David Lynch Turns Twin Peaks into a Virtual Reality Game: Watch the Official Trailer

in Games, Technology, Television | December 11th, 2019

When David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks pre­miered on ABC in 1990, view­ers across Amer­i­ca were treat­ed to a tele­vi­su­al expe­ri­ence like none they’d ever had before. Four years ear­li­er, some­thing sim­i­lar had hap­pened to the unsus­pect­ing movie­go­ers who went to see Lynch’s break­out fea­ture Blue Vel­vet, an expe­ri­ence described as eye-open­ing by even David Fos­ter Wal­lace. A ded­i­cat­ed med­i­ta­tor with an inter­est in plung­ing into unex­plored realms of con­scious­ness, Lynch tends to bring his audi­ence right along with him in his work, whether that work be cin­e­ma, tele­vi­sion, visu­al art, music, or com­ic strips. Only nat­ur­al, then, that Lynch would take an inter­est in the artis­tic and expe­ri­en­tial pos­si­bil­i­ties of vir­tu­al real­i­ty.

Last year we fea­tured the first glimpse of a Twin Peaks vir­tu­al real­i­ty expe­ri­ence in devel­op­ment, revealed at Lynch’s Fes­ti­val of Dis­rup­tion in Los Ange­les. “The best news is that the com­pa­ny devel­op­ing the game, Col­lid­er Games, is giv­ing cre­ative con­trol to Lynch,” wrote Ted Mills, and now, with the release of Twin Peaks VR’s offi­cial trail­er, we can get a clear­er idea of what Lynch has planned for play­ers. As Lau­ra Snoad writes at It’s Nice That, Lynch has used the oppor­tu­ni­ty to revis­it “well-known envi­ron­ments fea­tured in the series, such as the icon­ic Red Room (the stripy-floored, vel­vet cur­tain-clad par­al­lel uni­verse where Agent Coop­er meets mur­dered teen Lau­ra Palmer), the Twin Peaks’ Sheriff’s Depart­ment and the pine-filled for­est around the fic­tion­al Wash­ing­ton town.”

This will come as good news indeed to those of us Twin Peaks enthu­si­asts who’ve made the pil­grim­age to Sno­qualmie, North Bend, and Fall City, the real-life Wash­ing­ton towns where Lynch and his col­lab­o­ra­tors shot the series. But Twin Peak VR will offer a greater vari­ety of chal­lenges than snap­ping pho­tos of the series’ loca­tions and chat­ting with bemused locals: Snoad writes that each envi­ron­ment is con­struct­ed like an escape room. “Solv­ing puz­zles to help Agent Coop­er and Gor­don Cole (the FBI agent played by Lynch him­self), play­ers will also meet some of the show’s weird and ter­ri­fy­ing char­ac­ters, from the back­wards-speak­ing inhab­i­tants of the Black Lodge to the ter­ri­fy­ing Bob him­self.”

Avail­able via Steam on Ocu­lus Rift, Vive, and Valve Index this month, with Ocu­lus Quest and PlaySta­tion VR ver­sions sched­uled, Twin Peaks VR should give a fair few vir­tu­al-real­i­ty hold­outs a com­pelling rea­son to put on the gog­gles — much as Twin Peaks the show caused the cinéastes of the 1990s to break down and watch evening TV. Enjoy­ing Lynch’s work, what­ev­er its medi­um, has always felt like plung­ing into a dream: not like watch­ing his dream, but expe­ri­enc­ing a dream he’s made for us. If vir­tu­al-real­i­ty tech­nol­o­gy has final­ly come any­where close to the vivid­ness of Lynch’s imag­i­na­tion, Twin Peaks VR will mark the next step in his artis­tic evo­lu­tion. But for now, to para­phrase no less a Lynch fan than Wal­lace, the one thing we can say with total con­fi­dence is that it will be… Lynchi­an.

via It’s Nice That

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks Actu­al­ly Explained: A Four-Hour Video Essay Demys­ti­fies It All

David Lynch Is Cre­at­ing a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Expe­ri­ence for Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Avail­able as 78-Card Deck

Watch the Twin Peaks Visu­al Sound­track Released Only in Japan: A New Way to Expe­ri­ence David Lynch’s Clas­sic Show

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Brief History of Chess: An Animated Introduction to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

in Games, History | November 13th, 2019

I have come to the per­son­al con­clu­sion that while all artists are not chess play­ers, all chess play­ers are artists.

