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CHAPTER 1

Both In and Out of the Game

Reform Games and Avatar Selves

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,

Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,

Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,

Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855)

In the summer of 1860, as the owner of the only lithographic press in western Massachusetts, Milton Bradley undertook creating a standard reproducible image of Abraham Lincoln. Bradley was a capable draftsman who previously had made a living by sketching detailed patent drawings for the early inventors of the American industrial boom. Now he saw an opportunity to turn his political passion for Lincoln into a profit: working from a photograph, he sketched a painstaking likeness of the candidate’s distinctive, clean-shaven face and pressed enough copies to populate every home in New England. For a time they sold incredibly well—but Lincoln’s beard changed all that. Biographer James Shea writes, “Bradley could not believe it. But … no one wanted a lithograph of a beardless Lincoln. Some even wanted their money back.”¹ Frustrated but not defeated, Bradley turned his disappointment with the scheme into a renewed energy to produce and sell a game he had invented just a few months earlier, The Checkered Game of Life (Figure 4).²

On the colorful game board, Bradley created a likeness of nineteenth-century American life—conspicuously, adult male life, though the players were assumed to span a wider demographic—that placed new emphasis on timing and decision rather than the traditional ideals of place and avocation. Play consisted in accumulating points by moving around a freeform sixty-four-square checkerboard, encouraging “a frequent choice of moves involving the exercise of judgment.”³ More than a roll of the dice, character in Life was framed as a position from which to make public and materially registered decisions; it was something you acted out as well as watched. In an urban society composed of interactions among relative strangers, publicly visible decisions—from fashion and conduct to the pointing out of sites, objects, and newspaper articles—were quickly becoming the foundation of social selfhood.⁴ And indeed Life’s capacity to stage a complex “exercise of judgment” on the cognitive space of a single “page” of pasteboard may account for the game’s immense popularity. When Bradley first traveled to New York City to determine interest in the game, his supply of merchandise lasted only two days; within a few months he had sold forty thousand copies.⁵ Clearly, this kinetic mixture of bright red ink, brass dials, and layered decision making presented a model of life that the public was eager to practice.

Figure 4. Milton Bradley. Social Game. U.S. Patent 53,561. 3 April 1866. Source: United 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 important to remember, even as I wander into the operative abstractions of gameplay and rules below, that the persistence of decision making was something unfailingly accompanied by public movements of the hand, not simply of the mind.

In what follows, I contend that Bradley wasn’t alone in his engagement with an emerging figure of agency constituted through touchy media operations. If the mid-nineteenth-century board game was a site of experimentation in this frame, so too was the book—in ways that can be lost if our approach is primarily oriented toward textual dimensions of meaning. This chapter invests in the idea that both reading and gameplay were variations on coincident habits of self-production that were constituted and expanded by both the formal and the forensic materialities of their respective media.¹⁶ Subjecting Life to deeper scrutiny enables contrapuntal opportunities to think about the variety of social practices that were or could be imagined to ally with the term “reading.” Appropriately enough, a compelling and recognizable counterpoint to Bradley’s reemployment of the checkerboard is a “song” reinvented by the affordances of the book.

The same year that Milton Bradley was making his fateful trip to the city, Walt Whitman trekked in the opposite direction, leaving Brooklyn to oversee the third edition of Leaves of Grass in Massachusetts.¹⁷ In this collection, one can see elements of the same avatar-like perspective on self that was so integral to Bradley’s game. Opening with “Song of Myself”—a poem he identified simply by its first line, “I celebrate myself,” in early manuscripts—Whitman frames agency as a kind of avatar positionality with regard to social choices.¹⁸ And like Life, Whitman’s poem was deeply invested in the interface of things, ideas, and personal potential: “Put in my poems,” he directs himself in early notebooks, “American things, idioms, materials, persons, groups, minerals, vegetables, animals, etc.”¹⁹ Though Whitman desired the poem to be a “channel of thoughts and things,” this channel was not only a text but also a weight and volume that strategically gestured at the unsettling tactilities of the body itself.²⁰ There is some cause to believe, especially when considering The Checkered Game of Life and “Song of Myself” in a shared mediascape, that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is less a masterpiece of abstract and lyric yearning, and more a material instrument of occasion—a work indebted to and embedded in its medium that persistently asks its reader to register their position qua reading body: “Both in and out of the game,” as the speaker frames himself.

