhetoric to be “the practice of authoring arguments through processes… its arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior” (Bogost 29). What is important in his definition is to realize that the representational, the “words or images” are not the rhetorical tool of the game, but rather the “rules of behavior” that model the universe within the game. For Bogost, in place of words and images, “Unit Operations” serve as the unit of rhetorical argument, “each unit operation in a procedural representation is a claim about how part of the system it represents does, should, or could function” (Bogost 36). In short, what a Unit Operation really is in relation to Chess is merely a rule, or the expressive power of a single procedure within that game. In this way, Bogost’s modern theory revolves around games modeling a real world counterpart, and through the model capturing some ideal form or ideology.
In examining the ways that chess has been taken up by the church of the Middle Ages to spread moral and social values, we can see examples of how both representation and the procedure, or rules, of the game are used to form those ideologies in the same way. In the early example of the Einsiedeln Manuscript from the 990’s, there are two ways in which the game serves as a medium for modeling an social convention: the presence of a queen over a vizier and the rules stipulation that states only one queen may be present on the board at a time for each side. The change from vizier to queen is a change on the visual or representative level; no rule or procedure has changed. Rather, Yalom theorizes that the shift in representation was due to the presence of powerful female rulers being more relevant to the population in the Holy Roman Empire over the Arabic idea of a vizier: “we can speculate on the living sovereigns who might have served as models for the miniature queen. Empress Adelaide, the wife of Otto I, and Empress Theophano, the wife of Otto II, are the most probable candidates” (Yalom 19). However, the representational change results in the procedural one; as Yalom notes, “the prohibition on promoting a pawn to a queen while the original queen was still on the board was an attempt to preserve the uniqueness of the king’s wife” while “the Arabic game did not have to face that problem because a Muslim ruler could theoretically have as many viziers as he wanted” (Yalom 18). If we return to Bogost’s definition of a Unit Operation as a procedure that demonstrates what “does, could, or should” function in this representation of chess, we find that polygamy is not one of those things that can exist within that system. We see that the game’s modeling of a real world situation translates to a procedure that communicates it. This model is important, however, because the pieces on the chess board are representative of royal families and empires; the king and queen of the chess board must capture the ideal relationship between the ruling king and queen of whatever region the game is played, whether it be Italy, Germany, France, or Spain. The laity, playing chess within these regions, would be exposed to this model of the royal family and social structure and would learn about the ideal model of society from chess.
Indeed, one of Yalom’s most compelling examples of how chess was used by the church as a pedagogical tool is of Jacobus de Cessolis, a friar who used chess metaphors in his sermons. Yalom describes how he goes through describing each piece and assigning attributes on their idealized behavior, from the Queen’s companionship to the King requiring her to be “‘Chaste, docile, descended from a good family, and attentive to the upbringing of her sons’” according to de Cessolis, and Yalom pointing out further that “the words ‘chaste’ and ‘chastity’ were repeated several times to remind the audience where a woman’s greatest virtue lay” (Yalom 69-70). Not only was the chessboard used to espouse values about the proper woman, but also make people feel comfortable in their lower status in society by attributing each everyman to a specific pawn on the chessboard (Yalom 71). De Cessolis, in an attempt to espouse these values further, added interesting rules that reinforced the rhetoric. Yalom discusses one such rule:
One can discern a few differences from Alfonso’s manuscript, the most notable [rule] of which concerned the king. He was allowed to move two, three, or four squares on his first move, either in a straight line or diagonally or in a combination of the two. Interestingly, he could take the queen with him on his first and only three-square jump. This was but one of many symbolic attempts to remind the queen that she belonged to the king and was under his jurisdiction. It was up to the king to determine their “conjugal” first move. (Yalom 71)
Such rules may or may not have been strategically interesting, but the focus is clearly on using the game and its rules to reinforce his messages. What is interesting here is that like the Einsiedeln Manuscript, an idealized model of society gives rise to a procedure, so that the model of chessboard society matches the model that is being taught to the commoners.
When exploring how procedure and rules were used as ways to turn chess into an expressive medium, we discover that the representations and values surrounding the queen give rise inevitably to rules that must meet those claims. Yalom spends the rest of her book discussing how social changes lead to rule changes to reflect the idealized version of the world it is trying to teach and encourage, and how each little rule change and representation can make the medium express a narrative of war elephants, vizier generals, and endangered royalty, or a Christian lesson of protecting oneself from the devil through the grace of the Virgin Mary. Even within “one” game we’ve been able to express over a millennia of Asian and European history through their differences in procedure, and through the rhetoric the game taught we learn about the lessons each age of history wished to become.
Bibliography
Yalom, Marilyn. Birth of the Chess Queen. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2004.
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.
Comments