Book recommendation
I'd like to recommend that you read David Sirlin's, book,
Playing to Win. Sirlin is a professional game designer and national Street Fighter champion. It's an excellent, well-written book that basically teaches you how to win, specifically:
- what mindsets do/do not serve you
- a (brief and appropriate) re-telling of Sun Tzu's The Art of War as it applies to games
- an overview of common play styles you'll encounter in your opponents
- an analysis of top player to try identify the core traits of what makes the best player
- and much more.
The book is only 131 pages long, and is extremely well written and very concise. Sirlin really cares about clear thinking and good writing, and liberally takes lessons from Strunk and White's excellent,
The Elements of Style. Admittedly this recommendation is bias, since I'm a big fan of Sirlin, but the book really is good. And best of all, it's available for
free online!
If you'd rather read a physical copy, there's also a print version of the book available. There are also
unofficial file copies available (ie. PDF, .txt, etc), but I wouldn't recommend them because the font quality is poor. The online version (that I linked to first) is the best version.
You won't be able to find reviews of it from Amazon because Sirlin sucks at marketing (and/or doesn't have time to market since he has a job, the poor guy
).
However, in addition to my glowing, over-enthusiastic fan-boy recommendation (
), you can read a review of it by a competitive gamer
in this forum post, and another by Clint Hocking, a professional game designer who designed and did script work for the first
Splinter Cell game,
in this blog post.
An awesome quote from Clint's review that resonates strongly with me:
Quote:
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"Playing to Win" is a great book. For Sirlin, games aren't just entertainment, they are opportunities for communal exploration of highly complex possibility-spaces, and platforms for serious self-reflection and improvement. The games he is interested in are the kinds of games that people play for decades, for centuries, without exhausting all of their secrets. I'd love to see more mainstream computer and videogames with a commitment to the kind of depth that Sirlin finds in competitive gaming. Maybe if we could prorate roayalties over generations...
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Overall, I think chess will be an excellent fit for you since it makes use of what is probably one of your most powerful strengths -- your 1337 long-term projection/planning ability. Couple that with your Learner and Focus talent, and you're set.
Random, chess-related stuff you may like
According to this (really interesting)
article about chess grandmasters from Scientific American where they talk about how "
mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well", it'll take you about 10 years and lots of playing to get really good at the game. Now I'm pretty sure that you don't intend to play it this seriously, and you probably like chess because it takes you away from a monitor/TV screen, but in terms of games, I'd say there are much more interesting ones available that let you more directly make use of your talents.
Interestingly, Street Fighter also "takes you away from a monitor" (sort of) if it's available at arcades that you can go to and vs people ("arcades" and "Street Fighter" are synonymous), but sadly those arcades (and people who go to them) are hard to find. Darn chess for being so simple, inexpensive, and enduring. Just a board and pieces, and you're set to play.
On an un-related note, I'll cap this post off with an interesting quote:
Quote:
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I heard somewhere (lost the source, sorry) that if every particle in the universe could somehow be used to compute one operation per second and that all the particles in the universe were used in a massively parallel computer that analyzed all possible positions in Chess, it would take longer than the current estimated age of the universe to finish. So yeah, pretty long.
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