With Virginia Jackson’s piercing critique of lyric genre in the reception of Emily Dickinson in mind, I should note that in the effusive pages of the 1855 Leaves of Grass Whitman never once refers to his writing as “lyric.” He instead writes of “poems,” “poets,” “orations,” “rhyme,” “meter,” and of course “song.” Each of these terms reflects the conscious impact of form, both within the domain of verbal-textual governance (“meter”) and within the domain of medium and performance (“oration”). Through this terminology Whitman documents a materialist schema of poetry as an explicit technology of social arrangement, taking an expansive view of what a “poem” might be above and beyond a companion to private intellectual meditation. In his best-case scenario, as articulated thirty years later to Horace Traubel, a poem was an inducement for “people to take me along with them and read me in the open air”—bringing sensation and cognition into a radically overlapping alignment.²¹ This entanglement of paper and text, reading and the body of the reader, coincides with a rhetorical fusion of the first- and second-person perspective in Whitman’s poem to imagine a promiscuously creative interplay between texts and bodies, ideas and things, exercise as deciding-upon and exercise as physical preparation.²² As I mentioned earlier, Bradley’s game pivots on a similar equivocation in the act of exercising “judgment,” and this coincidence is a prompt to further inquiry.

My purpose, then, in putting Whitman’s work into conversation with Bradley’s materialization of avatar-selfhood in The Checkered Game of Life, is to supplement and expand traditionally textual approaches to Leaves of Grass while broadening our view of reading practices in the nineteenth century. It’s not as though we need to take a poet’s word as gospel, but it is intriguing to recall that even Whitman himself protests, “No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such a performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism.”²³ Yet in the field of literary criticism we haven’t always done much to address this (admittedly paradoxical-seeming) challenge to the general methods of our practice. Consider this the experiment of the present chapter.

When read alongside Life, Whitman’s voracious “I” can be seen as an avatar-like position within an algorithmic piece of writing: not a lyric ego but a more uncanny physical marker of a place where we might linger, a leaving (like the stain from sitting in the grass) that enables a reader to both leave (as in exit) and leave (as in grow and flourish in one place). The cascade of inclusive “or”s that characterize Whitman’s writing implicate the reader in something more than catalog-like reportage scanned along linear and sequential vectors. Instead, they become an opportunity to define a self that chooses, that decides among complex, but limited, collections of marked subject positions within the American social milieu, even as one feels the stasis and limitation that situate this freedom. Later, Whitman would generalize this view to the whole of Leaves of Grass, writing, “You do not read [it], it is someone that you see in action, in war, or on a ship, or climbing the mountains, or racing along and shouting aloud in pure exultation.”²⁴ Here he places distinct emphasis on the inclusive possibilities of this “someone,” noting a game-like series of disjunctions that one might choose to seize upon in defining the poem’s character. Through this determined emphasis on inclusive disjunction, he can be seen as making an intervention into nineteenth-century debates on characterization—moving the conversation beyond Lockean notions of the self as a passive intellectual vessel (a soft malleable brain upon which the world is impressed) and toward the same avatar-like self that Bradley imagines in Life.

The sections that follow enlist the models of avatar action and social legibility that are constructed and highlighted by Bradley’s board game to arrive at a different way of reading Whitman’s “leaves.” In parallel, I also consider the broad sociohistorical significance of Bradley’s game. Because avatar is defined by action (the “interactive” aspect of Meadows’s definition), it makes sense to trace its operational dynamics first in Life, contrasting it with the other board games of the period as a way of understanding the competing small media materializations of selfhood that existed in Bradley’s moment. Using Bradley’s innovations to codify these differences, I reexamine Whitman’s deployment of form and materiality in “Song of Myself.” What I hope to gain in this move is a more substantial way of thinking about the literary materialities that supplement Whitman’s linguistic deployment of exchangeable poetic grammars. Bradley’s game foregrounds the mechanics of avatar agency in ways that are obliged to accept media materiality as a given—the game takes place on a lithographed sheet that will inevitably bear the torn and scratched traces of its interactions. Whitman, America’s “printer-poet,” plays a coincident game by emphasizing the embodiment of writing in ways that echo these deep engagements with form, both on and as the page. By placing categorical subjectivity alongside disruptive visual patterning and persistent extratextual indication, Whitman’s poem resists the breathless ideality of language and rehearses the interleaving of materials and agency in the act of reading.

