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INTRODUCTION

On the Uses and Abuses of Games

Ragged at the edges from a century and a half of wear, a black and gold game board waits quietly in the archives of the Missouri History Museum. Wispy lines carve the surface, tracing links between tarnished brass images of “happiness” and “idleness,” “truth” and “crime,” “bravery” and “suicide.” These slanted strokes, etched remnants of aggressive play, suggest a history that goes beyond the imagistic content of an 1865 luxury edition of Milton Bradley’s runaway hit, The Checkered Game of Life—“handsomely gotten up,” as the ad copy of the day would have it, in “muslin and gilt.”¹ Like the scarred drag of squid tentacles across the “dead, blind wall” of a sperm whale’s head, they invite visualizations of a now bodiless conflict. There is no definite sense of endings or meanings, of who won and precisely when. Instead, there is only a scratched and worn suggestion of many doings that create a weird impression of time, a phantom feeling of intimacy at a distance. Attempting to bracket these feelings, we might set out to learn something by looking at the board itself (Figure 1). We might note, perhaps, the nineteenth-century obsession with reforming “intemperance” imaged in a square illustrating the same. Or we might attend to the evidence of innovation in planar printing technique that is literally reflected in the flat golden impression of its lithographed surface. Yet the scratches continue to itch, reminding us of the play and movement that must accompany a faithful picture of the game’s cultural work. To “read” this artifact requires more than a scan of its surfaces: one must wind oneself to the rhythms of a different moment, moving things, arranging bodies, and sliding over the worn paths of now absent hands. Reading takes the form of testing for potentials, and the nature of this testing slides freely between material and conceptual domains of knowledge.

Figure 1. Game board. The Checkered Game of Life. Springfield: Milton Bradley & Co., ca. 1865. Courtesy of Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.

Games are profoundly experimental media. The dimensions of this experimentation, and what can be learned from it, are at the center of the present book. The interpretation of games requires an approach that probes for meaning at persistently unsettled boundary lines between content and form, production ethos and reception aesthetics, subjects and objects. We can begin to frame their complexity by thinking of them as microtheories of association, codifications of and speculative exercises in how we might find pleasure with others (dare I say “fun?”). Games fix our attention on a specific subset of things, people, and actions, allowing us to understand how we operate when given a reduced but nevertheless urgent(ish) cluster of demands. They are iterative, habitual, and performative—we watch how others play, how we play, and what we think to do in specifically conditioned situations of stress, challenge, or humorous improvisation. In games we see a world in miniature, and like all miniatures they cue us to questions of fidelity, prompting us to ask what is emphasized and what is left out.²

With a media form like the book, these questions are most often critically framed by the concept of “representation,” but games impose strange alternatives. They direct one to think about fidelity in action, in materials, and in construction, fidelity on the level of patterns and figures of interaction enabled by the form.³ By situating games and books in a shared ecosystem of mass-circulating leisure media in the U.S. nineteenth century, Slantwise Moves uses the “itchy” interpenetrations of games like The Checkered Game of Life to educe different ways of reading nineteenth-century books—and different ways of thinking about how people may have read or used books in the past. The tricky issue with nineteenth-century textuality is not that literary history’s picture is incorrect but that it is often insufficient to a full view of the book as a media object. Media must be understood as an interrelated collection of venues, an ecology of uneven lifecycles and developmental dependencies, upon and within which certain forms of social life are staged and performed, never in isolation and never without some collective consequence. Despite this, the idea of experimentation within literature can often wend rapidly into the insular solidity of canon (the experiment as a representative example waiting to exist, always already literature) or the controlled flux of modernist play (the experiment as the privileged space of—a primarily masculinized—high art).

Games of this period, by contrast, occupy an especially precise, complex, and visible field of media experimentation relatively uncolonized by concepts of canon or intellectual tradition—revealing alternative foundations for thinking about what “books” were doing in medias res and how “writing” and “reading” may have created senses of sociality and self. The heart of my argument, here and in the chapters that follow, is a rejection of the idea that the “literary” can be cordoned off from the “ludic” in the nineteenth-century marketplace of cheap amusement commodities. As we shall see, intermedial reciprocity was a core feature of nineteenth-century production practice (much like it is in our own time), and I use this historical fact to reorient the literal and figurative modes of “self-making” and “socialization” that were enmeshed in and preserved by media across traditional conceptual divides.

Productively, the question of what a game is doesn’t creep into the background as easily as it sometimes does with other forms of media. Even in the most literal terms, every game emerges from its defining gestures—from its particular emphases and elisions. Though they undoubtedly might, literary critics don’t always (or in some cases ever) ask themselves to define the “book” as a genre or specific historical media figure at the onset of a critical analysis. Yet one is hard-pressed to find a critical work on games that doesn’t begin with a definition.⁴ While fixations on genre in literary discussions can appear to rotate within a distant orbit of the valorizing term “literature,” similar fixations occupy the molten core of gaming discourse.

“The Uses and Abuses of Games” (1886), Milton Bradley’s compact history of Anglo-American game playing and invention written for Good Housekeeping, provides a case in point. By then a twenty-six-year veteran of the games industry, Bradley opens by raising the question of definition only to trouble it: “The oldest and broadest definition of the word game would cover much more than its present use implies, which is merely that class of amusements … in which some one or some side wins. In addition there is a large class of puzzles, charades, tricks, etc., some of which are entirely separated from and others very closely allied to a game in its more limited sense.”⁵ Savvy to the categorical designations that enabled him to patent his games as technological inventions more frequently than any other designer of his generation, Bradley invokes the technical language of patent “class[es]” even as the alliances of the class petulantly rub against its conceptual collecting power. Indeed, the problem is the same even within the 1872 class specification used by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). While “Class 46” is first given the subject heading of “Games and Toys,” an immediate and perplexing set of expansions begins on the very next line, where it is clarified that this category includes “Games, Gymnastic and Exercising Apparatus, Traps, and Nets.” Below this, the list grows to ensnare even more: billiard balls and dumbbells, puzzles and targets, baseballs and police batons.⁶ One can imagine the anonymous author or authors of this document yearning for the comparative clarity of “Class 44: Fuel” or “Class 45: Furniture.” Similarly, as Bradley’s Good Housekeeping article progresses, he bounces from board games to word puzzles to card games, grappling with and hedging against sprawling disruptions to what he terms the “limited sense.” Totalizing declarations like “All quiet indoor games may generally be divided into two classes” are quickly trailed by “These two classes, however broadly construed, may not cover all in common use.”⁷ Other objects of discussion are held in suspension by statements like “if this may be called a game.”⁸ Seemingly by their nature, games are difficult to separate from those other mechanisms of play with which they are, as Bradley puts it, “very closely allied.” Both he and the USPTO struggle with an intuition that I am inclined to put more bluntly: the invention of a new game is the invention of a new genre.⁹ This might explain why “games” as a category—as opposed to specific examples like The Checkered Game of Life, tangrams, or billiards—are difficult to capture under a particular genre umbrella or invention class. Games are about invention itself.

