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 that of a random number generator. At the onset of a turn, the player spins the teetotum and counts his or her piece forward the number of spaces rolled. There 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,