How Board Games Explain Everything – Part 1: Structuralism

In his seminal, posthumously-published work, the Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure writes: “Of all the comparisons that might be imagined, the most fruitful is the one that might be drawn between the functioning of language and a game of chess. […] A game of chess is like an artificial realization of what language offers in a natural form.” Saussure is a monumental figure in academia. He is the father of modern linguistics and the founder of the structuralist and semiotic approaches to humanities research. And in his most important work he uses a board game as an analogy to explain his key concepts…because board games explain everything.

He is the father of modern linguistics and the founder of the structuralist and semiotic approaches to humanities research. And in his most important work he uses a board game as an analogy to explain his key concepts…because board games explain everything.

Saussure’s great insight was that linguistic signs are arbitrary and have no necessary relation to objects in the real world. This approach allows him to describe the structure of language without getting muddled up with all the messiness of ontology and metaphysics that you might think are required to understand language. In order to understand how the word “tree” function, for instance, you do not need to know anything about botany or biology—you don’t even need to have ever seen a tree—you just need to know the relationship between that word and all the other words in our language. In the Course Saussure gives us a vocabulary and methodology for describing and analyzing the relationships between words within language. He uses the word langue, for instance, to refer to the total sum of all the words and relationships that make up a language, and the word parole to refer to any string of words used to communicate (such as this post, a novel, or a conversation).

A syntagm

Two of his key concepts are the syntagm and the paradigm (paradigms are sometimes called systems or associations). A syntagm is a linear string of words or signs that create meaning by being present in one another’s company, often placed one after another (in space when written, in time when spoken). This sentence is a syntagm (as all sentences are). A paradigm, on the other hand, cuts along the other axis. A paradigm is the set of words or signs that could have been. They create meaning through their absence. In the sentence “The cat sat on the mat” there are any number of other words I could have used. I could have written “The cat slept on the mat” or I could have written “The cat shat on the mat”. That set of absent words also help give the sentence meaning. Part of how we understand what “sat” means relies on our ability to distinguish it from all those other words that it is not.

A paradigm

These terms don’t just apply to language, but to any number of signifying systems. In his slim volume, Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes uses the garment system as an example: He describes a paradigm as a “set of pieces, parts or details which cannot be worn at the same time on the same part of the body, and whose variation corresponds to a change in the meaning of the clothing: toque – bonnet – hood, etc.” and, by contrast, a syntagm consists of the “juxtaposition in the same type of dress of different elements: skirt – blouse – jacket”. So the skirt-blouse-jacket combo might create quite a formal look, but the fact that you’re not wearing a t-shirt, and are therefore not dressed casually, is part of what makes it formal.

A syntagm

So how do games help explain all this? Despite Saussure’s instance that chess offers the best possible analogy he does not explain the relationship in detail, but a bit of reflection reveals that chess is tailor made for this kind of analysis. Any given series of moves can be understood as a syntagm—meaningful in relation to all the other moves that were actually made—and all the different possible moves that could have been made at a given point can be understood as a paradigm: your decision to take my pawn was meaningful because it meant not taking my queen. The totality of all the possible relationships implied by the structure of chess is the langue of the game, and any actual session of play is an example of parole. I’ve talked before about “solving” games—well, this is precisely what it means to come to a complete description of the langue of the game. In fact, these terms seem even more apt for describing games than language. Unlike with language, it is theoretically possible to exhaustively describe every possible relationship within chess. We can understand precisely what sort of a thing the langue of a game is. You can map it out yourself for a simple game like tic-tac-toe. Furthermore, in games it is easy to avoid the temptation to drag the “real world” into it (something that Saussure wanted to get away from with his approach to linguistics). Everyone understands that the pieces in a chess game get their meaning from the internal logic of the game, not from real-world knights and kings and bishops.

A paradigm

Chess strategy guides (or newspaper chess columns) are nothing more nor less than structuralist analyses of the game, in precisely Saussure’s sense.

As I mentioned, Saussure has been vastly influential in academia, and his methods are used in the study of language, literature, film, anthropology and many other subjects. So if his ideas are so applicable to chess, you might ask, why isn’t there an academic field devoted to the structuralist analysis of games? Well, the answer is that there is such a field—it’s just not an academic discipline. Chess strategy guides (or newspaper chess columns) are nothing more nor less than structuralist analyses of the game, in precisely Saussure’s sense. Any discussion of strategy is necessarily about how moves relate to other moves—either the moves that came before or after, or the moves that could have been, the absent moves from which the present moves derive their meaning. These kinds of analyses go back millennia, of course. Far from inventing these techniques of structuralist analysis, Saussure stole them from an extremely well-established field. And that’s why chess was the most fruitful analogy that could be imagined.

Next week in “How Board Games Explain Everything”: Derrida and post-structuralism.