Slantwise Moves is about games, but it is resistant to defining them in sweeping ways for this reason. Individual, historically located games are as interesting for the particular limits they set as for the specific associative assemblages they enable. Thus it is important not to rule out what we might learn from the outset by overwriting empirical complexity through a surplus of conceptual rigor. “The conceptual distance we travel from the facts before us,” Sacvan Bercovitch reminds us in “Games of Chess,” “is directly proportional to our capacity to see the particular in the essential.”¹⁰ All too frequently, discussions about games flow in the opposite direction, looking for anthropological continuity where we might find meaningful breaks. To address this meaning in a particular set of moments in U.S. history, this book takes a case-study approach, looking intensively at popular mass-market games of the mid-nineteenth century not to answer what a game is but instead to ask what certain media do and how that doing might offer perspective on the literary questions we have directed at the period. Like the designers of nineteenth-century games, I find it not unhelpful to allow other amusements that gaming theorist Espen Aarseth dubs “ergodic” into the mix; that is, objects whose expressive form in a given use-iteration is dependent on a process of input and material negotiation involving both user and artifact—algorithmic media.¹¹ Read Moby-Dick and tell me that you never saw anything about whales, and I’ll suggest that you must have skipped something. But you can play many hands of poker and never see a red queen (as an idealistic royal-flush seeker knows all too well). The existence of queens undoubtedly constitutes the “scene” of card playing or its particular sphere of potentials, but it’s not necessarily a part of the plot of any given game.¹² It is in this redoubled attention to indirectly scriptive and ambiguously performative qualities of popular games in the nineteenth century that I see opportunities for reimagining “literary” developments in figure and form. The “slantwise” of this book’s title advocates interpretative “alongsides,” while the plurality of “moves” is an invitation—and a particularly game-like one at that—to consider potentials as well as outcomes.

I should note that even as the goal here is to prompt a more dimensional, fragmentary, and dispersed conversation about historical media—and a conversation about nineteenth-century texts that is not overdetermined by the disciplinary traditions of literary study as it emerged in the twentieth century—the methodology I employ is, in fact, derived from one of the most important tools in the literary toolkit: the sensitive use of metaphor as a mode of intellectual invention and experimentation. Though often employed to more aesthetic ends, a suggestive metaphor functions as an instrument through which one domain of knowledge becomes a foundation for testing the suitability of new knowledge in a different domain. Metaphor is less an object than an operation. It is a way to use a “strictly” incommensurate conceptual schema—a set of words or images traditionally associated with one thing (the “vehicle” in I. A. Richards’s classic terminology)—to produce unthought but potentially valid ways of speaking and thinking about another thing (the “tenor”).¹³ When Romeo says “Juliet is the sun,” he invites us to use knowledge about the sun to illuminate potential ways of speaking about his tenor, Juliet, that may not have previously occurred to us: her spatial orientation above him, yes, and undoubtedly certain thoughts about enlightenment and growth, but maybe also the specific distance at which a certain kind of warmth must be kept. Let’s remember that to get as close to the sun as Romeo does to Juliet would be to vaporize in a terrible storm of heat and plasma. And while it’s true that I’m indulging in a little scientific anachronism here, it’s not wrong to say that in four words Romeo conveys potential reflections about vitality and danger that resonate in relation to Shakespeare’s script, no matter how circuitous the path. Even if we knew nothing else of the play, our model of Juliet’s potential significance changes with these words—and with that, our sense of how to “read” her characterization (and Romeo’s). The metaphorical operation, by prompting nontraditional but specific schematic ways of knowing a tenor, fills in a territory that may have seemed nonexistent in an otherwise “full” literal depiction of characteristics. Metaphor reminds us that any concept—even one as deeply ingrained as “literature”—is always only a working model.

In “Deep Play,” Clifford Geertz sees games as occupying a similar space of operative social modeling. Expanding on a discussion of rural cockfights in 1970s Bali, he explains that “an expressive form works (when it works) by disarranging semantic contexts in such a way that properties conventionally ascribed to certain things are unconventionally ascribed to others, which are then seen actually to possess them.”¹⁴ Since nineteenth-century books and games did exist in a tightly shared context of production, transmission, and reception—something I discuss below—it makes even more than usual sense to ask the near-metaphorical question: What if a book were seen a game? What ideas about gaming might be usefully applied to notions of reading and writing? But this risks discussions of “play” that won’t take us much further than the semiotic deployments of this term that characterized the important, though often abstract, enlistments of late twentieth-century poststructuralist theory. Instead, I’m inclined to ask these questions in a way that lingers with material and historical details of distinctive gameplay media—not a loose or common-denominator sense of definition but concrete models of actual games that offer ways to test for the social potentials we might otherwise be overlooking in specific historical moments. “The heart is a city” can prompt certain thoughts about emotion, but no one would deny that “The heart is Chicago,” “The heart is New York,” and “The heart is Phoenix” are statements that carry different opportunities for thinking: about lakefronts and emotion; about compression, circulation, and cultural displacement; or about love, dust, rattlesnakes, and strip malls. Nineteenth-century games can provide information about repetitive cultural behavior that is as important to thinking about reading practice as it is to thinking about historically oriented sociological questions more broadly—and Slantwise Moves addresses this in appropriately messy and speculative, but interlocking, ways that require tracings of the unruly media scenes that books and games shared.

