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 rolls on a linear track.41
The first amusement of this type known to be manufactured in 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