routes. Closely played, the game reveals a complicated sensibility regarding the limit point of its core theme.
Moving to locations even more restrictive than the edges, all of the game’s corners allow only six options for player movement, contrasting the sixteen available at central locations on the board. Unless you are just starting or finishing Life it is never a good idea to be in a corner. Correspondingly, “Infancy” and “Happy old age” are the only themed squares occupying these positions. And to further discourage those who would dart across the board directly to “Happy old age,” this pinned position is surrounded by negatively themed squares that effectively rob the player of a turn (“Gambling,” “Intemperance,” and “Idleness”). Functionally, this means that if you were to land on “Happy old age” and not win the game in the same move, you would have only a slight chance (one in six) of attaining any points in the following turn. Moreover, you would have a 50 percent chance of having to wait at least two more turns before another scoring opportunity—a deterrent against living fast and retiring early. For Bradley, even the positive elements of Life require a keen sense of situational strategy and timing.
A further case in point, Bradley’s use of “Truth” may be the most suggestive combination of content and operation in the game. In play, the “Truth” square has no value of its own, but it puts you within striking distance of beneficial squares, such as “Wealth,” “Matrimony,” “Happiness,” “Politics,” “Cupid,” “Perseverance,” and “Congress,” with the only negative single-turn outcome being “Crime.”54 In other words, assuming the position of “Truth” is strategically smart: to seek out “Truth” is to have the potential for happiness or love and to forestall the possibility of “Ruin.” On the flip side, “Truth” is not automatically valuable. “Truth” alone is ambiguous; it requires judgment and is not an end in itself.55 Here again, Life’s operational approach conveys a considerable amount about how its inventor hoped to influence players’ senses of practical morality.
Yet Bradley’s game was not alone in its focus on virtue and vice. Earlier board games of moral instruction “mirror[ed] popular notions of the successful Christian life” by schematizing visualizations of virtue’s positive effects and vice’s negative outcomes. An important representative of the genre, William and Stephen Bradshaw Ives’s 1843 The Mansion of Happiness was a race game like Traveller’s with strong thematic parallels to Life. Indeed, it is almost always grouped in with Life as a kind of predecessor in histories of American board games. In Mansion, players traverse an inwardly spiraling path of sixty-seven squares culminating in “The Mansion of Happiness,” all while navigating a gauntlet of Christian morality.56 If players land on a space relating to one of the virtues, they jet forward on the path toward the center. On the other hand, if a player lands on a vice, say “Passion” on the fourteenth space, that player will have to return to the sixth space, “Water,” for as the rules caution, “Whoever gets in a Passion must be taken to the Water and have a ducking to cool him”; similarly, a “Sabbath Breaker [square twenty-eight] was ‘taken to the Whipping Post [square twenty-two] and whipt.’”57 In application, the goal of the game was to avoid vices (which lead to backward moves), amass virtues (which lead to forward moves), and achieve a counting score of sixty-seven as quickly as possible, similar to Bradley’s hundred-point goal.
The differences, however, are what shift the emphasis from informing the player to re-forming (changing) the player. In Bradley’s game, the progression one makes toward the score of one hundred is neither linear nor wholly left to chance. As opposed to the forward motion of Mansion, players of Life are persistently given choices regarding the direction they would rather take in the pursuit of a game-winning final score. This means that the player’s role is changed from one of spinning the teetotum and watching the results—perhaps forming positive or negative associations with different spots on the board, perhaps not—to one in which he or she might choose to weather a certain degree of vice on the road to greater virtue. The addition of judgment-based decision points in Bradley’s game imparts a stronger sense of player actions (rather than chance alone) determining the outcome. Players must formulate a personal navigation strategy, making their relationship to the game more interactive and connected to habit-oriented forms of social training.
The dominant manner of thinking through such training in the mid-nineteenth century was through the figure of “character.” Karen Halttunen writes: “Within prevailing Lockean psychology, the youth’s character was like a lump of soft wax, completely susceptible to any impressions stamped upon him…. The term character, in fact, could apply not to the lump of wax itself but to the impression made upon it.”58 The image of “soft wax” becomes an opportunity for figuring character as Locke’s famous tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which the sensational world acts. The character of an individual is, Locke argues, “acquired … imprinted by external things, with which infants have earliest to do, which make the most frequent impressions on their senses.”59 “Ideas,” he continues, fill the “empty cabinet” of the mind and make the person who he or she is, yielding a passive perspective on character that is the result of factors largely out of a person’s control.60
This information-based view of character impression is clearly present in both the instructional goals and the mechanics of a game like Mansion. Here, players come across spaces, as in Life, such as “Generosity,” “Ruin,” and “[Becoming] A Drunkard.”61 The consequence for landing on these spaces, which is wholly the result of the teetotum roll, is demarcated in a key that comes with the game, admonishing: “Whoever possess Audacity, Cruelty, Immodesty, or Ingratitude, must return to his former situation … and not even think of Happiness, much less partake of it.”62 In this game, the player is informed that the presence of a vice in the mind precludes the presence of virtues, and thus prevents a happy result. It is as if the cabinet to which Locke refers has only room enough for one set of ideas or the other. Accordingly, the goal for the players is to educate themselves as to what these positive ideas are, and to have a properly arranged stockpile (the visual analogy being a perfect accumulation of sixty-seven points, the endpoint of the game). Emphasizing this, the instructional passage lingers notably on a static and scenic depiction of the player’s mental state: the player “possess[es]” the vices (rather than acting them out) and as a consequence is prohibited from moving on. This situates game play wholly in the realm of forming either negative or positive associations with specific moral ideas, “Audacity, Cruelty, Immodesty, or Ingratitude” against “Charity, Humanity, or Generosity.”63 Accordingly, the characterological goal of a game like Mansion runs parallel to its operational goal: a player accumulating points is, at the same time, accumulating associational impressions, ideas of moral value.
Bradley shares this focus upon impressions in the patent for Life, asserting that “it is intended to forcibly impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice.”64 However, though the language of impression follows the Lockean precedent, the nature of these impressions is distinct from that in Mansion. In Life, impressions are made on a player by facilitating the active repeatability of decision making (re-forming the player through iterations of judgment) in addition to the possession of ideas. This operative addition is the central reform mechanism of the game. Bradley writes, “As the player … oftentimes has the choice of several different moves, the game becomes very interesting, the more so from the fact that the chance of the die is so connected with the frequent choice of moves involving the exercise of judgment.”65 While in Mansion it is enough to possess “Prudence … [to move] toward the Mansion of Happiness,”66 in Bradley’s amusement that good judgment must be “exercise[d]”—a use-it-or-lose-it approach to the same principles.
It is worth clarifying that in Mansion there are undoubtedly moments at which inputs must be given to the rule system in order to produce forward movement. Player involvement at these decision points, however, is essentially