Conversational Slants

In this book, I argue that beyond anything else a game reveals, it also signals a social scene: a dicey collection of concepts, materials, and people in a distinctively mobile arrangement. An example can help to clarify this. Variations on a simple game called “conversation cards” existed throughout the long nineteenth century in the United States, advertised in newspapers at least as far back as 1775.¹⁵ A commonplace in many stationery and job printing establishments, conversation cards (and playing cards) conspicuously lodged themselves among other more functional paper and ink implements. A representative listing of printed goods for sale might include:

A great variety of message and visiting cards, plain, bordered, and gilt,

Large printer’s blanks, common size ditto,

Playing cards English and American,

Conversation cards for reading the hearts of ladies,

Ditto for reading the thoughts of men,

Dutch quills.¹⁶

Typically a tiny pack with the dimensions of a matchbox and wrapped in paper or leather, conversation cards could be tossed into a pocket or reticule and be used to break the ice in friendly company—to “read” each other, as noted above. It’s not uncommon to find playing cards and conversation cards printed on the backsides of unused formal cards of introduction, aligning pervasive social rituals that involved the exchange of cards.¹⁷ The gameplay itself evokes an advanced level of such practices, moving beyond family names and business recognitions into the ambiguous terrain of “hearts” and “thoughts.” Composed of question cards and answer cards, the roughly sixty-card deck would be dealt entirely to the players, which the pronouns and supporting materials presuppose will be a mixed-gender gathering. An 1866 edition from Adams & Co. outlines the basic procedures of gameplay:

The player having the [question] cards takes one from his pack, and after reading it, aloud or not, as may be agreed upon, passes it to the other player, who in the same manner returns [an answer] card…. A laugh is allowable if it be not audible. The player who laughs aloud on the passing of a card, or during the game, shall take one of his live cards and put it with the dead ones. The player who first loses his cards, loses the game, and the other player wins. The preceding Rule and Forfeit may be dispensed with if desired, and a right-down merry time be had without limitation. The former manner of playing may be called a Tight, and the latter a Loose Game.¹⁸

With these procedures in place, players are given license to work through a series of irony-laden call and response situations that, notably to my mind, only require at least one player who can read.¹⁹ On the one hand, strict attention to the content of the card—distanced from the probable scene of gameplay—reveals this as a game invested in specific forms of heterosexual courtship. Benjamin Lindsey’s 1811 pack, widely copied and likely a reprinted copy itself, asks, “Do you long to be married?” and “Do you think yourself handsome?” with answers like “Yes, sir, with all my heart” or “Indeed you make me blush” (Figure 2). On the other hand, these composed and appropriate responses must have faced persistent interruption from otherwise unspeakable flirtations and gender inversions: “Are you fond of making conquests?” “Yes, sir, only in the dark.”²⁰ If this weren’t the case, laughing certainly couldn’t be one of the functional methods of competitive assessment. Depending on the players, laughter could be its own form of behavioral policing: we laugh at things we recognize to be “wrong”; we laugh to show we’re in on “what’s right.” But just as often we laugh at things that gesture at the ambiguity of rightness—things that transcend or neutralize a traditional polarization of wrong and right. We laugh at the thing that may be right even though no one ever says it that way (or says it at all).²¹ Because the operation of play is controlled by the rules, “conversation cards” do a lot of the talking for you—literally in the case of the silent variation suggested above—and there are myriad reasons why we can imagine this to be desirable. When one person asks, “Are you my friend?” and the other answers, “As circumstances will admit,” the words themselves can tell only a partial story. The rest lies in what is registered by the laughter, nonlaughter, or almost laughter that accompanies the physical exchange of a card: the losers of a “tight” game might actually be the winners of a broader communicative scene.

Tone is key. But we wouldn’t know that simply by reading the conservative gender content of the cards themselves. Ironically, this would strip the cards of their conversational quality.²² Alongside the text, we sketch a plausible social territory by narrating the potential contours of the game in its playing, in the scene of associations that unfold when we envision the game in movement—again, as a particular set of rules, things, spaces, and people. “Close reading,” the vexed but tenaciously useful core method of literary studies, demands sticking “close” to the specific language of a text in an effort to produce a “reading” or interpretation responsive to the questions of form and figure raised by a given cluster of words in a given order. Extending this responsivity to extratextual and nonnarrative figures, what we could call “close playing” is about the interplay, exchange, and potential transformations facilitated by traveling across different layers of form in a piece of media. Through this attention to the materials and mechanisms of transformation, close playing allows one to identify “operational figures” in nineteenth-century media and society—sets of actions held together in loose but structured sequences that become the basis of social legibility.²³ Not limited to what objects or images sit next to each other, close playing examines the actions that sit next to each other and how certain active sequences gesture at emergent cultural “logics” of association, invention, and connection.²⁴ In a sympathetic mode, Robin Bernstein has recently argued, using a provocative admixture of performance and “thing” theories, that playthings can be a way to understand “normative aggregate behavior,” or iterative social scenes, by keeping a close eye on how a given thing prompts and resists certain sets of actions.²⁵ A scriptive thing, she insists, “is a tool for analyzing incomplete evidence—and all evidence is incomplete—to make responsible, limited inferences about the past.”²⁶

Figure 2. Conversation Cards. New Bedford: Benjamin Lindsey, ca. 1811. Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society.

