I don't play chess. That is, I know how to play, but I'm really pretty bad at it and don't like it much, so I hardly ever try.

Part of this is because I find it difficult to do the planning-for-all-eventualities kind of strategic thinking. It just seems to be a blind spot in my intellect. I'm an engineer type, who will do a competent job if given plenty of resources and a good safety margin; strategy in a fair fight is more a question of squeezing every last bit of juice out of the limited resources you've got, and that's not my forte.

But also, chess specifically annoys me in one particular way, and that's the uniform vulnerability of the pieces. I'm much happier playing games like Starcraft, in which the more powerful units are generally better armoured as well as better armed, so although a high-value unit can still be mobbed by enough small pieces, it's not usually possible for (say) a single marine to take out a battlecruiser. But in chess, the powerful pieces can be captured exactly as easily as the feeble ones, and this paradoxically makes the feeble ones more scary due to the concept of piece exchanges; a knight protected by another knight, for example, has little to fear from the lightning strike of the opponent's queen (if he wants to swap his queen for one of my knights that's fine by me) but is likely to run like hell from a slowly advancing pawn (his pawn for my knight is much more in his favour). It irks me that the powerful pieces are so circumscribed by this sort of consideration that it's very hard to actually use them for anything worthwhile. My intuition as to how battle games ought to work is much more in the Starcraft mould than the chess mould, and as such I've always felt this feature of chess to be counterintuitive and somewhat artificial.

It occurred to me recently, though, that in fact the chess model can apply worryingly well to less military aspects of life, because some vulnerability models aren't as linear as they are in battle. Suppose, for example, that you believe yourself to be good at doing something because you've never failed to do it yet, but that a lot of what makes you good at it is precisely the confidence that comes from a 100% track record. Suddenly your vulnerability is increased in proportion to your success so far: if you fail just once, you know your confidence will be badly shaken and you're likely to start failing a lot more in future. So although you have this theoretical great strength, in practice you often don't want to have to risk using it.

This annoys me just as much in real life as it does in chess. Except that in chess you can always say ‘oh, this is a stupid game, I can't be bothered’ and walk away from the board.