Players and Pawns: How Chess Builds Community and Culture by Gary Alan Fine (review)

Gary Alan Fine's goal in Players and Pawns is to understand the social world surrounding chess in terms of its "history, rules, practices, emotions, status, power, organization, and boundaries" (p. 2). The central claim he makes in each of these areas, perhaps unsurprising to folklorists, is that despite its reputation as a game of pure intellect, chess is "eternally social" (p. 3). Fine convincingly demonstrates that even something as seemingly objective and fixed as chess ratings, the numbers used to rank players, reflects socially determined values within chess communities.

In Fine's projects on other social worlds, such as tabletop role-playing games or Little League baseball, he focused on "thick description" of a single group or a few similar groups. Here, he has taken a different approach, with observations of chess players in over a dozen diverse settings. These include open chess tables in Greenwich Village, chess clubs, and competitions ranging in stature from high school matches up to the World Open. This allows Fine to capture some of the diversity of chess worlds, although this is at the expense of a rich sense of any particular group.

Despite the diversity of sites explored in the research, there are some areas that are thinner than others. The overwhelming focus is on official play, with very little attention given to the more informal matches of Greenwich Village, which Fine observed only on four occasions. While this is a necessary decision given the breadth of worlds that he covers, folklorists in particular may be left curious about the presumably rich folklore in the less institutional forms of chess.

Chapter 1 begins the process of deconstructing the common understanding of chess as a purely mental activity by highlighting the importance of both the body and emotions in the chess community. Although chess players' bodies are not active in the same way as dancers' or athletes' bodies, Fine points out that a largely still body is nonetheless a body in action, fidgeting, moving pieces, making notations, and marking time by the clock. All of these actions embody thinking and communication. Similarly, despite the image of chess as a game of logic, Fine reports that players experience intense emotions with both victory and defeat. These emotions, like bodily movements and even the mental activities of the game, are "shaped by the demands of a community and by the desire of the person to interact with that community" (p. 40).

Having established the sociality of mind, body, and soul in chapter 1, Fine moves on to consider the sociality of rules in chapter 2. While, for the most part, Players and Pawns is decidedly a sociology of a hobby community rather than a piece of game studies literature, in this chapter, he interfaces more directly with chess as a game. Working in the vein of Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman, Fine presents chess players as performing their identities and relations through the rules and structure of the game. While the rules do not force a player to resign a game once it becomes clear he or she will lose, for example, "resignation avoids the claim that one cannot understand what everyone else sees" (p. 74).

In the third chapter, Fine describes the organization of time in chess worlds, moving from the macro scale of tournament schedules and ending with the microtemporal experience of players racing the clock when turns are short. This time pressure comes at the end of a standard match if the player has already used most of his or her allotted time, or in intentionally fast-paced variants such as bullet chess. This latter case is one of a number of examples cited by Fine as he argues that the clock has become a central agent in the game. On each of the temporal scales, as in other areas of modernity, "chunks of time are sliced ever more thinly" (p. 84).

Sticky culture...