Drawing together design, performance, and explicitly algorithmic elements, games like conversation cards are scriptive things par excellence, challenging the analyst to produce an account that interweaves media, behavior, and meaning. They oblige us to imagine “loose[ness]” in even the most “tight” game. While the rules, materials, and history of a game dictate the breaking point of our inferential looseness, stretching the fabric, so to speak, is the only way to make room for the bodies we aim to remember. Games redirect and expand our view of the potential work of books and other allied media in part because a responsible approach to these artifacts makes it impossible to imagine reading at an intellectual distance from its material and social sites of enactment: the game of conversation cards is not the same without the tiny cards (requiring some degree of interpersonal touch to pass them on) and without the faces and voices of its players. We can’t fully know what they were or what they sounded like, but we know that they were there and how they were most likely arranged. Each of these elements gives us a slant on the game, an incomplete but provocative take on the kind of social world that was coming into being through the playing. For both players and critics, these games exist in their slantwise moves—in the indirect opportunities they create for habitual orientation and reorientation through the oblique playful use and reconfiguration of the objects, relationships, and content at hand.

The figure of the “slantwise” is important here because it puts the work of critical orientation at issue. If I stressed earlier that every new game is the invention of a new genre, the thrust of this claim was in the way that a new game begins with a procedural orientation—an outline of how to go about using it, of how to arrange yourself, your friends, and various associated objects in order to produce a specifically contoured performance space. As a result of the liminal privilege afforded to gameplay, these performance spaces can, at times, radically readjust a group’s perspective on itself.²⁷ Prior to the opening of a game of conversation cards, certain skills may have been overemphasized in a given group dynamic: someone with a good memory for current events may dominate conversations; old friendships may effectively place the actors in a hierarchy of leads and supporting players. But the procedures of the game, in their singular reduction of “conversation” to ready-made phrases printed on cards and enforcement of turns, place the emphasis instead on charming gestures, evocative tones, and weird juxtapositions. This is not to say that gameplay escapes the ideological magnetisms of its moment—these gestures, tones, and feelings of weirdness could just as easily reinforce the most awful elements of a culture. Questions remain regarding whose action is emphasized and who gets to be in the room.

Yet there was surprising latitude in the way that room was imagined by the makers of these games: in 1858, William Dick and Lawrence Fitzgerald pitch their best-selling anthology of home amusements as being “for family circles, for schools, for pic-nic parties, for social clubs, and, in short, for all occasions where diversion is appropriate”;²⁸ six years later, Dick, writing under the pseudonym “Trumps” in American Hoyle, gleefully reports that “regardless of sex, age, or social position, [billiards] is participated in by all classes of society.”²⁹ In the same year, Milton Bradley advertises his innovative multigame travel pack under the conspicuously combined name of “Games for the Soldiers or Family Circle” and insists that it is “just the thing to send to the boys in CAMP or HOSPITAL for a CHRISTMAS PRESENT, or to keep at home for the winter evenings”;³⁰ just after the war, he contends that Caroline Smith’s 1866 Popular Pastimes for Field and Fireside; or, Amusements for Young and Old, is “not a Boy’s book or a Girl’s book, but a home book for boys and girls of all ages.”³¹ Despite the slow yoking of gameplay to childhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the games addressed in Slantwise Moves—board games, card games, fill-in-the-blanks books, configuration puzzles, and targeting games—were promiscuously marketed and often played across generation, gender, and class.³² As a result, these games prompt us to ask different questions about the spaces where new forms of association and intimacy were being built; they prompt us to notice slantwise moments of productive irony where we might otherwise see only a loud, ponderous normativity machine.

As contrapuntal analytics, attention to historical games can supplement the critical orientation Michel Foucault famously afforded homosexuality in “Friendship as a Way of Life,” as the “occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because of the ‘slantwise’ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric [that] allow these virtualities to come to light.”³³ Of course, “slantwise” is not Foucault’s word, but the French en biais evokes the practice of cutting woven textiles “on the bias,” or at a forty-five-degree angle, in order to allow maximal stretch in the fabric (Foucault’s “lignes diagonals qu’il peut tracer dans le tissu”).³⁴ Because gameplay of the kind addressed in this book can never rest easy on the suggestion of a final picture or outcome—because the iterative archive of possibilities that define a game make any single analysis move like a marble on an uneven table—it must persistently hold many discrete though divergent possibilities in suspension, doubling back to stretch the comfortable fabric of texts whose interpretative range may appear to be settled.³⁵ Folding social action of the kind we can infer from games into our readings makes them thicker; orienting the diagonal relationships of books and games within a shared “fabric” of nineteenth-century media production allows for a better accommodation of this thickness, of the bodies that have been corseted out of the picture.³⁶

A striking example of the loss that can accompany an overtight perspective on the relationships of text, genre, and medium in the mid-nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson has been a site of important reimaginings in recent criticism. Martha Nell Smith, Marta Werner, and Virginia Jackson have all, in different but related ways, challenged the early editorial and critical work on Dickinson that forced her creative output into shapes that ruled out its nearly game-like medial and genre experimentation. In light of their interventions, Dickinson’s writing now appears to anticipate the very problems that accompanied her emergence as a figure of literary interest:

Tell all the truth

but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit

lies

Too bright/bold for our

infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb

surprise.³⁷

In a reading compatible with my invocation of “operational figures” above, the “Success” to be attained in the task of learning historical truths lies in understanding the “Circuit” or regular routes that direct their flow—hence algorithmic readings that narrate a sphere of potentials in an effort to trace the underlying biases or schemas that give shape to action. At the same time, Dickinson’s “Circuit lies” are iterative attempts to get at the truth with an imperfect instrument. The “lies” of customary metaphor and idiomatic rhetoric—the sorts of things one must tap into in order to be understood—require one to hang a lantern on the “slant” one is taking in the effort. Dickinson suggests that these efforts be multiplied, layered over and again upon each other, since no single slant can capture the “superb surprise” of an inexhaustible wonder in the world. This intuition of inexhaustibility reflects the fact that the “truth” of a thing has more to do with our perspective on how it should be used—what it fits with—than on what it is. Any “thing” can always be used a different way, as Dickinson demonstrates through her redeployment of scraps from receipts, old envelopes, and lists as platforms for new pieces of linguistic art. As I’ve gestured at in my transcription, the manuscript in which this “poem” appears makes such a layered redeployment even more obvious: “bright” and “bold” sit right on top of each other, neither struck out (I’ve clumsily rendered this in type with a slash). One is invited to read one, then the other, in a kind of assay of meaning that is materially prohibited from pushing either word out of the picture. The truth is bright, bold, and—strangely but meaningfully—a kind of flashbulb palimpsest or harmonic concatenation: “bright-bold.” Much of Dickinson’s writing demands a similar concatenation on the level of its material experimentation: a letter is a poem is a collage is a letter-poem-collage. The artifact insists that you read a poem as if it weren’t a poem in a manner comparable to the invocation in conversation cards of a dialogue that both is and is not a conversation in the traditional sense. Would it be useful to imagine Dickinson’s work as “conversation cards” of a sort? As objects of exchange and gestural irony instead of lyric? Given the friendship Dickinson enjoyed with Samuel Bowles—the editor of the Springfield Republican who collaborated with Milton Bradley on some of his first projects in the same period—it might be more productive to imagine her work within the sphere of game making rather than on the firm ground of the “literary” that has traditionally defined it.³⁸

