continental America was the 1822 Traveller’s Tour through the United States.42 Essentially a map of the eastern United States, the game board is crisscrossed with a serpentine line stopping at 139 different points, corresponding to different American cities. Each of the cities on the game map has a listing in the key enclosed with the game (cross-referenced by the number listed at the indicated point) that includes some brief trivia about the city and its population. Boston, for example, is described as “the largest city in New England [and] situated on a peninsula at the bottom of Massachusetts bay. It has a fine capacious harbour, and is extensively engaged in commerce.”43 After spinning the teetotum to see who takes the first turn (highest roll leads), players start off the board and continue to spin to see how far they travel, alternating turns and reading the city information aloud as they move along.44
The operations of game play in this sort of game are a function of basic arithmetic: take the number of the space you are on, add to it the number you have spun, and then record the new sum by moving your piece to the corresponding number. Reflecting this, the typical term for a player’s game piece in this era was a counter.45 In Traveller’s and other games of its ilk, this counting terminology underlines the fact that the visualization enabled by the game board and player piece is primarily a way of spatializing accounting procedures. Additive arithmetic on a linear game board (Traveller’s does not allow backward moves) constitutes the algorithm, or the discrete input-output structure, of the game. The spinning teetotum produces inputs, and the rules of arithmetic produce consistent outputs that determine the player’s in-game outcomes.
This ties race games like Traveller’s indirectly to the history of the term “algorithm,” which was “a corruption of the name of the Persian mathematician al-Kwarizmi.”46 Laying the foundations of modern algebra, al-Kwārizmī’s work introduced the Western world to the convenience and accuracy of performing arithmetic with Hindu-Arabic numerals. In its first instances, an algorithm was a symbolistic replacement for the spatial counting operations traditionally handled by the abacus. A game like Traveller’s combines these operations by allowing the marker and board to act either as a counting device (one can imagine younger players counting out each individual number they pass) or as an accounting device through which players represent the arithmetic totals they have calculated (placing their piece directly at the total).
In Life, this counting is displaced from the central playing field. The player piece, which Bradley still refers to as a “counter,” does not represent an accounting of progress but rather figures an object allegory of a self defined and located by mobilizing decisions.47 Here, by contrast to Traveller’s, the game board is a freeform grid consisting of sixty-four squares—a format putting pressure on the visualized counting terminology native to other period games. Starting in the bottom left corner at “Infancy,” a player spins the teetotum and coordinates his or her rolls (one through six) with instructions for movement written on the bottom of “record-dials” that remain separate from the field of play. These dials take the place of the game board visualization required by race games like Traveller’s and record how many points a player has scored toward the hundred-point goal (via a small brass swiveling arm that points to an arc of numbers like the minute hand of a clock). This adjustment leaves the board open to new functional interpretations. If the counting operations of the game have now been moved to the periphery—a subroutine to the central focus of game play—then we must now look to the supplementary algorithm that this displacement allows to take place on the board. Put another way, if the game board isn’t a visualization of the counting going on, what exactly is it visualizing? The answer suggests Bradley’s innovation: to make the “exercise of judgment” the primary focus of the game.48
Combining chance and choice, Life foregrounds decision making. Rolling a one through three allows the player to move one square: either “up or down” for a one, “right or left” for a two, and “Diagonally in either Direction” for a three; rolling a four through six duplicates these options, adding the ability to move “one or two squares” in either of the aforementioned directions. Players alternate turns, decide their directions, and follow the instructions listed on the square upon which they land, which usually lists either a point value (to be added to the record-dial) or another square to which the player should move his or her piece. Point-value squares are more sparsely portioned than one might imagine; more often than not players are simply moving about the board in the effort to get near the squares that will notch the record-dial ever closer to the win.
Already we can note a strain in the terminology of Bradley’s patent: the movable piece he calls a counter is less a token marking a precise accumulation of points than an indicator of position amid a field of choices imbued with a relative value not transparently related to the game-board square. Accordingly, Bradley warns that reaching “Happy old age” (the square most distant from “Infancy” and worth a game-changing fifty points) is not necessarily a foolproof strategy for winning the game. He writes, “As ‘Happy old age’ is surrounded by many difficulties, fifty [points] may oftentimes be gained as soon by a succession of smaller numbers as by striving for ‘Happy old age.’”49 The manipulation of the counter in the field of choices and the presumed, if simple, relationship between player and counter were precisely the aspects of the game Bradley hoped would allow it be a teaching tool—not just of information relating to virtues but also of smart and virtuous habits of decision making. This is because the results of the game are dictated by player judgment rather than random number generation alone.
Here it is important to keep in mind that both the actions of the players and the limitations bounding them determine the outcome of the game, as with any algorithm. Algorithmic media requires interactivity at some point in its decision tree in order to produce a result. It is what McKenzie Wark calls “a finite set of instructions for accomplishing some task, which transforms an initial starting condition into a recognizable end condition.”50 In Life, the algorithms of the game rules govern things like: the starting position of the counters, the possibilities afforded players upon spinning a given number, the results of inhabiting a given space, and the end conditions for declaring victory. None of these rules, however, does anything without the players supplying the inputs that give starting values. So while there is a very real sense in which the player’s outcomes are bound and determined by the structure of Bradley’s algorithms, the regular iteration of decision points in the game ensures that the outcome is never wholly out of the players’ hands.51 Every slide and scrape of the counter materializes a choice, yoking movement and visual representation to intellectual purpose in the vein of Bradley’s later work with the tactile pedagogy of Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten gift blocks. Grasping Life as an experiment in decision making and character rehearsal, it becomes relevant to ask what kinds of decisions it requires its players to make.
To open such an analysis, we might look at restrictive positions on the board, such as edges and corners. In these positions, a player’s counter is against the boundaries of the game board, suggesting a back-against-the-wall feeling that Bradley may have intended to generate among gamers who landed on these squares. This reading is supported by the content of the backline squares—“Prison,” “Jail,” and “Disgrace,” and at other edge squares like “Poverty,” “Gambling,” and “Ruin.” Further, even the positively valued squares at the edges of the board are risky places to be: “Fat Office” is surrounded by “Ruin,” “Prison,” and the game-ending “Suicide.”52 Yet “Suicide,” that most aggressively bleak inclusion from a twenty-first-century perspective, is nearly impossible to land on, as there is only one lonely place—“the red square between Ruin and Fat Office,” as Jill Lepore notes—and one roll from that place that can force you onto the sad image of the hanging man.53 As I contemplate this operational figure of sympathy for the compulsion to self-harm, I am further arrested by the fact that Bradley builds a kind of haunting into the insistent visual index of the game: one cannot play Life without acknowledging the way that some people feel forced into death. Even if you never land on it, the
