PART 2 • The idea behind chess quests
The idea of“ experience levels” goes back to the mid-1970 ' s at the time when paper and pencil roleplaying games were introduced to the mass market. The concept was( and remains) simple: for every challenge you( or more properly, the imaginary game character you control) successfully face, you earn points for the experience( making the journey the reward, as with Sir Gawain in that medieval epic). After you gain enough of these experience points, you“ level up” and gain new skills and better abilities, which in turn enables you to meet tougher challenges. With traditional boardgames, you play a single game and you ' re finished. With roleplaying games, your experiences carry over from one game session to the next, encouraging you to keep coming back to play the game again and again.
When computer games were first marketed, the introduction of“ experience levels” was a natural. Your character wins a battle or completes a task and gains points as a reward; earn enough points and your character“ levels up”. It ' s become such a pervasive theme in computer gaming that most people don ' t even remember its paper and pencil origins. Even people in the non-gaming world understand the concept of what it means to“ level up”, so much so that a television series has that term as its title.
But no one has ever applied that concept to a chess program before the introduction of Chess King! It seems like such a natural that once you hear of it, you smack yourself on the forehead and say,“ Why didn ' t I think of that?” And when one considers the emphasis and importance that many chess players place on their Elo ratings( and the corresponding“ class / category” designations; i. e.“ He ' s a Class B player”), it ' s positively staggering to realize that commercial chess programs had been on the market for more than twenty years before the“ experience level” concept was directly applied to this particular game genre.
It ' s a great little“ hook”, especially when Chess King is used in a group setting by multiple users( such as in a chess club or school team setting). Players will want to come back and increase their levels, then compare their progress with that of the program ' s other users. The levels even provide an incentive for single players to keep coming back to Chess King, because the more you“ level up”, the more challenges you unlock for continued play.
Levels also provide an incentive for players to improve their chess skills for, without continued improvement, many players may find it impossible to advance past a certain point in the software or, once an advanced level is unlocked, to successfully meet a particular challenge.
213 chessking. com