 –Mar­cel Duchamp

“Over the rough­ly one and half mil­len­nia of its exis­tence, chess has been known as a tool of mil­i­tary strat­e­gy, a metaphor for human affairs, and a bench­mark of genius,” points out the TED-Ed ani­mat­ed his­to­ry of the game by Alex Gendler, above. The first records of chess date to the 7th cen­tu­ry, but it may have orig­i­nat­ed even a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er, in India, where we find men­tion of the first game to have dif­fer­ent moves for dif­fer­ent pieces, and “a sin­gle king piece, whose fate deter­mined the out­come.”

It was orig­i­nal­ly called “chat­u­ran­ga,” a word that Yoga prac­ti­tion­ers will rec­og­nize as the “four-limbed staff pose,” but which sim­ply meant “four divi­sions” in this con­text. Once it spread to Per­sia, it became “chess,” mean­ing “Shah,” or king. It took root in the Arab world, and trav­eled the Silk Road to East and South­east Asia, where it acquired dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics but used sim­i­lar rules and strate­gies. The Euro­pean form we play today became the stan­dard, but it might have been a very dif­fer­ent game had the Japan­ese version—which allowed play­ers to put cap­tured pieces into play—dominated.

Chess found ready accep­tance every­where it went because its under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples seemed to tap into com­mon mod­els of con­test and con­quest among polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary elites. Though writ­ten over a thou­sand years before “chat­u­ran­ga” arrived in China—where the game was called xiangqi, or “ele­phant game”—Sun Tzu’s Art of War may as well have been dis­cussing the crit­i­cal impor­tance of pawns in declar­ing, “When the offi­cers are valiant and the troops inef­fec­tive the army is in dis­tress.”

Chess also speaks to the hier­ar­chies ancient civ­i­liza­tions sought to nat­u­ral­ize, and by 1000 AD, it had become a tool for teach­ing Euro­pean noble­men the neces­si­ty of social class­es per­form­ing their prop­er roles. This alle­gor­i­cal func­tion gave to the pieces the roles we know today, with the piece called “the advi­sor” being replaced by the queen in the 15th cen­tu­ry, “per­haps inspired by the recent surge of strong female lead­ers.”

Ear­ly Mod­ern chess, freed from the con­fines of the court and played in cof­fee­hous­es, also became a favorite pas­time for philoso­phers, writ­ers, and artists. Trea­tis­es were writ­ten by the hun­dreds. Chess became a tool for sum­mon­ing inspi­ra­tion, and per­form­ing the­atri­cal, often Punic games for audiences—a trend that ebbed dur­ing the Cold War, when chess­boards became proxy bat­tle­grounds between world super­pow­ers, and intense cal­cu­la­tion ruled the day.

The arrival of IBM’s Deep Blue com­put­er, which defeat­ed reign­ing cham­pi­on Gar­ry Kas­parov in 1996, sig­naled a new evo­lu­tion for the game, a chess sin­gu­lar­i­ty, as it were, after which com­put­ers rou­tine­ly defeat­ed the best play­ers. Does this mean, accord­ing to Mar­cel Duchamp’s obser­va­tion, that chess-play­ing com­put­ers should be con­sid­ered artists? Chess’s ear­li­est adopters could nev­er have con­ceived of such a ques­tion. But the game they passed down through the cen­turies may have antic­i­pat­ed all of the pos­si­ble out­comes of human ver­sus machine.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gar­ry Kas­parov Now Teach­ing an Online Course on Chess