Milton Bradley and the Game of Self-Representation

Born on 8 November 1836 and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, by working-class parents, Bradley had a persistent interest in the practical uses of art.²⁵ The pragmatic tenor of his aesthetic pursuits appears to have been conditioned by a singular coupling of tendencies: a taste for the world of technical engineering paired with a knack for interweaving social threads. By 1853, Bradley had proven himself an ambitious teenager, navigating the bustling Lowell industrial scene with grace, “peddling paper, envelopes, pens, ink, wafers, etc., through the boarding houses in the corporations.”²⁶ He recalls, “All the mill girls at that time were intelligent Americans, and in some of the larger houses there were fifty girls in a tenement. Usually I would find from ten to twenty-five assembled around the dining table sewing or reading or writing letters. I, in fact, had an established trade which competitors who learned my methods tried in vain to take from me, as the girls would wait for me.”²⁷ Images like those Bradley describes here—of people in medium-sized groupings around tables, waiting, working, chatting, pointing—stuck with him and emerged as a trope in much of his later artwork involving human figures. Some of the first box art that accompanied The Checkered Game of Life—itself localized in ways that connected it to regional traditions of social assemblage as part of the “The New England Series of Games”—featured a majority of women: one standing and looking thoughtfully at the board, while an ambiguously styled person at the front (likely male because of the attire) makes a move as two girls and a boy watch (Figure 5). “There is a sociability in a game,” Bradley would write, “which unites all the family, old and young, around the library table of a winter evening, which is found in few places besides.”²⁸ As one of those “few places besides,” the mill tenements (and later Civil War encampments) represented a functional and productive society via a diverse circling, usually but not always around a table. Success for Bradley was deeply linked to his ability to produce and maintain such geometric groupings.

At the onset of his twenties, he ventured into urban Springfield, securing a job as a draftsman with Wason Car-Manufacturing Company, a local factory specializing in the manufacture of railroad cars and locomotives.²⁹ It was here that he honed his technically oriented artistic craft, eventually going into business for himself as a “Mechanical Draftsman & Patent Solicitor.”³⁰ At his Main Street office, he survived the financial downturns of the late 1850s by drawing patent schematics for hopeful inventors and designing a luxurious railcar for an eccentric Egyptian pasha.³¹ In the process, he became interested in lithography, and in 1860, in a move that would radically shift the course of his life, he bought himself and his company a lithographic press.³² Though he lamented that his “first real troubles would came with the lithograph business”—from drunken pressmen to the fickle facial fashions of the president-elect—it would also predicate his first massively public success, enabling him to produce prototypes of The Checkered Game of Life later that same year.³³

Shortly after the stunning initial sales of his new game—some forty thousand copies, or nearly three times the population of his native Springfield³⁴—the outbreak of the Civil War saw Bradley briefly abandoning amusement to focus on assisting the mechanical end of the war effort, drafting plans for the Union Army’s new percussion-lock rifles.³⁵ While on the job, he took notice of the intense boredom that accompanied leisure time off the battlefield and began work on Games for the Soldiers, a portable kit that included chess, checkers, backgammon, dominoes, and, of course, The Checkered Game of Life. Materials and form were always as much a part of his designs as the rules themselves, and “he took great pains to make it small and light enough to fit in a pocket and not add weight to a soldier’s equipment.”³⁶ The thoughtful approach paid off. The first compilation of its kind, Games for the Soldiers was immensely popular, as kits were bought up by civilian charities and donated to Union troops throughout the duration of the war.³⁷

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 totals they have calculated (placing their piece directly at the total).