Since books and games occupied overlapping worlds, an attentive approach to games becomes an opportunity to rethink our expectations about what literature was doing in this moment as well. Such a shifted perspective allows us to ask what some of the texts and authors at the center of our literary-critical traditions—texts I have selected for their solid familiarity in contrast to the historical amnesia that surrounds their ludic counterparts—could have been figuring in the more motion-driven operational domain highlighted and placed at issue by gameplay. To put it another way, by including canonical literature alongside native models of potential social interaction (that is, specific historical games), I hope to show that a common conversation was happening within and across media that did not, in their moment, occupy dramatically different registers. Given that some nineteenth-century designers thought games could “be made to inspire an early taste for a profitable class of reading,” one might reasonably ask what specific sets of social behaviors and arrangement practices gave special contour to this idea.³⁹ Such declarations prompt us to the insight that reading and game playing might have been seen in a continuum that has since been lost, naturalized, or simply ruled out by the slow historical reifications of genre and the late nineteenth-century invention of “childhood”—a major event in the sense of a division between (adult/serious) reading and (childish) gameplay.⁴⁰ The more games and books are drawn together, the more possible it becomes to unsettle the assumed reception of both and to see them, in Thomas Augst’s phrase, as “artifacts from the messy business of living.”⁴¹

Materials in Play

If the curious contrivances analyzed in this book were always an experiment in pleasurable social modeling, they were also, like Dickinson’s work, nearly always the result of an expanded view of material usage, a wide and slippery territory of transmedia objects constructed out of the raw materials most readily at hand. A different approach to considering the vast genre experimentation in nineteenth-century games would be to think of them instead as experiments in the affordances of media. While games of the mid-nineteenth century were undoubtedly in conversation with innovations in reform pedagogy, they were just as often answers to the question of what could or might be done with the light industrial materials that were circulating the U.S. mediascape in high quantities: paper and ink, leather and wood, india rubber and pasteboard.⁴² The material world of paper amusements, documentary object production, and communicative labor was incredibly porous in the nineteenth century.⁴³ Meredith McGill has compellingly argued that reprinting—from pirated European works to modular recirculations of newspaper content—was part of the “horizon of the ordinary … a principle of organization” in the antebellum period.⁴⁴ Building on this, we might say that “reprinting” was a principle predicated on a general ethos of “repurposing” and “reinvention” that spanned the antebellum and postbellum periods. Like the Silicon Valley programmers of our own time—many of whom draw upon vast libraries of existing software like APIs, development frameworks, and middleware to build new end products without reinventing the wheel—successful agents of this system were as likely to be defined by their capacity to reconfigure, reappropriate, and reimagine what already existed as much as make something entirely new. Calling cards, as I mentioned above, could become playing cards. Maps could become board games with a few lines added.⁴⁵ And cardstock for traditional playing cards could be used to print less morally problematic pictorial matching games, which Bradley wryly points out “are nearly all copied after some of the old games or are combinations and modifications of them.”⁴⁶ Some of this circulation was undoubtedly the result of technological and geographic proximities, an alliance indebted to quasi-centralized locales of production and distribution.

Walk down the bustling printers’ row on Washington Street in Boston on a day in early 1858 and you would encounter a vital entanglement of printers, ink sellers, stationers, binders, and dealers of paper goods that ranged from blank books and fill-in-the-blanks puzzles to visiting cards, playing cards, maps, and board games, alongside the “literary” books that have formed criticism’s primary objects of study.⁴⁷ Boundaries between different forms of media were persistently crossed and interleaved. Gould & Lincoln, which worked with the American Tract Society and primarily published religious pieces and year-end scientific anthologies, also published a stand-alone version of one of the first commercial Mad Libs–type games in the country. Anne Abbot’s breakout game of family grouping, Dr. Busby (1843), was ported into some of the earliest attempts at literary crossover publishing, as both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) were converted into similar card games that were sold around the corner from the shop of John Punchard Jewett, the original publisher of both best-selling novels.⁴⁸ Jewett got his own start in Salem selling “new games” like Abbot’s alongside pictorial bibles, almanacs, and gift annuals before moving his business to Boston.⁴⁹ And when he moved out of his location at 117 Washington Street in 1858, it was William Crosby and H. P. Nichols, publishers of the tangram-like “Geometrical Puzzle for the Young,” that moved from three doors down to take over his supplies.⁵⁰

Anne Wales Abbot, arguably the United States’ first homegrown commercial game designer, would parlay her career in games into a position as a well-respected educator and editor. (In a critique of The Scarlet Letter for the North American Review, she gives a hilariously backhanded compliment about the novel’s preface, reporting that “this naughty chapter is more piquant than any thing in the book.”)⁵¹ And though influential reviewers, editors, and authors like Abbot may have prompted Hawthorne’s bitter laments about “scribbling women,” it was some of these same Salem women who would ensure that future generations remembered Hawthorne’s place in the canon, by adapting Dr. Busby into a new game of literary memorization and matching called Authors (1861).⁵² Perhaps all of this interplay explains at least one reason Milton Bradley took pains to mimic ornate gilding patterns and morocco-leather binding on the earliest versions of The Checkered Game of Life (1860), presumably so that it would not look out of place propped atop a parlor piano or in a bookcase (Figure 3). Books and games lived together, if not as blood family, then at least as raucous adolescent roommates.

