Chess Notation: An Appeal for Innovation
I’m not a grammar nerd, but I do kind of love punctuation. I don’t mean that I like getting in arguments about the Oxford comma or anything – I just like that there are these symbols that we use to add meaning to our words in different ways. Punctuation marks are just kind of neat-looking as far as I’m concerned – my great grand-father was a printer, and at some point I got to see a couple of pieces of lead type from his press. I don’t remember a great deal about the experience, but the look of those backwards symbols cast in lead (especially the question mark) stuck with me for one reason or another. It’s probably no surprise that I think chess notation is also neat for similar reasons. The way that we can compress all the action on the board into a compact code, decipherable to those in the know so that they can recreate games from centuries past is a bit of a marvel.
Nothing is so good that it can’t be improved upon, however. Take ordinary punctuation, for example. As a young boy, I was introduced to Victor Borge’s concept of phonetic punctuation, which struck me as a good enough idea to try out at school. It was met with what I would describe as moderate resistance, but it’s still clear to me that there was room for innovation. The modern era has of course dramatically expanded our use of non-letter symbols for written communication with the introduction of the emoji. Now I can confidently communicate one idea to people my age and embarrass myself in front of people younger than me with a simple cartoon skull, a crying-while-laughing face, or an array of produce symbols that mean God-knows-what.
Yes, the way that we use symbols alongside words and letters to communicate has changed a ton even in my own lifetime. Except, that is, with regard to chess notation, which is horribly stagnant. How can it be that there’s an international committee that makes real progress adding things like the Dumpling emoji to the set of symbols that we can use in chat, but apparently no growth at all in the way we write down a chess game? The fact is that we have to do better and that means coming together as a community to decide on some ways to broaden our annotation mark-up that we can all agree on. I don’t pretend that this will be easy, but it’s important.
Before we can look ahead to the future, we need to establish a common grounding in the past. If you’ve been playing much at all, you’re probably familiar with the basic set of symbols used to mark up moves in annotated games. First, there is a relatively small set of symbols used to describe objective events on the board:
x – captures
ep – a move in which the opponent takes your pawn off the board for no reason.
+ - A check.
# or ++ - A checkmate.
These are straightforward and I’m hard-pressed to think of anything that’s missing in particular. However, there is another set of symbols that are used to convey more subjective opinions regarding individual moves:
! – An excellent move.
!! – A brilliant move.
? – A bad move.
?? – A blunder.
?! – A dubious or questionable move.
!? – An interesting or provocative move.
This, friends, is where we need to put in more work. These are useful, sure, but they really just let us say something about a move being good-to-bad on a 4-point scale or sort of throw our hands in the air and say “That was weird.” You all know you’re much more expressive than this when you play and it’s high time this was reflected in our annotations. For crying out loud, every 80’s kid knows that Q*Bert was better than this at conveying his emotional state and it’s not clear to me why we should have a smaller set of symbols to choose from than Sarge from Beetle Bailey.
What to do? Obviously we need to take a good, long look at our keyboards, recall the glory days of ASCII art, and think about things that happen during a game that we really want to record. I’ve taken a crack at this myself and would like to propose the following additions to our annotation symbol library (alongside the original symbols some of them modify):
First, some ideas about taking pieces off the board.
x – an ordinary capture
X – an emphatic capture where you yell at the screen while doing it.
xx – capturescaptures, for trades
xxx?@!# - capturescapturescaptures <redacted>, for when you miscounted the opponent’s attacking pieces.
ep – ordinary en passant capture
Eep? – an en passant capture your opponent had to explain to you because you didn’t know the rule.
Eep! – an en passant capture that makes things much worse for you.
Next, we all know that bad moves are not all the same. There are many kinds of bad moves (and good moves by others that are bad for you) and we must make sure we distinguish between these different shades of error. A few proposals:
? – your standard bad move.
-->? – a bad move you only made because of a mouse slip.
-->! – a good move (that is very bad for you) that you know your opponent only made because of a mouse slip.
?+! - a move that was only bad because your opponent did something good next.
?+% - a move that was only bad because you weren't taking this game seriously and only going at like 10% or something.
?+$ - a bad move that you only made to win a bet.
? (MC!!) - a move that is terrible when you make it, but would be genius if Magnus or another super-GM made it.
And finally there are other sentiments about your play that are probably worth expressing to give your readers a richer sense of context.
@ - a move you’re going to brag about on social media.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - A move you made because you had no idea what was going on.
Obviously these only scratch the surface, but I hope I've given you a glimpse of what could be possible. Imagine the spectrum of triumph, defeat, apathy, brilliance and clueless-ness we could be enriching our annotated games with! I hope you'll agree that we'd be all be better off this way. If you do, remember to be the change you want to see in the world and start adding these to your games. At the very least, comment with what you think we should add because you probably have better ideas than me.