A Free 700-Page Chess Man­u­al Explains 1,000 Chess Tac­tics in Plain Eng­lish

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Mind-Bend­ing Chess Prob­lems

Chess Grand­mas­ter Gar­ry Kas­parov Relives His Four Most Mem­o­rable Games

When John Cage & Mar­cel Duchamp Played Chess on a Chess­board That Turned Chess Moves Into Elec­tron­ic Music (1968)

Mar­cel Duchamp, Chess Enthu­si­ast, Cre­at­ed an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Avail­able via 3D Print­er

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Internet Archive Makes 2,500 More Classic MS-DOS Video Games Free to Play Online: Alone in the Dark, Doom, Microsoft Adventure, and Others

in Games, Internet Archive | October 21st, 2019

Back in 2015 we let you know that the Inter­net Archive made 2,400 com­put­er games from the era of MS-DOS free to play online: titles like Com­man­der Keen, Scorched Earth, and Prince of Per­sia may have brought back fond 1990s gam­ing mem­o­ries, as well as promised hours of more such enjoy­ment here in the 21st cen­tu­ry. That set of games includ­ed Id Soft­ware’s Wolfen­stein 3D, which cre­at­ed the genre of the first-per­son shoot­er as we know it, but the Inter­net Archive’s lat­est DOS-game upload — an addi­tion of more than 2,500 titles — includes its fol­low-up Doom, which took com­put­er gam­ing itself to, as it were, a new lev­el.

The Inter­net Archive’s Jason Scott calls this “our biggest update yet, rang­ing from tiny recent inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tions to long-for­got­ten big-name releas­es from decades ago.” After detail­ing some of the tech­ni­cal chal­lenges he and his team faced in get­ting many of the games to work prop­er­ly in web browsers on mod­ern com­put­ers — “a lot has changed under the hood and pro­grams were some­times only writ­ten to work on very spe­cif­ic hard­ware and a very spe­cif­ic set­up” — he makes a few rec­om­men­da­tions from this newest crop of games.

Scot­t’s picks include Microsoft Adven­ture, the DOS ver­sion of the very first com­put­er adven­ture game; the 1960s-themed rac­er Street Rod; and Super Munch­ers, one in a line of edu­ca­tion­al titles all of us of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion will remem­ber from our class­room com­put­ers. Odd­i­ties high­light­ed by clas­sic game enthu­si­asts around the inter­net include Mr. Blob­by, based on the epony­mous char­ac­ter from the BBC com­e­dy show Noel’s House Par­ty; the undoubt­ed­ly thrilling sim­u­la­tor Pres­i­dent Elect — 1988 Edi­tion; and Zool, the only nin­ja-space-alien plat­former spon­sored by lol­lipop brand Chu­pa Chups.

This addi­tion of 2,500 com­put­er games to the Inter­net Archive also brings in no few undis­put­ed clas­sics whose influ­ence on the art and design of games is still felt today: Alone in the Dark, for exam­ple, prog­en­i­tor of the entire sur­vival-hor­ror genre; Microsoft Flight Sim­u­la­tor, inspi­ra­tion for a gen­er­a­tion of pilots; and Sim­C­i­ty 2000, inspi­ra­tion for a gen­er­a­tion of urban plan­ners. Among the adven­ture games, one of the strongest gen­res of the MS-DOS era, we have Dis­c­world, based on Ter­ry Pratch­et­t’s comedic fan­ta­sy nov­els, and from the mind of Har­lan Elli­son the some­what less comedic I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. One glance at the Inter­net Archive’s updat­ed com­put­er game col­lec­tion reveals that, no mat­ter how many games you played in the 90s, you’ll nev­er be able to play them all.

