States Patent and Trademark Office.
To understand the dimensions of Bradley’s precipitous success, and what this success can tell us about American media history (not to mention literary history), it is essential to pause for a moment and reflect on what we can learn from the punctuated emergence of new commercial games like The Checkered Game of Life—in contrast to more traditional staples of amusement. Though he may have inaugurated a new era in integrated game design, theory, and branding, Bradley certainly did not invent American play. Sketching the anthropological edges of traditional play practices, anthologies such as The Boy’s Treasury of Sports, Pastimes, and Recreations (1847) and The Boy’s Book of Sports and Games (1851) pillaged liberally from London native William Clarke’s nostalgic reflections and codifications in The Boy’s Own Book (1828/1829).6 In isolation, Clarke’s compendium of childhood entertainments—republished by the Boston firm of Munroe and Francis nearly every year for twenty-five years and selling in this period, by one account, eighty thousand copies in the United States7—offers a broad introduction to texture of everyday play in the nineteenth century, which included checkers, marbles, wordplay games, puzzles, and playground standards like Blind Man’s Buff. Clarke’s books and their many echoes documented ubiquitous games and modes of amusement that most would have known or might be expected to know. Advertised and (if inscriptions in extant copies suggests common practice) largely bestowed during the domestic leisure of the Christmas season, Boy’s Own books were touchstones in social calibration: equal parts reference book and usage guide for a set of discrete playful protocols that could aid in the attainment of a shared sociophysical language. And just as a dictionary does not invent words, and an encyclopedia does not invent topics, these books did not invent new games; instead they cataloged a cultural topography of leisure time associations and pleasures with a tone of romantic universality and completeness. Indeed, there is only a glancing sense that the games in these books came from anywhere other than a distant, spuriously researched past.
A fact-driven history of particular games in these collections, of the sort that might support meaningful social analysis, is persistently frustrated by a competitive tendency among the makers of these books toward compendious completeness. Authority without authorship reigned. And this authority was anchored by the anonymizing and appropriative tendencies of reprinting. As William Dick, the editor of American Hoyle (1864), clarifies in the book’s preface: “It has been the intention of the publishers of this work to make it the standard authority for all American Games. With this view, they have neglected no available research to render it as perfect and complete as possible, and think they may safely commend it to the American people as a reliable and trustworthy arbiter of all questions arising within its scope.”8 The sources for this “research” were directly acknowledged in Dick and Fitzgerald’s concurrently published American Boy’s Book (1864): “We are indebted to the compilers of the ‘BOY’S OWN BOOK,’ ‘EVERY BOY’S BOOK, and the ‘BOY’S HANDY BOOK OF GAMES,’ for sundry extracts, descriptions, and hints, of which we have made use in the preparation of this volume.”9 Similarly, a posthumously expanded 1854 edition of Clarke’s Boy’s Own Book reflects upon the fact that in the absence of many substantive additions, the core differences between these yearly offerings were, in fact, style and format: “As new editions have been called for, the value of the book has been increased by successive improvements, and it has thus been rendered as distinguished for the style of its production as it was formerly attractive for its novelty.”10
Even so, when collated across publishers, editions, and time, documentary trends begin to surface. New pages are added to reflect newly popular games. New names and name localizations emerge (“Touch” becomes the more familiar “Tag,” for example). Emerging technologies like the daguerreotype are folded in, and national distinction emerges as a selling point as the guides begin to highlight differences between American rules, American games, and their European counterparts.11 If play was a laboratory for the production and manipulation of cultural associations, then a chronological intertextual study of Boy’s Own books discloses a shifting landscape of instruments, methodologies, and points of focus.12 And these attempts to break with tradition (or to register important but previously undocumented traditions) were even more apparent in the bureaucratically rationalized world of patents and commercial competition—a world of technical innovation, to wind us back to where we started, that deeply affected Milton Bradley’s career.
By studying freshly patented and produced games like The Checkered Game of Life, we can more directly locate certain operative mechanics and material affordances as being meaningfully of their time. Where guidebooks reflect an aggregate that can be broken down and collated into a history of trends, the commercial sphere of advertising and patenting represents a series of punctuated moments: instances in which a given inventor was willing to invest both time and capital for the purpose of seizing or creating a new feeling or set of operative associations. We might bear in mind that there was minimal risk in adding new pages to Boy’s Own books, minimal need for concern over whether anyone would take pleasure in one entry out of hundreds. By contrast, every advertisement and patent signals a leap predicated on the anticipation of a return on investment. In the end, both archives are useful, but in differing ways: one speaks to us about the being of diversion and the other, about the becoming—residual and emergent forms, to invoke Raymond Williams’s terms. “Our list,” Bradley’s advertisements insist to both consumers and historians, “is not made up of … duplications of old methods under new names.”13 Though enjoyment of old forms of play—“old methods”—may not have faded, the emergence of new forms gestured at the subtleties and distinctions that were gaining traction in the everyday lives of Americans—specifically, those with the time and means to play at new models of social pleasure.
Bradley’s flagship game may have seen such special success because it materialized a figure of growing importance to its nineteenth-century audience, a figure we now understand through the term “avatar.” Analyzing the experience of playing in online virtual spaces, Mark Meadows describes an avatar as an “interactive social representation of a user.”14 Indeed, our own media-heavy society is flooded with such representations in digital form, but we need not limit the figure to the twentieth century’s development of computerized games. As I will argue below, Bradley’s Life innovatively sketches one of the first fully realized avatars in U.S. game history. With this avatar, players are figured, via a unitary piece on the board, as a kind of possibility machine, defined by the way they physically and publically navigate the series of “or”s that constitute any position in the field of play. And while the “interaction” of Meadows’s productively intuitive definition reflects the navigation of a scripted algorithm (a term I’ll return to shortly), the “social” here cannot simply be collapsed into a set of readymade interpersonal or cultural protocols—if so, “social” would only mirror and magnify the sense conveyed by “interactive.” Instead, the specific sociality of an avatar, as I employ it, is more closely parsed by what Bruno Latour has dubbed a “sociology of associations”; it reflects a dynamic and performed collective that incorporates things, people, pictures, rules, and concepts, creating a set of coordinated psychophysical habits by which one might begin to account for life in the new world of commercial things and urban exchange.15
Avatars of the sort invited by Bradley’s game enacted a purposefully tactile dislocation and relocation of the idea of self into a shared space of marking that went beyond a purely mentalist notion of interiority. It was, by contrast, an exteriorized and performed celebration of self in a relevant but less familiar sense of “celebration”—not as a simple synonymic substitute for “positive glorification,” but instead as a public ritual of materialization, like a wedding or the traditional Christian sense of “celebrating” the Eucharist. The Hindi concept of avatara from which videogame designers drew “avatar” in the twentieth century parallels this notion, as it denotes the incarnation of spirit into a bodily form. So while the “exercise of judgment” that Bradley aims for in his game was on the one hand executive, it was also and always explicitly somatic and material. It is
