Slantwise Moves. Douglas A. Guerra

does not represent an accounting of progress but rather figures an object allegory of a self defined and located by mobilizing decisions.⁴⁷ Here, by contrast to Traveller’s, the game board is a freeform grid consisting of sixty-four squares—a format putting pressure on the visualized counting terminology native to other period games. Starting in the bottom left corner at “Infancy,” a player spins the teetotum and coordinates his or her rolls (one through six) with instructions for movement written on the bottom of “record-dials” that remain separate from the field of play. These dials take the place of the game board visualization required by race games like Traveller’s and record how many points a player has scored toward the hundred-point goal (via a small brass swiveling arm that points to an arc of numbers like the minute hand of a clock). This adjustment leaves the board open to new functional interpretations. If the counting operations of the game have now been moved to the periphery—a subroutine to the central focus of game play—then we must now look to the supplementary algorithm that this displacement allows to take place on the board. Put another way, if the game board isn’t a visualization of the counting going on, what exactly is it visualizing? The answer suggests Bradley’s innovation: to make the “exercise of judgment” the primary focus of the game.⁴⁸

      Combining chance and choice, Life foregrounds decision making. Rolling a one through three allows the player to move one square: either “up or down” for a one, “right or left” for a two, and “Diagonally in either Direction” for a three; rolling a four through six duplicates these options, adding the ability to move “one or two squares” in either of the aforementioned directions. Players alternate turns, decide their directions, and follow the instructions listed on the square upon which they land, which usually lists either a point value (to be added to the record-dial) or another square to which the player should move his or her piece. Point-value squares are more sparsely portioned than one might imagine; more often than not players are simply moving about the board in the effort to get near the squares that will notch the record-dial ever closer to the win.

      Already we can note a strain in the terminology of Bradley’s patent: the movable piece he calls a counter is less a token marking a precise accumulation of points than an indicator of position amid a field of choices imbued with a relative value not transparently related to the game-board square. Accordingly, Bradley warns that reaching “Happy old age” (the square most distant from “Infancy” and worth a game-changing fifty points) is not necessarily a foolproof strategy for winning the game. He writes, “As ‘Happy old age’ is surrounded by many difficulties, fifty [points] may oftentimes be gained as soon by a succession of smaller numbers as by striving for ‘Happy old age.’”⁴⁹ The manipulation of the counter in the field of choices and the presumed, if simple, relationship between player and counter were precisely the aspects of the game Bradley hoped would allow it be a teaching tool—not just of information relating to virtues but also of smart and virtuous habits of decision making. This is because the results of the game are dictated by player judgment rather than random number generation alone.

      Here it is important to keep in mind that both the actions of the players and the limitations bounding them determine the outcome of the game, as with any algorithm. Algorithmic media requires interactivity at some point in its decision tree in order to produce a result. It is what McKenzie Wark calls “a finite set of instructions for accomplishing some task, which transforms an initial starting condition into a recognizable end condition.”⁵⁰ In Life, the algorithms of the game rules govern things like: the starting position of the counters, the possibilities afforded players upon spinning a given number, the results of inhabiting a given space, and the end conditions for declaring victory. None of these rules, however, does anything without the players supplying the inputs that give starting values. So while there is a very real sense in which the player’s outcomes are bound and determined by the structure of Bradley’s algorithms, the regular iteration of decision points in the game ensures that the outcome is never wholly out of the players’ hands.⁵¹ Every slide and scrape of the counter materializes a choice, yoking movement and visual representation to intellectual purpose in the vein of Bradley’s later work with the tactile pedagogy of Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten gift blocks. Grasping Life as an experiment in decision making and character rehearsal, it becomes relevant to ask what kinds of decisions it requires its players to make.

      To open such an analysis, we might look at restrictive positions on the board, such as edges and corners. In these positions, a player’s counter is against the boundaries of the game board, suggesting a back-against-the-wall feeling that Bradley may have intended to generate among gamers who landed on these squares. This reading is supported by the content of the backline squares—“Prison,” “Jail,” and “Disgrace,” and at other edge squares like “Poverty,” “Gambling,” and “Ruin.” Further, even the positively valued squares at the edges of the board are risky places to be: “Fat Office” is surrounded by “Ruin,” “Prison,” and the game-ending “Suicide.”⁵² Yet “Suicide,” that most aggressively bleak inclusion from a twenty-first-century perspective, is nearly impossible to land on, as there is only one lonely place—“the red square between Ruin and Fat Office,” as Jill Lepore notes—and one roll from that place that can force you onto the sad image of the hanging man.⁵³ As I contemplate this operational figure of sympathy for the compulsion to self-harm, I am further arrested by the fact that Bradley builds a kind of haunting into the insistent visual index of the game: one cannot play Life without acknowledging the way that some people feel forced into death. Even if you never land on it, the image remains. Finally, since there isn’t much reason to cross this square, “Suicide” remains one of the most legible icons even on aggressively played game boards—as Life ages, its potential pitfalls stand in high contrast to safer 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