"Global Chess," is not a game, it is an experience. To partake in the activity of playing chess *globally* is like no other. This game depicts race relations, class consciousness, and gender empowerment all through the ancient classic of chess. Let me explain:
In normal chess, there are two colors. White and black. An ancient dynamic, to be sure, as white households hold a higher median income and household wealth than black households in the United States, and so this classical version of chess can still hold up in modern racial and socio-linguistic power dynamics. However, global chess expands this spectrum. You can choose to be colors like red, pink, blue, a different blue, green, and many more. This has revolutionized educational understandings of racial constructs in our western tech-dominated society. "How can colors that no human qualifies under possibly depict human racial dynamics?" You might be asking. Well, by depicting humanity with abstract colors, we have separated our hidden unconscious associations of race from the usual "black" and "white" conceptualizations. By doing this, we replicate real life consequences of colonialism and imperialism, but through the lens of an alternate dystopia. Much like *Metamorphosis* by Kafka, this "Joseph Kinsella" (A title I can only assume to be a pseudonym) has criticized our reality by making a surreal version of it, forcing our minds to find the differences between the abstraction and the truth, and therefore analyze it's similarities as well. It's like Squid Game but chess.
Additionally, the author has managed to create commentary on class relations in modern capitalist society, as well as existing traditional social statuses in less "developed" nations. Global Chess, much like "real" chess, has varying degrees of pieces. The rook, the bishop, the knight, the king, the queen, and pawns. These are all identities we are familiar with, as they are nostalgic depictions of medieval social classes that we learn in high school history class. In this manner, Joseph Kinsella has made no change. On the same note, the transferring of these pieces onto an alternate board, one that can hold continents and countries within its patterns, allows the player to reenact the timelines of history. Watching your pawns, clearly a metaphor for the global working class, hold say in their own future without having to travel to the "end" of the board is likely pointing to the game's developer subscribing to Karl Marx's "Historical Materialism" theory. Spawning a nation of pawns in Arabia and effectively promoting them all into bishops is a player-created commentary for the hold that religion has on all of our social morals, even once we stop going to church. This may be the first game that the player creates the commentary for the author. Its like if you were reading a book and the chapters were spawning as your brain predicts what's next.
As mentioned, we can also witness controversial depictions of gender dynamics in Global Chess. The queen has always been the most powerful piece in chess. This is no surprise. Joseph Kinsella has caused a rift in academia, though. You can have all the queens you want. You could technically have infinite queens! You are not limited to one plus the amount of starting pawns, because more pawns spawn in. What does this mean? Well, compared to normal chess, the queen has much larger movement capacity in Global Chess, as well as the fact that pawns are becoming queens left and right in all the games I have played. Could this be a striking truth that the glass ceiling no longer exists? Is the author trying to say that lower-class women are able to become wealthy and powerful in modern oil baron society to any extent that they wish? Time will tell, as it is too early to say what the author's true intentions are.
For this, I will be giving "Global Chess," by Joseph Kinsella a respectable rating of 9 out of 10 stars.
Minus one point for no boobs on the pieces. Do better.
