competitors who learned my methods tried in vain to take from me, as the girls would wait for me.”27 Images like those Bradley describes here—of people in medium-sized groupings around tables, waiting, working, chatting, pointing—stuck with him and emerged as a trope in much of his later artwork involving human figures. Some of the first box art that accompanied The Checkered Game of Life—itself localized in ways that connected it to regional traditions of social assemblage as part of the “The New England Series of Games”—featured a majority of women: one standing and looking thoughtfully at the board, while an ambiguously styled person at the front (likely male because of the attire) makes a move as two girls and a boy watch (Figure 5). “There is a sociability in a game,” Bradley would write, “which unites all the family, old and young, around the library table of a winter evening, which is found in few places besides.”28 As one of those “few places besides,” the mill tenements (and later Civil War encampments) represented a functional and productive society via a diverse circling, usually but not always around a table. Success for Bradley was deeply linked to his ability to produce and maintain such geometric groupings.
At the onset of his twenties, he ventured into urban Springfield, securing a job as a draftsman with Wason Car-Manufacturing Company, a local factory specializing in the manufacture of railroad cars and locomotives.29 It was here that he honed his technically oriented artistic craft, eventually going into business for himself as a “Mechanical Draftsman & Patent Solicitor.”30 At his Main Street office, he survived the financial downturns of the late 1850s by drawing patent schematics for hopeful inventors and designing a luxurious railcar for an eccentric Egyptian pasha.31 In the process, he became interested in lithography, and in 1860, in a move that would radically shift the course of his life, he bought himself and his company a lithographic press.32 Though he lamented that his “first real troubles would came with the lithograph business”—from drunken pressmen to the fickle facial fashions of the president-elect—it would also predicate his first massively public success, enabling him to produce prototypes of The Checkered Game of Life later that same year.33
Shortly after the stunning initial sales of his new game—some forty thousand copies, or nearly three times the population of his native Springfield34—the outbreak of the Civil War saw Bradley briefly abandoning amusement to focus on assisting the mechanical end of the war effort, drafting plans for the Union Army’s new percussion-lock rifles.35 While on the job, he took notice of the intense boredom that accompanied leisure time off the battlefield and began work on Games for the Soldiers, a portable kit that included chess, checkers, backgammon, dominoes, and, of course, The Checkered Game of Life. Materials and form were always as much a part of his designs as the rules themselves, and “he took great pains to make it small and light enough to fit in a pocket and not add weight to a soldier’s equipment.”36 The thoughtful approach paid off. The first compilation of its kind, Games for the Soldiers was immensely popular, as kits were bought up by civilian charities and donated to Union troops throughout the duration of the war.37
Figure 5. Game box with record dials. The Checkered Game of Life. Springfield: Milton Bradley & Co., ca. 1865. Courtesy of Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.
Beyond Life, Bradley’s catalog in the period between 1861 and 1865 reflected some degree of focus, emphasizing both the themes and the dynamics of social and generational fusion. He worked together with Samuel Bowles to create The Myriopticon: A Toy Panorama of the Rebellion, which brought the Civil War into the domestic space of storytelling and parlor theater: children sold tiny accompanying tickets and read from an at times humorous script that was paired with scrolling scenes from the war, wondrously backlit courtesy of a candle.38 The Contraband Gymnast was a flipping acrobat toy that invited the contentious political status of southern African Americans into the homes of many white Northerners even as it—however problematically—suggested the continuity of the black body with the idea of America (the gymnast himself doubles as a fluttering American flag). My Grandfather’s Games and the only slightly later Games of 1776 used the multigame innovation, undoubtedly grounded in some degree of cost savings, to create a platform through which people of a different era might understand their own past. As a generation struggling to sustain a sense of history and national belonging, the “1776” of Bradley’s compilation was metonymic for a supposed moment when Thomas Paine’s “common sense” seemed to exist in a way that now felt impossible.39
By linking these two games explicitly to history (both national and more broadly familial), Bradley suggested that playing could be a way to relive the past, to feel and understand important things about how the revolutionary generation had lived through rather than conceived of “the social.” While Boy’s Own books nostalgically flattened the past in order to produce an aggregate reference to the present, Bradley’s backward-looking offerings showed him thinking of games explicitly as theoretical objects, as models of a differential historical imagination. This reflected a sophisticated awareness of the role that media could play in the negotiation of a culture, as he used games and toys to reinvigorate feelings of both intellectual and physical intimacy after the traumatic losses and separations of the war. The Checkered Game of Life, after all, was subject to cross-gender and cross-generational marketing, played by both soldiers and civilians in dramatically differing contexts. Yet as soldiers returned from the conflict in the spring of 1865, it’s not difficult to imagine the simple comfort of playing a game that all involved had suddenly become familiar with—an unlikely point of social connection between the fractured domestic space and the horrors of the battlefield. As these families rediscovered how to coexist and enjoy one another’s company, what better shared activity than a game about judgment and the decisions one could control, as well as the public identifications one should and shouldn’t make? This particular emphasis on individual but socialized decision was a key operational distinction between Life and previous games in the American market.
Before the mid-century, most U.S. games were imports or slightly varied copies of popular British games.40 Many of these were newly published versions of very old games: checkers and draughts; chess; the Indian game of Pachisi; and, of course, numbered card games. Notably, in these games there is either no representation of the player outside of the players themselves (as in poker) or else the representation of the player is dispersed across multiple pieces. This may speak to the simulation these games were meant to invoke: a view from on high of war, of military command, and of monarchal authority. For instance, in a game of checkers or chess, the moves happen one at a time, but the movements are divided among a range of player-controlled pieces. As a result, losing a piece or facing a setback may be a disappointment but, depending on the value of the piece, may not require large-scale adjustments to player strategy. The disappointment of losing a piece in checkers is more akin to the death of a character in a third-person narrative than to the abrupt end of a first-person narration. In the first instance, the focus of the story may shift, but the fundamental perspective does not change. In the second instance, barring the introduction of a secondary narrator (or tricky science fiction), the story is over.
By contrast, Life situates the player as the manager of a single actor within the gamespace; in this way, the marker is not a representation of others under the control of the user but a representation closer to that of the user controlling himself or herself. In a sense, this marker delineates a tactile you position that can then be inhabited as an I, a formal and visual second person that becomes the ludic first person. Many traditional games opt against employing this type of unitary player representation, but it alone does not make Bradley’s game unique. Instead, it reveals the ancestral link between Life and an earlier form of board game known commonly as a race game. In race games—widely popularized in Western contexts as The Royal Game of Goose and The Game of Snake—players compete to be the first to reach a finish line (or square) by accumulating die
