I’m frustrated. I started playing chess again last year and I can’t get past a certain level. I learned as a child, a little before adolescence. I looked at the grid on a screen bigger and deeper than the microwave I now have in my kitchen. It was a computer game where the pieces were animated and fought each other. The pixelated graphics, with their limited palette, amused me. I suspect that was the intent of the game’s makers and programmers. Each piece had its own choreography. They moved in particular ways and kept surprises in reserve for the moment they were rid of an opposing character. I don’t remember them all, but I remember having favorites.

The rook, which was really a tower while parked, turned into a hominid, something like the Thing from the Fantastic Four, made of stone. That was how it moved: like a grotesque, second-string superhero. I remember the rook swallowing one of the characters whole. It must have been the queen. It crushed the pawns with a single punch, a Hulk painted another color.

The pawns were scrawny soldiers, kitted out in armor whose helmet had a grille so the occupant could see and breathe. They carried short spears they used to, for instance, stamp on one of a knight’s feet, leaving him vulnerable, hopping on one leg, just before the little grunt dealt the fatal blow. Or was it a perfectly aimed kick to the parts that shall go unnamed?

The knights were burlier figures, with a cape, sword, and shield held high. They recalled images I’d seen in history books — or was it in some other computer game? — of the Teutonic knights, with the typical, frightening helms slit in the shape of a “t”. They were the brutes of the arena, bound to trace the letter “l”, but shoving everyone else aside as they crossed the field.

The bishops, dressed as if ready to celebrate Mass, ran the diagonals with no feet showing, hidden by their robes. They had a staff with a blade at the tip that they handled like shaolin monks (sacrilege!). Their bodies barely moved, in contrast with the quick, agile staff, spinning in combinations the attacking opponents found impossible to defend.

The king was a small character, plump, slow, holding his scepter. I don’t remember more than that. Curiously, or not, the supposed main character is the one my memory kept the least.

The queen swayed across the squares in robes that recalled the evil queen from Snow White. If I remember rightly, she used magic and trickery to deal her mortal blows. She surely cast lightning on some of her victims.

Each character, then, had a ritual reserved for killing each of the others. Which means each one also died in a distinct way, depending on its assassin. All of this was slow. Very slow. The games took eternities, since the characters dawdled before changing squares, and more still when they killed or were killed. Even so, my fascination was plain. I didn’t bore easily, despite the predictable repetition. I learned all the rules. I don’t remember beating the computer a single time. Sometimes one of my summer friends, the one who must have shown me the game when games still lived on floppy disks, would turn up and we’d play one against the other. I don’t remember ever winning. He was older.

Years later, I remember taking part in the secondary-school chess tournament. I got far and came close to winning. The games were faster, since the pieces no longer transformed or had death rituals, though in my head their movements never disappeared. Their speed depended solely on the force of human, direct fingers. Not the indirect ones of a programmer of archaic computer games.

Back to the beginning. I started playing chess again, after many, many years without touching a piece. In truth, I don’t touch pieces now. I touch mechanical mice, or glass coated in some conductor, that turn physical gesture into digital action. After all this time, I notice a great deal when I play. I notice the differences in the world and in myself.

The pieces no longer linger, nor come alive. Their purpose is no longer entertainment or wonder — it’s efficiency and measurability. The virtual boards summon indirect, digital fingers to move the pieces, which compete faceless and under false identities for a higher place on a numerical scale. Depending on whether we win or lose, we climb or fall in the ranking. Mastery, it seems, has nothing to do with knowing or with educated intuition. Now it’s defined by a figure, though that number, in theory — I repeat, in theory — represents experience, study, and talent, whatever that may be.

The pedagogy is abundant and (post)modern: videos, puzzles, tutorials, manuals, books written by experts and by opportunists hunting for more clicks and attention. There is, of course, a paid subscription that grants an algorithm access to analyze every game we finish — win, loss, or draw — handing us a score for the precision and correctness of each move. The criterion is robotic: it’s the machines that dictate what is most correct. And the humans follow, since none of these artifacts aims at, say, “spending quality time,” but rather “hit level X with these unheard-of openings and tactics (chess jargon)!”.

Paradoxically, the resurgence and growing popularity of chess in recent years serve as an argument for technologists and solutionists to go on seeing in technique the hope for progress and salvation. They say that, although machines have unequivocally surpassed human ability — perhaps even because of it — we’ve come to appreciate more the game played between those who have flaws without knowing they have them. As I wrote once, interest and enthusiasm in a game depend on the uncertainty about its outcome.

At the end of that same text, I wrote a short paragraph about the chess I’ve been playing with my boys. We’re playing even more often now, and I found in our behavior something that left me curious and intrigued. We too are shaped by the postmodern version of chess. Worried about our rankings, there are times we’d rather play on the cramped board we own, because those analog games have no effect on rises or falls in the lists.

As for me, I’ve been observing a few things that make me think. There are days, or even weeks, when I win most of my games. I have streaks of wins that surprise and thrill me. And other stretches of losses followed by more losses. They roughly even out, maybe with a slight lean toward the wins. Which leaves me with slow, inconsistent progress. I can’t make the reasons for the swing clear to myself. Sometimes I think my chess is a kind of barometer for my powers of attention and concentration, one that — instead of atmospheric pressure — would measure the pressure life is exerting on me, whether self- or other-inflicted. At other moments I reckon the algorithm is conspiring against me, even though I’m playing, I think, against unknown humans, almost always foreign; or that there are weeks when the grandmasters create profiles from scratch to amuse themselves in games against less-than-mediocre amateurs like me. I alternate, then, between more neurotic explanations and more paranoid ones.

There are more intrigues about myself that surface on account of my relationship with this game. The swing in my performance, which leads to apparent stagnation, makes me doubt my capacity to learn. In the weeks I win, I seem to be learning. In the weeks I lose, I seem to be regressing. I know I could study more and better, but I don’t want to, because that would mean going the opposite way to what I want for myself. Maybe I give myself too much importance, or I believe in the naturalness of progress through repetition and persistence. As a former athlete, though, I know you can train error, never improving, staying forever trapped in a closed circuit of blindness. I don’t play with the conscious aim of optimizing my output. But these reactions make me wonder whether I’m addicted to optimization without noticing it. I suspect these business models are built to hold me, and that on the other side of the screen there’s a dealer — an algorithmic pusher of attention, counting on my relapse. From there to the more paranoid explanation is a single step: that the frustration isn’t even mine, but provoked and instrumental, manufactured by someone else’s design. The discomfort is that this suspicion may be right and, even so, be the barest form of my paranoid side — knowing the architecture of attraction exists doesn’t free me from possibly using it so as not to look at myself.

Is the frustration I feel natural, the frustration of someone who has played thousands of games in a year with no improvement? Is it pig-headedness? Is it a mixture of all this?

I have no answers to these questions, nor any hurry to find them. I know that, several times while writing this, I felt like breaking off to play one more game, and that I had to call on some discipline to dwell on these thoughts instead of trading them for the board. Perhaps this is the phenomenon underneath it all, as applicable to chess as to any other activity that demands attention, concentration, memory, imagination, and foresight: speed and comfort leave us with less training ground for those faculties. If chess really is a barometer, perhaps this is the pressure it measures — the difficulty of staying still long enough to notice that the board is exactly where I want to escape to.