Season 1, episode 3 of "The Wire" has a pretty inciteful scene featuring Chess as a metaphor for the criminal life ("Pawns get capped early."):
Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results
21–30 of 88 posts
Re: Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results
#22"Every move has consequences" - That is absolutely brilliant! Is there any better way to explain such an abstract life concept to kids who can't see the consequences of whatever they do?
Not just direct consequences, but indirect consequences such as opportunity cost.
Yes you took that pawn, but now your knight is in a vulnerable position... maybe there was a better play.
Re: Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Losing the game , you might get a few chance to respawn, but most games have some sort of scoring system. It is not much different than a game of Chess, in many ways.
With chess at least you have to restart from the beginning, like starting your life over I guess, making you rethink your strategy. With video games you typically regain health and restart from the last save...
There are many games where death is permanent. It seems to be the default for roguelikes. Unfortunately the games of this kind are harder the longer you can play them, which means that the best ones are almost impossible to beat. That reminds me to try my hand at nethack again...
Re: Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Losing the game , you might get a few chance to respawn, but most games have some sort of scoring system. It is not much different than a game of Chess, in many ways.
With chess at least you have to restart from the beginning, like starting your life over I guess, making you rethink your strategy. With video games you typically regain health and restart from the last save...
Not all video games are like that, what does it matter if the "typical" video game is like that?
Re: Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results
#25In Australia, they have (or were) using flying lessons to try and rehabilitate drug addicts [1]. Apparently the idea was to stall the plane and have the patients recover from the stall, as a way of teaching them about taking control of their own life. I don't know what the long term results are, and it's part of a longer term rehab program so it would be hard to narrow it down specifically. Regardless, it's an intere…
I can imagine the board meeting where they were discussing an alternative "high" they could offer the drug addicts.
Re: Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Losing the game , you might get a few chance to respawn, but most games have some sort of scoring system. It is not much different than a game of Chess, in many ways.
With chess at least you have to restart from the beginning, like starting your life over I guess, making you rethink your strategy. With video games you typically regain health and restart from the last save...
In the middle ages, backgammon was more popular than chess as it was seen as a closer to real life than chess. In backgammon, you have the concept of luck playing a role too.
The meta lesson is: Luck can play a big role, but you still need a strategy.
Re: Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Losing the game , you might get a few chance to respawn, but most games have some sort of scoring system. It is not much different than a game of Chess, in many ways.
With chess at least you have to restart from the beginning, like starting your life over I guess, making you rethink your strategy. With video games you typically regain health and restart from the last save...
It depends on the game. They could play Civilization which gives someone an intro to strategy, history, politics and science all in a friendly looking package, and when you lose you have to start over from the ancient era.
Re: Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results
#28I bet they cheat. :)
Seriously, it seems like it would encourage discipline, a good thing.
Re: Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
With chess at least you have to restart from the beginning, like starting your life over I guess, making you rethink your strategy. With video games you typically regain health and restart from the last save...
It depends on the game. They could play Civilization which gives someone an intro to strategy, history, politics and science all in a friendly looking package, and when you lose you have to start over from the ancient era.
Is Civilization different from, say, Age of Empires in this respect? Because in AoE you keep your card deck etc. and merely restart the battle, which still puts you at an advantage compared to when you started off.
Re: Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
With chess at least you have to restart from the beginning, like starting your life over I guess, making you rethink your strategy. With video games you typically regain health and restart from the last save...
Not all video games are like that, what does it matter if the "typical" video game is like that?
> Not all video games are like that, what does it matter if the "typical" video game is like that?
I guess because the comment was talking about "most popular video games"?