is no arguing with the die: if you’re on square 24, roll a one, and notice that one space forward will land you on “Immodesty,” you cannot instead move one space backward to “Truth,” or across the board to the adjoining square 52, “Humanity.” Unfortunately, it’s “Immodesty” or bust.67 In this case, even though players technically interact with the algorithms of the game, the mode of their interaction is limited to the physical act of spinning the teetotum. If there is a tactile mnemonic at play it is this: touch things at your own risk.
In the current climate of video games, Mansion’s mode of activity might not be called interactivity at all, given that interactivity is typically associated with a real sense of agency (that is, a real give and take between the decision process of the algorithm and the decision process of the player). Addressing this issue, Janet Murray writes, “Activity alone is not agency. For instance, in a tabletop game of chance, players may be kept very busy spinning dials, moving game pieces, and exchanging money, but they may not have any true agency. The players’ actions have effects, but the actions are not chosen and the effects are not related to the players’ intentions.”68 On the other hand, as previously noted, players of Life are given ample opportunities to take an agential role in the game, to, as Bradley puts it, “exercise [their] judgment.”69 In this way, Bradley’s player/counter/game dynamic is more akin to Meadows’s definition of avatar discussed earlier: an “interactive social representation of a user.” It is interactive, in that the decision-making process is two-sided (at least), involving the input-output system of the game rules and the player’s activity of judgment within this system. And it is social, in that the decisions of the players are represented visually on the board by a small piece of wood with which they associate themselves, for the benefit of other players. These players, in turn, can formulate their own strategies, as well as expressive conceptions of their playmates, through this token and its movements. It is, however, also important to linger on the double meaning of “exercise” in tying this back to the nineteenth-century goal of “character” formation.
Insofar as Bradley’s counter is more avatar-like than in previous American games, one can see the game as profoundly interested in representing a self controlled by the best judgments of the player. A counter, by this rubric, was more like a puppet manipulated by the player than a sum of numbers. This emphasis on self-control was directly related to what Steven Mintz identifies as one of the core goals of mid-century reformers: “The traits associated with a firm character had a strongly moral dimension; they included personal integrity … a capacity for hard work, and self-control … For early-nineteenth-century child-rearing experts, the primary goal of socialization … was to implant a strong will, a capacity for self-discipline, and sense of duty deep within the individual character.”70 By playing at such “self-control” in Bradley’s game, players were, at each turn, habituated to the notion of judgment being a contributing factor to good character development. Possessing good ideas, as in Mansion, was not enough; one had to use these ideas to generate active solutions to an ever-changing gameplay situation. This is at the core of the game’s reform goals: at every turn, players form and iterate (re-form) a strategy for negotiating the board, representing their “will” and reinforcing their “capacity” for self-control. The repetitive nature of decision in a turn-based game like Life meant that one “exercised” the faculty of judgment by playing. Rather than a self that is impressed upon by the outside forces of the game/world, this self “forcibly impress[es]” its avatar (that is, develops procedural strategies) as a way of shaping the options that the world rains upon it. And instead of an accumulation of static ideas, player “character” materializes in the iterated assemblage of these local instances of strategy over time—the slowly engraved directional grooves that link one square to another in a forensic indicator of strategy that can be read years later. The emphasis shifts to a visualization of how you react rather than what you know.
As a Massachusetts contemporary of Bradley, Ralph Waldo Emerson offers a gloss on this process-minded reimagining of the Lockean wax metaphor, asserting in “The Transcendentalist,” “You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstances. Let any thought or motive of mine be different from that they are, the difference will transform my condition and economy. I—this thought which is called I—is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould.”71 Where the earlier depiction of character situated the self as a malleable piece of wax and the world as composite agential force doing the impressing (lending itself to analogies of the divine), here Emerson turns this on its head, suggesting that the world itself is wax and the self is a sculpting force that impresses a shape upon the raw materials provided. This inverted metaphorical figure has two consequences significant to the parsing of character’s relationship to self and agency. First, while it still gives some ground to the outside world’s ability to affect the product of the impression process (one can imagine different mixtures, colors, and consistencies of wax), Emerson’s metaphor gives the final public configuration of agency to the self. Differences of “motive,” which one might reasonably link to habituated strategies of judgment developed in Bradley’s game, have a direct effect on the “shape of the mould.” As a result, the aggregate force of a person’s own active judgments has a direct effect on the self that is realized in the public world.
Moreover, Emerson’s image evokes a transposability not present in the earlier metaphor. By thinking of the self as a mold, one is encouraged to imagine multiple wax productions yielded from the same basic structure, each one slightly different in terms of the raw material furnished (the “circumstances” the world presents) but proximately linked via the mold’s underlying shape. Here one might think of the ever-changing states presented by a moderately open-ended game like Life: each turn instances a new circumstance, new raw materials for testing the desirability of the current expressive strategy or mold. Bradley hoped these habits of judgment would not only be “forcibly impressed” on the character of the game’s players within the game but also capable of being ported to a real-world perspective on self.72
Taking an alternative slant, we might adjust this sense of character by thinking of it not through Emerson’s familiar reworking of the wax metaphor but rather through the lens of Bradley’s own experience as a draftsman and lithographer. Though he did less and less of the manual labor involved in presswork as time went on, in the early years Bradley was the primary trainer for his crew and often had to step in to complete jobs when his pressmen went missing (sometimes to the chagrin of his customers).73 To make a reproducible image, he would use a special wax crayon to draw on a limestone plate, rendering the plate water-resistant in all of the areas he had drawn upon. Then, using a chemical wash containing gum arabic, he would wipe down the stone to produce an opposite effect in the whitespace of the drawing. When he poured a combination of ink and water over the stone, the plate would retain ink precisely in the form of the wax drawing, and from here the image could be impressed upon sheets of cardstock or paper. It could be trying work, intensified by the idiosyncrasies of the technology: “The drawing surface of the stone had to be kept absolutely clean; one drop of perspiration on it reproduced smudges on the finished print.”74 For a two-color print like the red and black Checkered Game of Life, this impression was doubly complicated by the need to pull the first print, dry it, and then accurately line it up with a separate inking for the second color—a process even further developed in the case of the full-color chromolithographs I discuss later, in Chapter 5. Appreciating this process and its centrality to Bradley’s business, it is not unproductive to imagine that when Bradley says a game will “forcibly impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice,” his controlling metaphor is not wax molding but wax drafting and lithographic reproduction.
Pursuing this, one might think of the movements of players as akin to the drawing of wax upon the limestone (rather than pouring the wax into a preestablished mold). At this point, far from the relative permanence of engraving or etching, adjustments can be made, just as in any given game a player’s