In Life, this counting is displaced from the central playing field. The player piece, which Bradley still refers to as a “counter,” 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 to Life. Indeed, it is almost always grouped in with Life as a kind of predecessor in histories of American board games. In Mansion, players traverse an inwardly spiraling path of sixty-seven squares culminating in “The Mansion of Happiness,” all while navigating a gauntlet of Christian morality.⁵⁶ If players land on a space relating to one of the virtues, they jet forward on the path toward the center. On the other hand, if a player lands on a vice, say “Passion” on the fourteenth space, that player will have to return to the sixth space, “Water,” for as the rules caution, “Whoever gets in a Passion must be taken to the Water and have a ducking to cool him”; similarly, a “Sabbath Breaker [square twenty-eight] was ‘taken to the Whipping Post [square twenty-two] and whipt.’”⁵⁷ In application, the goal of the game was to avoid vices (which lead to backward moves), amass virtues (which lead to forward moves), and achieve a counting score of sixty-seven as quickly as possible, similar to Bradley’s hundred-point goal.

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, the primary goal of socialization … was to implant a strong will, a capacity for self-discipline, and sense of duty deep within the individual character.”⁷⁰ By playing at such “self-control” in Bradley’s game, players were, at each turn, habituated to the notion of judgment being a contributing factor to good character development. Possessing good ideas, as in Mansion, was not enough; one had to use these ideas to generate active solutions to an ever-changing gameplay situation. This is at the core of the game’s reform goals: at every turn, players form and iterate (re-form) a strategy for negotiating the board, representing their “will” and reinforcing their “capacity” for self-control. The repetitive nature of decision in a turn-based game like Life meant that one “exercised” the faculty of judgment by playing. Rather than a self that is impressed upon by the outside forces of the game/world, this self “forcibly impress[es]” its avatar (that is, develops procedural strategies) as a way of shaping the options that the world rains upon it. And instead of an accumulation of static ideas, player “character” materializes in the iterated assemblage of these local instances of strategy over time—the slowly engraved directional grooves that link one square to another in a forensic indicator of strategy that can be read years later. The emphasis shifts to a visualization of how you react rather than what you know.

As a Massachusetts contemporary of Bradley, Ralph Waldo Emerson offers a gloss on this process-minded reimagining of the Lockean wax metaphor, asserting in “The Transcendentalist,” “You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstances. Let any thought or motive of mine be different from that they are, the difference will transform my condition and economy. I—this thought which is called I—is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould.”⁷¹ Where the earlier depiction of character situated the self as a malleable piece of wax and the world as composite agential force doing the impressing (lending itself to analogies of the divine), here Emerson turns this on its head, suggesting that the world itself is wax and the self is a sculpting force that impresses a shape upon the raw materials provided. This inverted metaphorical figure has two consequences significant to the parsing of character’s relationship to self and agency. First, while it still gives some ground to the outside world’s ability to affect the product of the impression process (one can imagine different mixtures, colors, and consistencies of wax), Emerson’s metaphor gives the final public configuration of agency to the self. Differences of “motive,” which one might reasonably link to habituated strategies of judgment developed in Bradley’s game, have a direct effect on the “shape of the mould.” As a result, the aggregate force of a person’s own active judgments has a direct effect on the self that is realized in the public world.

Moreover, Emerson’s image evokes a transposability not present in the earlier metaphor. By thinking of the self as a mold, one is encouraged to imagine multiple wax productions yielded from the same basic structure, each one slightly different in terms of the raw material furnished (the “circumstances” the world presents) but proximately linked via the mold’s underlying shape. Here one might think of the ever-changing states presented by a moderately open-ended game like Life: each turn instances a new circumstance, new raw materials for testing the desirability of the current expressive strategy or mold. Bradley hoped these habits of judgment would not only be “forcibly impressed” on the character of the game’s players within the game but also capable of being ported to a real-world perspective on self.⁷²

