3 ms·
Watching chess, like watching "hacking" is kind of boring. The audience understands the high level concepts but not the details. I feel that the actual placeme
by uberman 8y ago
Watching chess, like watching "hacking" is kind of boring. The audience understands the high level concepts but not the details. I feel that the actual placement and progress of a game of chess on the big screen follows the same "entertainment logic" that "cracking" passwords one letter at a time does. That is no logic at all.
Chess is a signifier. The players are smart, sometimes ruthlessly willing to sacrifice for the greater good. The opponents are doing battle often a mental proxy that foreshadows a physical battle to come. There is a slow tension to it. People get the high level concept and symbolism without understanding the nuances or in fact without understanding what a fork is or being able see it on the board let alone being able to "see it" coming.
Almost no one in a theater will see HAL's mistake at calling for mate in 2 rather than mate in 4. Sure, people find "easter eggs" and hidden messages like this after the fact and it is fun to debate but during the film this simply goes over people's heads.
Finally, this post suggests that the "average" game is about 79 moves.
https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/2506/what-is-the-average-length-of-a-game-of-chess https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/2506/what-is-the-a...
Any director will be hard pressed not to take liberties regarding play and still keep the audience engaged.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Asooka 8y agoI recently chanced upon this chess video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G90SVhxKeig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G90SVhxKeig I believe you could spice up the presentation with some cinematography and a clearer narration and it will make for good cinema. Chess has a nice battle rhythm of quick simple moves and long periods of thinking about pivotal moves. It's still not 100% super accessible if you have to speak and explain the meaning behind the moves, but it's probably a good idea in a movie about chess. In another kind of movie, one in which chess is used more as a proxy, you could have the narrator sort of in the midground, focusing on wordless interaction between onlookers, so people who don't care about the commentary aren't forced to think and understand the game and can instead immediately empathise and get the appropriate emotional response.
- mindgam3 8y agoWatching chess, like watching baseball, is only boring if you don’t understand what is going on.
- hhjj 8y agoThe one letter password guessing had some credibility long time ago thanks to unvalidated password length fields: https://jumpespjump.blogspot.com/2014/02/hacking-windows-95-part-1.html https://jumpespjump.blogspot.com/2014/02/hacking-windows-95-... But nowadays i doubt you often encounter that kind of bugs and the speed would probably be unappealing to audience.
- eridius 8y agoThe one letter password guessing still has relevance today in systems vulnerable to a timing attack. If the timing of password validation is affected by the valid-prefix length (which it would be if the password validation is a simple strcmp()) then you can use that to brute-force the password character-by-character.