Get more infor­ma­tion on the new batch of games at the Inter­net Archive.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

Free: Play 2,400 Vin­tage Com­put­er Games in Your Web Brows­er

Play a Col­lec­tion of Clas­sic Hand­held Video Games at the Inter­net Archive: Pac-Man, Don­key Kong, Tron and MC Ham­mer

1,100 Clas­sic Arcade Machines Added to the Inter­net Arcade: Play Them Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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MIT Robot Breaks Rubik’s Cube World Record, Solving It in 0.38 Seconds

in Games, Technology | May 20th, 2019

A robot cre­at­ed by MIT stu­dents Ben Katz and Jared Di Car­lo man­aged to solve a Rubik’s Cube in a record-break­ing, light­ning-fast 0.38 sec­onds. The video above shows it hap­pen­ing in real time, then in pro­gres­sive­ly slow­er times. By com­par­i­son, Yusheng Du, a Chi­nese speed­cu­ber, holds the [human] record for solv­ing a 3x3x3 cube in 3.47 sec­onds.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Boing­Bo­ing

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Free: Play the Original “Minecraft” in Your Browser

in Games | May 14th, 2019

A quick heads up from Engad­get: “Minecraft is cel­e­brat­ing its 10th birth­day by mak­ing its Clas­sic ver­sion eas­i­ly playable on web browsers. You don’t need to down­load any files to make it work, and you don’t have to pay a cent for access. Since Clas­sic was only the sec­ond phase in the game’s devel­op­ment cycle, its fea­tures are pret­ty lim­it­ed. You’ll only have 32 blocks to work with, most of which are dyed wool, and it’s strict­ly cre­ative mode only. But who needs zom­bies, skele­tons and oth­er mobs when you have the ver­sion’s decade-old bugs to con­tend with, any­way?”

Click here to launch in your brows­er. Find more vin­tage video games you can play in your brows­er below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Play 2,400 Vin­tage Com­put­er Games in Your Web Brows­er

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

Play­ing a Video Game Could Cut the Risk of Demen­tia by 48%, Sug­gests a New Study

Hayao Miyaza­ki Tells Video Game Mak­ers What He Thinks of Their Char­ac­ters Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: “I’m Utter­ly Dis­gust­ed. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

Learn to Write Through a Video Game Inspired by the Roman­tic Poets: Shel­ley, Byron, Keats

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Experience the Majesty of Notre Dame by Getting a Free Download of the Video Game Assassin’s Creed Unity (Free for a Limited Time)

in Games, History | April 20th, 2019

FYI: In the wake of the great Notre Dame fire, the French video game com­pa­ny Ubisoft has decid­ed to make its pop­u­lar video game Assas­s­in’s Creed Uni­ty free through April 25th, allow­ing gamers to “expe­ri­ence the majesty and beau­ty of the cathe­dral.” The goth­ic cathe­dral fig­ures cen­tral­ly in the game. Start your down­load (avail­able only for PC users) here. Once you down­load the game, you’ll own it for­ev­er in your Uplay games library.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Laugh­ing Squid

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Watch a Playthrough of the Oldest Board Game in the World, the Sumerian Royal Game of Ur, Circa 2500 BC

in Games, History, Museums | December 20th, 2018

They may not sur­prise the aver­age mar­ket ana­lyst, but the gam­ing industry’s fig­ures tell a pret­ty com­pelling sto­ry. New­zoo esti­mates that “2.3 bil­lion gamers across the globe will spend $137. 9 bil­lion on games in 2018.” Ven­ture­Beat reports that mobile games account for over 50 per­cent of the total. Cur­rent­ly, “about 91 per­cent of the glob­al mar­ket is dig­i­tal, mean­ing that $125.3 bil­lion worth of games flows through dig­i­tal­ly con­nect­ed chan­nels as opposed to phys­i­cal retail.”

That’s a lot of vir­tu­al dough float­ing around in vir­tu­al worlds. But this vast and rapid growth in dig­i­tal gam­ing does not mean phys­i­cal games are going away any­time soon—and that includes cards, board games, and oth­er table­top games, a mar­ket that has “surged as play­ers have grown jad­ed with the dig­i­tal screens they toil over dur­ing the work day,” wrote Joon Ian Wong in 2016.

