in how we might find pleasure with others (dare I say “fun?”). Games fix our attention on a specific subset of things, people, and actions, allowing us to understand how we operate when given a reduced but nevertheless urgent(ish) cluster of demands. They are iterative, habitual, and performative—we watch how others play, how we play, and what we think to do in specifically conditioned situations of stress, challenge, or humorous improvisation. In games we see a world in miniature, and like all miniatures they cue us to questions of fidelity, prompting us to ask what is emphasized and what is left out.2
With a media form like the book, these questions are most often critically framed by the concept of “representation,” but games impose strange alternatives. They direct one to think about fidelity in action, in materials, and in construction, fidelity on the level of patterns and figures of interaction enabled by the form.3 By situating games and books in a shared ecosystem of mass-circulating leisure media in the U.S. nineteenth century, Slantwise Moves uses the “itchy” interpenetrations of games like The Checkered Game of Life to educe different ways of reading nineteenth-century books—and different ways of thinking about how people may have read or used books in the past. The tricky issue with nineteenth-century textuality is not that literary history’s picture is incorrect but that it is often insufficient to a full view of the book as a media object. Media must be understood as an interrelated collection of venues, an ecology of uneven lifecycles and developmental dependencies, upon and within which certain forms of social life are staged and performed, never in isolation and never without some collective consequence. Despite this, the idea of experimentation within literature can often wend rapidly into the insular solidity of canon (the experiment as a representative example waiting to exist, always already literature) or the controlled flux of modernist play (the experiment as the privileged space of—a primarily masculinized—high art).
Games of this period, by contrast, occupy an especially precise, complex, and visible field of media experimentation relatively uncolonized by concepts of canon or intellectual tradition—revealing alternative foundations for thinking about what “books” were doing in medias res and how “writing” and “reading” may have created senses of sociality and self. The heart of my argument, here and in the chapters that follow, is a rejection of the idea that the “literary” can be cordoned off from the “ludic” in the nineteenth-century marketplace of cheap amusement commodities. As we shall see, intermedial reciprocity was a core feature of nineteenth-century production practice (much like it is in our own time), and I use this historical fact to reorient the literal and figurative modes of “self-making” and “socialization” that were enmeshed in and preserved by media across traditional conceptual divides.
Productively, the question of what a game is doesn’t creep into the background as easily as it sometimes does with other forms of media. Even in the most literal terms, every game emerges from its defining gestures—from its particular emphases and elisions. Though they undoubtedly might, literary critics don’t always (or in some cases ever) ask themselves to define the “book” as a genre or specific historical media figure at the onset of a critical analysis. Yet one is hard-pressed to find a critical work on games that doesn’t begin with a definition.4 While fixations on genre in literary discussions can appear to rotate within a distant orbit of the valorizing term “literature,” similar fixations occupy the molten core of gaming discourse.
“The Uses and Abuses of Games” (1886), Milton Bradley’s compact history of Anglo-American game playing and invention written for Good Housekeeping, provides a case in point. By then a twenty-six-year veteran of the games industry, Bradley opens by raising the question of definition only to trouble it: “The oldest and broadest definition of the word game would cover much more than its present use implies, which is merely that class of amusements … in which some one or some side wins. In addition there is a large class of puzzles, charades, tricks, etc., some of which are entirely separated from and others very closely allied to a game in its more limited sense.”5 Savvy to the categorical designations that enabled him to patent his games as technological inventions more frequently than any other designer of his generation, Bradley invokes the technical language of patent “class[es]” even as the alliances of the class petulantly rub against its conceptual collecting power. Indeed, the problem is the same even within the 1872 class specification used by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). While “Class 46” is first given the subject heading of “Games and Toys,” an immediate and perplexing set of expansions begins on the very next line, where it is clarified that this category includes “Games, Gymnastic and Exercising Apparatus, Traps, and Nets.” Below this, the list grows to ensnare even more: billiard balls and dumbbells, puzzles and targets, baseballs and police batons.6 One can imagine the anonymous author or authors of this document yearning for the comparative clarity of “Class 44: Fuel” or “Class 45: Furniture.” Similarly, as Bradley’s Good Housekeeping article progresses, he bounces from board games to word puzzles to card games, grappling with and hedging against sprawling disruptions to what he terms the “limited sense.” Totalizing declarations like “All quiet indoor games may generally be divided into two classes” are quickly trailed by “These two classes, however broadly construed, may not cover all in common use.”7 Other objects of discussion are held in suspension by statements like “if this may be called a game.”8 Seemingly by their nature, games are difficult to separate from those other mechanisms of play with which they are, as Bradley puts it, “very closely allied.” Both he and the USPTO struggle with an intuition that I am inclined to put more bluntly: the invention of a new game is the invention of a new genre.9 This might explain why “games” as a category—as opposed to specific examples like The Checkered Game of Life, tangrams, or billiards—are difficult to capture under a particular genre umbrella or invention class. Games are about invention itself.
Slantwise Moves is about games, but it is resistant to defining them in sweeping ways for this reason. Individual, historically located games are as interesting for the particular limits they set as for the specific associative assemblages they enable. Thus it is important not to rule out what we might learn from the outset by overwriting empirical complexity through a surplus of conceptual rigor. “The conceptual distance we travel from the facts before us,” Sacvan Bercovitch reminds us in “Games of Chess,” “is directly proportional to our capacity to see the particular in the essential.”10 All too frequently, discussions about games flow in the opposite direction, looking for anthropological continuity where we might find meaningful breaks. To address this meaning in a particular set of moments in U.S. history, this book takes a case-study approach, looking intensively at popular mass-market games of the mid-nineteenth century not to answer what a game is but instead to ask what certain media do and how that doing might offer perspective on the literary questions we have directed at the period. Like the designers of nineteenth-century games, I find it not unhelpful to allow other amusements that gaming theorist Espen Aarseth dubs “ergodic” into the mix; that is, objects whose expressive form in a given use-iteration is dependent on a process of input and material negotiation involving both user and artifact—algorithmic media.11 Read Moby-Dick and tell me that you never saw anything about whales, and I’ll suggest that you must have skipped something. But you can play many hands of poker and never see a red queen (as an idealistic royal-flush seeker knows all too well). The existence of queens undoubtedly constitutes the “scene” of card playing or its particular sphere of potentials, but it’s not necessarily a part of the plot of any given game.12 It is in this redoubled attention to indirectly scriptive and ambiguously performative qualities of popular games in the nineteenth century that I see opportunities for reimagining “literary” developments in figure and form. The “slantwise” of this book’s title advocates interpretative “alongsides,” while the plurality of “moves” is an invitation—and a particularly game-like one at that—to consider potentials as well as outcomes.
I should note that even as the goal here is to prompt a more dimensional, fragmentary, and dispersed conversation about historical media—and a conversation about nineteenth-century texts that is not overdetermined
