Chess and the Cultivation of Attention

Games as media cultivate attention by demanding us to think, perceive, and feel according to them. In my phenomenological approach inspired by Merleau-Ponty, attention consists of two intertwined acts, intuitive perception and more rational acts of deliberation. Chess serves as a good case study because it tasks its players to become familiar with an insurmountable magnitude of complexity. Chess players learn how to become attentive by training their perceptual and rational capacities so that they understand the problems of a position intuitively, as a state of positional imbalance created through the uneven distribution of pieces on the board. Following the Latin etymology of the word ‘medium’ as ‘in-between’ phenomenon, I assert that games, as processes of play, exist in the very intermediary relation between players and playthings, expressed by this field of strengths and weaknesses, and thus come to shape the thinking, perceiving, and feeling of the player.