Though scholars have begun to think about the role that extraliterary documents and documentary practices played in the literary establishment, games and books are not usually discussed together in any material way. The distance between game studies and literary studies exists in part because of a critical gap between important tropological studies of nineteenth-century games and more recent approaches to video games and new media. In the first category, historical studies of the interaction between literature and games in the nineteenth-century United States have focused on rhetorics of game and sport, parsing the significance of gameplay tropes, often in contrast to a discourse of “seriousness.” Ann Fabian’s Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America makes important claims about the significance of gaming rhetoric in creating models of “economic rationality” in the early age of stock market speculation;⁵³ while Michael Oriard’s expansive study, Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture, traces the use of the word “game” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that the language of gaming metaphors in U.S. literature “reveals human thought processes and cultural values … [and] creates the perceived reality.”⁵⁴ Moving beyond these suggestive rhetorical ambivalences, I focus instead on the function and cross-pollination of specific structures within the available game commodities of the time, enlisting canonical literary luminaries to show that their central position (with regard to acclaim and pedagogy) might be better employed through the different modes of critical attention that are invited by coincident period games. For example, a reading of William Simonds’s Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York (the Gould & Lincoln precursor to Mad Libs mentioned previously) adds nuance to Herman Melville’s notoriously fragmentary dialogue in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Like Melville’s characters, Peter Coddle falls victim to a savvy operator, drawn in by his desire for objects written on a set of cards that are selected by players as the game progresses: “a stick of candy,” “a mint of gold,” or perhaps even “a stack of fat lobsters.” Nested within a larger youth novel entitled Jessie; or, Trying to Be Somebody (1858), Simonds’s textual game makes an operative argument about the increasingly instrumental perspective on becoming “somebody” demonstrated in nineteenth-century reform literature; Coddle’s identity is literally structured as a set of social input events bounded by a regulated but undefined grammar. Understanding this facilitates a reassessment of the similarly fragmentary speech of undefined passengers aboard the steamboat Fidèle in Melville’s The Confidence-Man, who construct their own identities as if they were a kind of fill-in-the-blanks game, valuing a comfortably mechanical consistency over impromptu character making. A surrogate for the lost agency of these passengers, the Confidence-Man himself begins to seem more hero than villain in Melville’s narrative because he represents an aesthetic of limited invention and tactical play that is materialized and humorously reinforced in Simonds’s game.

Figure 3. Game back. The Checkered Game of Life. Springfield: Milton Bradley & Co., ca. 1865. Courtesy of Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.

My precedents in this approach are interdisciplinary scholars working with digital games—some coming from a framework of textual studies and book history, such as Matthew Kirschenbaum, Johanna Drucker, and Steven E. Jones, and some from within new media studies, such as Ian Bogost, Jesper Juul, and Espen Aarseth. The insights of this recent work have not been fully applied to game forms that predate the twentieth century, although there is much to be gained from such an encounter. Engaging with what Kirschenbaum highlights as formal and forensic materialities, nineteenth-century games like bagatelle, croquet, and even The Checkered Game of Life developed strategic habits of mind in players that were explicitly coincident with bodily habits of seeing, moving, and touching.⁵⁵ Hence, the USPTO’s inclusion of dumbbells and exercising devices amid playing cards, dice, and puzzles. Here the materiality of gameplay mattered in a way that is only recently being reclaimed by critics of both games and books. And because these forms existed within a shared media ecology, they both reflected and refracted the same cultural imaginary in different though comparatively interesting ways: if games carried the expectation of physical or dispositional exercise, then we are inclined to ask how books may have facilitated or enacted formally continuous modes of engagement. As New Media theorist Lisa Gitelman observes of media technologies in the late nineteenth century, “different media and varied forms, genres, and styles of representation act as brokers among accultured practices of seeing, hearing, speaking, and writing.”⁵⁶ To understand literary history within the scope of the procedural and ludic practices materially modeled by games is to better comprehend the practices being “broker[ed]” by authors working in this historical moment.

Beginning by thinking through the manner in which object displacements of “interior” character rearticulated the grounds of social legibility in the mid-nineteenth century, my first chapter, “Both In and Out of the Game: Reform Games and Avatar Selves,” tracks the interface of decision and thing in Milton Bradley’s The Checkered Game of Life (1860) and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855). A fusion of somatic and cognitive training created to aid in the “exercise of judgment,” Bradley’s career-making board game combined the tactile socialization of previous board games with a mechanic of timing and decision that was substantially novel for its time. This shift in emphasis rendered the player’s marker what we would today call an “avatar,” an interactive social representation of users defined by their actions in a shared virtual and often strategically liminal world. By disrupting the genre expectations of lyric that typically frame discussion of Whitman’s poetry, I allow Bradley’s game to inflect a renewed reading of “Song of Myself”—a poem both formally and thematically concerned with judgment, decision, and touch. In this mode, Whitman’s voracious “I” becomes an avatar-like position within a medially sensitive algorithmic piece of writing, with flurries of inclusive “or”s foregrounding a self that chooses among complex, but limited, collections of subject positions that are inscribed upon and indebted to the tactile dislocations of the book’s various “leaves.”