Ven­ture cap­i­tal is flow­ing into board game devel­op­ment. Table­top bars and cafes are pop­ping up all over the world, encour­ag­ing peo­ple to min­gle over Scrab­ble and Cards Against Human­i­ty. It seems the time is just right to revive the old­est playable board game in the world. If some­one hasn’t already launched a Kick­starter to bankroll a new Roy­al Game of Ur, I sus­pect we’ll see one any day now. At least four-and-a-half-thou­sand years old, accord­ing to British Muse­um Cura­tor Irv­ing Finkel, the Roy­al Game of Ur was prob­a­bly invent­ed by the Sume­ri­ans. And it seems like it might still be a blast, and a con­sid­er­able chal­lenge, to play.

“You might think it’s so old that it’s irre­triev­able to us, that we’ve got no idea what it was like play­ing, what the rules were like,” Finkel says in the video at the top, “but all sorts of evi­dence has come to light so that we know how this game was played.” He promis­es, in no uncer­tain terms, to wipe the floor with YouTu­ber Tom Scott in a Roy­al Game of Ur show­down, and Scott, who has nev­er played the game before, seems at a decid­ed dis­ad­van­tage. But watch their con­test to see how the game is played and whether Finkel makes good on his threat. Along the way, he lib­er­al­ly shares his knowl­edge.

For a short­er course on the Roy­al Game of Ur, see Finkel’s video above. It takes him a cou­ple min­utes to get around to intro­duc­ing his sub­ject, the dis­cov­ery and deci­pher­ing of the “world’s old­est rule book.” A con­sum­mate ancient his­to­ry detec­tive, Finkel describes how he decod­ed an ancient tablet that explained a game, but which game, no one knew. So, the ded­i­cat­ed cura­tor tried the rules on every mys­te­ri­ous ancient game he could find, till he land­ed on the “game of twen­ty squares” from Mesopotamia. “It fit­ted per­fect­ly,” he says with rel­ish. See the orig­i­nal board, pieces, and dice from about 2500 BC, and learn how Finkel had been search­ing for its rules of play since he was 9 years old.

For more of Finkel’s pas­sion­ate pub­lic schol­ar­ship, see him demon­strate how to write in cuneiform and read about how his work on cuneiform tablets led to him dis­cov­er­ing the old­est ref­er­ence to the Noah’s Ark myth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Hear the “Seik­i­los Epi­taph,” the Old­est Com­plete Song in the World: An Inspir­ing Tune from 100 BC

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,737 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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A Beautiful Short Documentary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

in Games, Life, Philosophy, Travel | December 14th, 2018

Chess Forum in Green­wich Vil­lage is, like Gramer­cy Type­writer and the Upper East Side’s Ten­der But­tons, the sort of shop New York­ers feel pro­tec­tive of, even if they’ve nev­er actu­al­ly crossed the thresh­old.

“How can it still exist?” is a ques­tion left unan­swered by “King of the Night,” Lone­ly Leap’s love­ly short pro­file of Chess Forum’s own­er, Imad Khachan, above, but no mat­ter. We’re just glad it does.

The store, locat­ed a block and a half south of Wash­ing­ton Square, looks old­er than it is. Khachan, hung out his shin­gle in 1995, after five years as an employ­ee of the now-defunct Vil­lage Chess Shop, a rift that riled the New York chess com­mu­ni­ty.

Now, things are much more placid, though the film incor­rect­ly sug­gests that Chess Forum is the only refuge where chess lov­ing New York­ers can avail them­selves of an impromp­tu game, take lessons, and buy sets. (There are also shops in Brook­lyn, Harlem, and the Upper East Side.) That said, Chess Forum might not be wrong to call itself “New York’s last great chess store.” It may well be the best of the last.

