A Game of Chess (from The Wasteland)

This is a project created for my Poetry and Music class. It is a visualization of A Game of Chess, a section of T.S. Eliot's poem, The Wasteland. 

In the poem, a woman dresses up for her date. But when her date comes, the man is eerily thoughtless. The woman desperately tries to feel something, anything, from their relationship, but all the man is thinking about is “Those are pearls that were his eyes” and “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag.”

In the game, you play as the woman from A Game of Chess. Specifically, you are playing chess against the “Lidless Man” (the name I gave for her partner, referencing the line “lidless eyes” from the poem). However, the man is emptily floating, repeating the same action over and over, slowly drifting away in thought. 

I wanted to subvert the expected nature of chess by making you play against yourself. You are forced to go through the motions without someone else moving with you, stepping in the same direction, and wordlessly flowing together. I think playing chess by yourself captures the mood of the two characters’ one-sided relationship as well as the man’s empty thoughts.