My Obsession with Chess | Hacker News Reader

My Obsession with Chess

scottmccloud.com

156 pointsgnosis29 comments

If anyone hasn't read Understanding Comics, it's a fantastic book. http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Comics-Invisible-Scott-M...

And for the HN set, it is actually really good for UX inspiration.

Also his book "Making comics" is useful to understand visual story making; I am actually half-way through reading it.

If you're doing any sort of visual storytelling, especially animation or games, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

I'd argue that any UX is visual storytelling.

It's worth noting Scott McCloud also did the Google Chrome comic - http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

wow, had this book for years but never took the time to read it. After reading that chess comic I really want to now.

About this comic:

My Obsession with Chess

1998-1999

My fourth online comic seemed to strike a chord with many readers, despite requiring side-scrolling as well as down-scrolling (which I'll admit, can be pretty annoying).

This one's autobiographical; an account of a childhood obsession with "the most violent game" and how that obsession returned in my late twenties. It's all true, but pretty weird, 'cause I was, um... a weird kid.

I visited the legendary Xerox PARC shortly after completing the comic and they offered to print it for me on their humungous format printer. In 2008, the print-out was exhibited at New York's Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art and Bowling Green University as an artifact of webcomics history.

Anything more than ten years old is like the dead sea scrolls in webcomics.

From http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/chess/index.html

<nit>All my copies of 'My System', say Aron Nimzowitsch</nit> Great obsession though, pretty easy to relate to as well. Glad he found comics...

Thank you, I was about to look for the book and this saved some confusion. Not sure why you were DV'd.

Wonderfully captures the obsession many of us chess players have shared with the game.

Love the ending.

I had a very similar experience as the author did in the ending when playing World 4 of Braid. For several hours I felt like walking back in the direction I came from would cause time to move back as well.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bobby_fischer_against_the_wo... Haven't seen it yet but plan too! Looks like a pretty good chess related film.

The best chess-themed movie I've ever seen is "Black and White Like Day and Night": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078211/

It's fiction, but loosely based on Bobby Fischer.

The first chess-related work of fiction that comes to mind is "The defense", by Nabokov. The main character is similarly obsessed with chess and comes to see everything in terms of chess. There's a movie adaptation called "The Luzhin defense", with John Turturro and Emily Watson, which I thought was OK.

What does this comic gain from the strange layout of otherwise regular squares? I got frustrated of trying to figure out where the next square was as I scrolled down.

I've read Scout McCloud's series about comic books and I can understand why he did this - he's fascinated in how to challenge the status quo and existing norms in comics. Besides the obvious parallel to chess moves that is. He's kind of a in a position to do it too, given he's already accomplished a lot in the comic world.

They are like squares on a chess board. They even match the colors correctly when moving diagonally or vertically/horizontally. I liked this little detail.

I also wouldn't be surprised if there's some hidden meaning to some of the movements.

It would be so much better if it lined up with the tile background.

http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/chess/index.html

I don't know about chess but it seems to follow some kind of pattern when zoomed out.. Is it a famous game or set of moves?

"... What does this comic gain from the strange layout of otherwise regular squares? ..."

Scott McCloud wrote a whole book explaining why, "Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form" ~ http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Comics-Imagination-Technol... a quick summary: he's trying to redefine & elevate comics from being mere cartoon strips in newspapers or the plastic covered, pulp superhero "comix" you find in dingy comic book stores to a higher art-form through new technology & imagination ~ http://www.scottmccloud.com/2-print/2-rc/index.html

McCloud is playing with the compositional rhythms allowed by the web. Normally a comics artist is constrained by whatever page size she's using for the book; McCloud is completely and utterly fascinated* by the possibility of breaking that long-standing constraint.

The repetition of regular squares sets up rhythms, that he then violates for purposes of mood, emphasis, timing, etc.

*seriously, his second comic about comics, "Reinventing Comics", basically boils down to "the Internet will transform the finances behind comics via micropayments" (right on the transformation, wrong on the micropayments) and "the Internet will transform the layout of comics by freeing us from the constraints of a particular page size".

It's about chess; it moves horizontally, vertically, diagonally, like moves on a chessboard. The individual panels have black and white backgrounds, like a chessboard, which combined with the movement, gives him the chance to affect the mood; if he sticks to diagonal moves on black, you get a sequence of dark, moody frames.

He also wrote, in the introduction to the comic (http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/chess/index.html):

  My fourth online comic seemed to strike a chord 
  with many readers, despite requiring side-scrolling 
  as well as down-scrolling (which I'll admit, can be 
  pretty annoying).

It sounds like this was something experimental; remember, this was the early days of webcomics. He was experimenting with what you could do in a new medium. It turns out that this choice was kind of annoying; but it was a nice experiment, and it's a good comic despite the somewhat annoying scrolling.

Sleep paralysis is terrifying.

It's only terrifying if you let it terrify you.

I get it on a regular basis, and don't mind.

Yeah, it takes some concerted effort to realize its happenning and to relax back into sleep.

How can u post that link again? Is HN not blocking old links?

Boring teen angst.

This probably won't matter to you, but the entire point is that it's not about the angst.

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