The nar­row shop’s inte­ri­or trig­gers nos­tal­gia with­out seem­ing cal­cu­la­tion, an organ­ic reminder of the Village’s Bohemi­an past, when beret-clad folkies, artists, and stu­dents wiled away hours at bat­tered wood­en tables in its many cheap cafes and bars. (Two blocks away, sole sur­vivor Caf­fé Reggio’s ambi­ence is intact, but the prices have kept pace with the neigh­bor­hood, and the major­i­ty of its clien­tele are clutch­ing guide­books or the dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent there­of.)

Khachan, born in Lebanon to Pales­tin­ian refugees, gives a warm wel­come to tourists and locals alike, espe­cial­ly those who might make for an uneasy fit at tonier neigh­bor­hood estab­lish­ments.

In an inter­view with the Green­wich Vil­lage Soci­ety for His­toric Preser­va­tion, he recalled a “well-dressed and high­ly edu­cat­ed doc­tor who would come in wear­ing his Har­vard logo sweater, and lose repeat­ed­ly to a home­less man who was a reg­u­lar at Chess Forum and a chess mas­ter.”

The game also pro­vides com­mon ground for strangers who share no com­mon tongue. In Jonathan Lord’s rougher New York City chess-themed doc, Pass­port Play, Khachan points out how dia­grams in chess books speak vol­umes to expe­ri­enced play­ers, regard­less of the lan­guage in which the book is writ­ten.

The store’s mot­tos also bear wit­ness to the val­ue its own­er places on face-to-face human inter­ac­tion:

Cool in the sum­mer, warm in the win­ter and fuzzy all year long.

Chess Forum: An expe­ri­ence not a trans­ac­tion

Smart peo­ple not smart phones.  (You can play a game of chess on your phone, Khachan admits, but don’t fool your­self into think­ing that it’s giv­ing you a full chess expe­ri­ence.)

An hour of play costs about the same as a small lat­te in a cof­fee­house chain (whose preva­lence Khachan refers to as the Bostoniza­tion of NYC.) Senior cit­i­zens and chil­dren, both revered groups at Chess Forum, get an even bet­ter deal—from $1/hour to free.

Although the store’s offi­cial clos­ing time is mid­night, Khachan, sin­gle and child­less, is always will­ing to oblige play­ers who would stay lat­er. His soli­tary mus­ings on the neighborhood’s wee hours trans­for­ma­tion sup­ply the film’s title and med­i­ta­tive vibe, while remind­ing us that this gen­tle New York char­ac­ter was orig­i­nal­ly drawn to the city by the specter of a PhD in lit­er­a­ture at near­by NYU.

Read­ers who would like to con­tribute to the health of this inde­pen­dent­ly owned New York City estab­lish­ment from afar can do so by pur­chas­ing a chess or backgam­mon set online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When John Cage & Mar­cel Duchamp Played Chess on a Chess­board That Turned Chess Moves Into Elec­tron­ic Music (1968)

Chess Grand­mas­ter Gar­ry Kas­parov Relives His Four Most Mem­o­rable Games

Man Ray Designs a Supreme­ly Ele­gant, Geo­met­ric Chess Set in 1920–and It Now Gets Re-Issued

A Human Chess Match Gets Played in Leningrad, 1924

A Free 700-Page Chess Man­u­al Explains 1,000 Chess Tac­tics in Plain Eng­lish

Clay­ma­tion Film Recre­ates His­toric Chess Match Immor­tal­ized in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Play Chess Against the Ghost of Mar­cel Duchamp: A Free Online Chess Game

Chess Grand­mas­ter Mau­rice Ash­ley Plays Unsus­pect­ing Trash Talk­er in Wash­ing­ton Square Park

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City through Decem­ber 20th in the 10th anniver­sary pro­duc­tion of Greg Kotis’ apoc­a­lyp­tic hol­i­day tale, The Truth About San­ta. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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