Chapter 2, “A Fresh and Liberal Construction: State Machines, Transformation Games, and Algorithms of the Interior,” continues to examine the constitutive relationship between agency, objecthood, and association. Popular but largely outside of critical view, William Simonds’s sixth youth-oriented novel, Jessie; or, Trying to Be Somebody, takes a puzzling turn midway through the tale when one of its protagonists introduces a “Game of Transformations” called Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York. A forerunner of twentieth-century word substitution games, Simonds’s story makes Coddle the victim of a New York operator who seduces the rural mark with promises of fabulous luxuries that are filled in by the game players via preprinted cards. As a result, Coddle’s active identity is a function both of formal consistencies (the text surrounding the interactive gaps) and of contingent textual variables input by readers—without material social interaction, Coddle remains structured but undefined. Published a year earlier, Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade portrays the passengers of the steamboat Fidèle as similarly undefined, giving them notoriously fragmentary dialogue that has often confounded critics: “Believe me, I—yes, yes—I may say—that—that—,” “Upon my word, I—I,” and “I conjecture him to be what, among the ancient Egyptians, was called a —.”⁵⁷ Through these stylistic gaps, Melville imagines public identity, within the demands of reformist institutionalism, as an instrumentalization of one’s social self, a singular reading and affirmation of identity in a proscriptively static interpretative mode. In this mode, which Melville lambasts through his much commented on metanarrative asides, bodily feelings of anxiety linked to chaotic and competitive interiorities were regulated by performing the self as a consistent decision algorithm, a state machine like Simonds’s fill-in-the-blank story. Melville’s marks cede their capacity for agency to the Confidence-Man, who reaffirms their desired identity—defining their structured incompleteness for a price they are all too willing to pay. In his triumph, the Confidence-Man represents the importance of “playerliness,” a term I ascribe to the ability to read broadly across layers of medial address (operational, affective, and more traditionally textual). The playerliness of the novel’s fourth-wall-breaking narrator, as well as its “Mississippi operator,” stages a critical supplement to the enactments of state and consistency that dominated U.S. reform discourse and documentation in the mid-nineteenth century. As institutionalism sought to flatten time in a manner that would ensure a consistent future, both The Confidence-Man and Peter Coddle reconfigure focus onto the differential and associative moments when character could be invented anew. Yet though Simonds was somewhat freer to invite the interplay of tone, scene, and textual object as a consequence of generic fluidity in games, the failure of Melville’s novel may reflect a reading public less willing to accept the alternative notions of literary protocol required by his inventive experiments in the novel as mechanism.

This important historical connection between a personal and a mechanical aesthetic of invention is made explicit in my third chapter, “The Power to Promote: Configuration Culture in the Age of Barnum,” which situates the success of P. T. Barnum within a framework of advancements in U.S. patent law that reinforced a growing configurative focus in society at large. By keeping the cost of patenting significantly lower than in Europe and by creating managed public archives of existing inventions like the USPTO, the Patent Act of 1836 contributed to a wider culture of exhibition in the United States and encouraged middle-class inventors to make their names by reconfiguring preexisting materials. Aligning this development with the emergence and persistence of a seven-piece configuration puzzle popularly known as “The Chinese Puzzle” or tangram, I explore Barnum’s use of physical, oral, and documentary paratextual arrangement—supporting materials he dubs “outside show”—as a variety of inventive associational puzzle play. The obsessive configurational intimacies of “The Chinese Puzzle,” which prompted international outcry over “puzzle madness” in the early nineteenth century, offer a way to read Barnum that is sensitive to the thresholds of agency limned by the association of bodies and things. Seeing this through, I pause on the troubling case of Joice Heth, the elderly African American woman who arguably made Barnum’s career as a promoter. If outside cues were a crucial element of invention and playful communication, Heth’s exhibition—first as George Washington’s improbably ancient nurse, then as an impossibly sophisticated automaton—demonstrates the sinister range in which these practices could be used to naturalize dehumanizing attitudes toward nonwhite, nonnormative bodies. At the same time, I explore evidence of audience mediations that may have gone beyond the intended studium of Barnum’s carefully designed stage pictures to produce a puzzling performative punctum, transformatively challenging viewers to play a different game. Haunting the “tact” of Barnum’s career, Heth’s airy and tonal control of atmosphere seeps into his success at the American Museum, where he places focus on murky contexts of enactment and on the reciprocal and embedded interface of spectator and exhibit, rather than simply on the subject-object relationship between viewer and artifact.

Expanding on the thematics of scope and focal control introduced via “outside show” in Barnum’s career, Chapter 4, “Social Cues and Outside Pockets: Billiards, Blithedale, and Targeted Potential,” investigates an unlikely pairing: the high literary genre of Romance and the low hustle of the billiards hall. An Irish immigrant with a knack for the pool cue and an ambitious take on the value of his beloved game, Michael Phelan made his name patenting modifications to billiards tables and codifying American slants on both strategy and rules in his immensely popular Billiards without a Master (1850). Throughout this otherwise functional and geometrically inclined manual, Phelan fixates on the ways in which proper targeting—particularly in the iterative and improvisational mode of “nursing” the table—can be used to “cue” behavioral change outside of the game through shifts in “disposition,” imagination, and mood. Though developed around the table, a set of visual habits and their reversals bleed into associated spaces: the city, the tavern, and the home. I use Phelan’s explorations of the interface between eyes, cues, and social bodies to take a different approach to the work of “Romance” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Brook Farm reverie, The Blithedale Romance (1852). In a narrative framed by scenes of nursing, Miles Coverdale’s ostentatious visual targeting and iterative rearrangements of view enact a logic of scopic manipulation that is central to Hawthorne’s genre intervention. Stories within stories, fixations on point of view, and figures of “reticules” (small netted purses, but also gun targets) permeate a novel that is fronted by a character with a deep attachment to his evenings “at the billiard-hall.” By investigating the shared territory of utopic operation in both Hawthorne and Phelan, I consider “Romance” not merely as a genre defined by tropes of atmospheric marvelousness, but also as a way of thinking about relationality and reframing as ways of affecting social change in directedly indirect ways, a kind of motivated vicariousness native to both billiard playing and reading.

