Is chess a weird society?
Por: pretender33x
(Eliot Benitez)

A King, a Queen, so far so good. Royalty but... no dukes or other bluebloods?
A Bishop: The church, but... no Archbishops? no Cardinals?
The Knights. The rooks. Okay, the military but... what, no army? An army of pawns? The working classes?
No maids or other female players... just the queen and her entourage of males...
Some more dysfunctional traits: a good-for-nothing, stay-at-home king, usually protected by unisex pawns... one that openly displays his distaste for battle and/or intrigue... a paranoid king always worried about his own safety...one that, literally, is better at running than at fighting...
A warrior queen which seems to team nicely with knigths, bishops, rooks and even pawns... plays well with others, i'm sure...
Bishops that love the battlefield... the church is a bit boring you see...
Sedentary rooks that only come out at the end mostly to fight enemy pawns which are sometimes too strong... a cannon being resisted by the infantry?
Pawns that get to crown... into queens... more often than not... who would want to be a king in this stage anyway? But a Queen.... well... they seem to want that role the most...
Also, the knight with its crooked jump... no wonder begginners hate them... the movements of the knights make no sense at all in this world of predictable, straight-line movements, suddenly a jumpy, shifty piece... shouldn't that be the role of the palace's dirty tricks team?... the Mack the Knife role?... is this style of fighting appropriate for a knight?
The confinement of the bishops to one color squares is strange too. The bishop is the only piece limited in this way. The risk of being left with a bad bishop is frequently a factor in the player's mind. Quite often the game organizes around this theme. The limitations of the bishop influence the character of each game. It's a bit like having an alcoholic in the family...
A bit into semiotics now, why are the squares on the board black and white? Consider this: if we only had colorless squares determined by fine lines, the bishops would completely lose their identity as the openings developed into middle-games... it would be difficult to remember which is the queen side bishop or king side bishop... but... a different set of thought patterns would have to be developed by the players... perhaps the game would be more difficult... perhaps richer....
Along those same lines, it could be argued that the only piece the Knight really teams up well with is the Queen. Capablanca remarked that the most powerful combination in chess was the Queen-Knight team...
The Knight is definitely tricky. I vaguely remember that in the old days it was presented as a "proof" of chess potential the speed with which a begginer could run the Knight through an empty board (starting from a1 then touching b1, c1, and so on) and urban legend had it that Fischer was able to accomplish this feat in 20 secs...
I'm sure that chess is meaningful in many ways... hobby, art, intellectual exercise, escape, and so on...
The point made here is that chess hides in many ways truths about society... truths that can be seen as variations on the theme "the king is naked"...
A case in point, the Queen does the heavy lifting, not the King...
Another example is that the pawns, no matter how useful their work or how hard they try, will remain pawns... game after game...
Not to make this too long a story, my comment is that chess is about social stability, about status quo, about things remaining as they are...
Another point is that something like the unisex presentation of the the pawns along with the rest of counterintuitive freaks could mass up so as to constitute an inhibitor in the development of chess skills.