In my closing chapter, “The Net Work of Not Work,” such “reframing” itself becomes the major topic of focus, as I double back to Milton Bradley to analyze his post–Civil War fascination with thinking across thresholds and training habits of scalar or scopic thinking. In a bizarre follow-up to the kinetic judgments of The Checkered Game of Life, Bradley’s Game of Bamboozle, Or the Enchanted Isle (1872) produces a Gordian knot of visually arresting entanglements that force its players into a series of waiting games and paratactic associations. Advertised as having “no instructional value whatsoever,” Bamboozle demonstrates Bradley looking in two directions at once: at a future of games sold by virtue of their graphic effusiveness and a past of games as places of “simple” bodily proximity and storytelling. In the first case, the full-color depth of Bamboozle’s board speaks to developments in lithographic technology that were allowing competitors like the artistically savvy McLoughlin Brothers to encroach on Bradley’s business by producing beautiful but operationally unoriginal board games. With a board that represented the most colorful effort in chromolithography by Bradley to date and rules as difficult to pin down as the sperm whales and sea creatures gracing the edges of the playfield, his long-selling amusement was a tangle of race-style games folded in on themselves that may have been intended as a procedural satire of the industry. At the same time, I unpack its deep indebtedness to the alternative sensibilities of undirected gameplay, social narrative, and transmedial reframing that characterized the massively popular card games and novels created by Anne Abbot some thirty years earlier. Pushing back against the aspirational culture that he had emphasized in The Checkered Game of Life, Bradley’s later output highlights the value of proximity and indirected association, making waiting itself a mode of social agency and group formation.

Over the course of these chapters, the problems of creating, performing, and reinventing public character mirror a certain strain of critical discourse within American Studies. How does one attain genuine social agency—the power to change one’s world—despite the normative mechanisms of control that structure that world and make it available for such an agency? As Walter Benn Michaels put it three decades ago, critical transcendence cannot be taken at face value, “not so much because you can’t really transcend your culture but because, if you could, you wouldn’t have any terms of evaluation left.”⁵⁸ The issue of scholarly agency here is synecdochic for the wider issue of agency as a whole; six years after Michaels, Sacvan Bercovitch frames the problem as a decision “to make use of the categories of culture or to be used by them.”⁵⁹ In Slantwise Moves, I read nineteenth-century U.S. writers, readers, game players, and designers in the midst of an evolutionary engagement over the issue of repurposing and embedded use. Rather than being the passive deployment of supposedly neutral instruments, such “use” was instead a variety of insistent experimentation within an interleaved topography of body and medium. Whether it be Whitman’s redefinition of character as choice making on and across the page (use as the rehearsal of personal judgment), Melville’s iterative staging of social confidence games (use as manipulation), Barnum and tangram players’ exploitation of the thresholds between text and paratext (use as limited reinvention), Phelan and Hawthorne’s representations of dispositional change through targeting practices (use as site of perspectival potential), or Anne Abbot and the later Milton Bradley’s emphasis on social entanglement and waiting (use as generative waste), the perpetual use of at-hand cultural materials became a central mode of self-making in an era when traditional ways of adjudicating character were being left by the wayside.

This was not a self made but a gerund-y and insistent making; it was a historical moment when, as Scott A. Sandage writes, “A rising ‘business man’ embodied true selfhood and citizenship: the man in motion, the driving-wheel, never idle, never content.” The requirement of constant change was accompanied by the persistent risk of failure—of inventing a business, a technology, or a self that failed to live up to its promise, by failing to resonate with the social body as a whole.⁶⁰ The rise and importance of the games addressed in Slantwise Moves speaks to a desire to plot such failures on a continuum, to enable inventive change despite the (often profound) human risk associated with each move this change necessitated. The works discussed here prefigure a need that advances into our own time, when critics call for reconceiving “associations as sites of inventive alternatives … and not simply as reflections of preexisting or predetermined values.”⁶¹ While the rhetoric of “invention” has attained the valence of a dead metaphor (a replacement for “creative” or “imaginative”), tactically critical and locally embedded use was staged by way of both formal and material mechanisms in nineteenth-century games, and often, as I argue, in literature as well. This project continues the work called for in the conclusion of Bercovitch’s Rites of Assent, where he contends, “We will never properly understand [American writers’] force of enterprise, speculation, and invention until we set this firmly within a history of American enterprise, speculation, and invention in the nineteenth century.”⁶² Supplementing the local comparative work done by individual chapters, Slantwise Moves situates major authors of the mid-nineteenth century within a history of invention by looking at procedural amusements as an interface between the representational and the mechanical, refusing to see writing and reading as immaterial practices. If Bercovitch’s imperative carries at least the faint suggestion of an impossible or purely metaphorical span between the abstract figural inventions of “writing” and the physical inventions of “history”—history as a forensic “context” emanating explanations for the literary—then one aim of my book is to trouble that distance and do the work of tracing the intermediaries native to writing, bodies, and things. The goal is not homology (or not only homology) but a flattened look at the conditions through which certain social practices, social habits, and social bodies are produced around and with media.

Examining the figures and forms of mid-nineteenth-century games in the United States allows us to understand literature in conversation with a complex and evolving commercial marketplace of things, a conversation that facilitates one of literature’s core functions as historical repository. To find meaning in literary objects, critical scholarship must reconstruct the social environments that allow(ed) them to signify; yet it has often proven difficult to track a set of associations that are based on motion and spatiality and operational possibility using what are assumed to be nonprocedural forms (that is, novels, poems, autobiographies). As a result, critical methodologies fixate on the immobile, the institutional, and a historiography of increasingly obliterated time. These perspectives are crucial, and yet they risk leaving out the temporal local activities of daily life that are enacted and reiterated by gameplay and reading. Here timing, movement, and sociality were always, and often explicitly, at issue. For those seeking a deeper understanding of the interactive medial shift that was occurring across the nineteenth century—corresponding to a shift in the possibilities of the literary—games offer models of emerging procedural grammars, drawing attention to the increasingly algorithmic structures enabling the civic agencies that have been represented by American literary studies. The consequence of pairing games and literature allows us (to repurpose a phrase used by Gerry Canavan and Priscilla Wald) “to track both a shift in the formative terms of an ideology and the means by which that shift occurs.”⁶³ In short, it allows us to create new ways of reading and to imagine old ways of playing that have important bearing on literary history, as well as literary critical practice and pedagogy.