Taking an alternative slant, we might adjust this sense of character by thinking of it not through Emerson’s familiar reworking of the wax metaphor but rather through the lens of Bradley’s own experience as a draftsman and lithographer. Though he did less and less of the manual labor involved in presswork as time went on, in the early years Bradley was the primary trainer for his crew and often had to step in to complete jobs when his pressmen went missing (sometimes to the chagrin of his customers).⁷³ To make a reproducible image, he would use a special wax crayon to draw on a limestone plate, rendering the plate water-resistant in all of the areas he had drawn upon. Then, using a chemical wash containing gum arabic, he would wipe down the stone to produce an opposite effect in the whitespace of the drawing. When he poured a combination of ink and water over the stone, the plate would retain ink precisely in the form of the wax drawing, and from here the image could be impressed upon sheets of cardstock or paper. It could be trying work, intensified by the idiosyncrasies of the technology: “The drawing surface of the stone had to be kept absolutely clean; one drop of perspiration on it reproduced smudges on the finished print.”⁷⁴ For a two-color print like the red and black Checkered Game of Life, this impression was doubly complicated by the need to pull the first print, dry it, and then accurately line it up with a separate inking for the second color—a process even further developed in the case of the full-color chromolithographs I discuss later, in Chapter 5. Appreciating this process and its centrality to Bradley’s business, it is not unproductive to imagine that when Bradley says a game will “forcibly impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice,” his controlling metaphor is not wax molding but wax drafting and lithographic reproduction.

Pursuing this, one might think of the movements of players as akin to the drawing of wax upon the limestone (rather than pouring the wax into a preestablished mold). At this point, far from the relative permanence of engraving or etching, adjustments can be made, just as in any given game a player’s strategy might change or adjust. Through the habituation of certain types of decision making at iterated turns in the game, however, one might imagine that these momentary tactics or inspirations will begin to be inked—linked to positive strategic outcomes that the player wants to reproduce, in the game of course but perhaps in real life as well (since this distinction is specifically rendered ambivalent by the content of Life). Once the players’ habits are “inked” they can then be reproduced and transposed into different situations, as different individual documents. In the case of printmaking, each individual document maintains the idiosyncrasies of the medium and the pressing (how might an errant drop of sweat gradually change the picture over the course of many impressions?), while still maintaining a proximate genetic similarity that can read as a single text. In the case of character, this text is a person’s public identity or avatar. Much as the lithographic press “forcibly impress[es]” its prints upon the many leaves of paper and cardboard that make up an edition run, the player now has a sense of repeatable, but nevertheless potentially mutable, character. And even if this reading requires a few logical leaps, a bit of calculated risk in this regard may be warranted. Because even allowing for some amount of analogic fuzziness, it seems to me ultimately imperative to consider the degree to which extant technologies of reproducibility—the resources, tools, and mechanisms that were the everyday associates of media producers in this era—must have had bearing on the figures that these media producers deployed to imagine collective life. It is unlikely that the specific affordances of material reproducibility had no bearing on models of social and personal reproduction. Discussed further in the next chapter, metaphors of self are nearly always drawn from those models most ready at hand (often literally).

For now, suffice to say that the idea of social reproducibility reminds us that Bradley’s game participated in an emerging discourse, one insisting that the relationship between selfhood and society or selfhood and history was not passive.⁷⁵ Life supplements and contrasts itself to earlier figurations of Romantic-era selfhood, aptly visualized by the counter of a game like Mansion. In these previous figures the self is a cipher, or in Locke’s language an “empty cabinet” through which the events of life pass. If these events happen to be virtuous, the vessel gains value. A poem prefacing Mansion explains that the game “gives to those their proper due, / Who various paths of vice pursue, / And shows (while vice destruction brings) / That good from every virtue springs.”⁷⁶ Unlike in Life, where a virtue like truth is framed as a strategic position and may not “spring” positive results, Mansion both thematically and operationally asserts that one’s choices have very little to do with outcomes. Agency is the ability of the individual to know rather than the ability to decide. This perspective can be summed up by William Wordsworth’s position in “Expostulation and Reply,” first published in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads:

The eye it cannot choose but see,

We cannot bid the ear be still;

Our bodies feel, where’er they be,

Against, or with our will.

Nor less I deem that there are powers,

Which of themselves our minds impress,

That we can feed this mind of ours,

In a wise passiveness.⁷⁷

Here we are given the image of a “passive” self “impress[ed]” upon by the circumstances of the world—much in line with the Lockean metaphor to which Emerson found himself responding in “The Transcendentalist.” Will is subordinate to the hungry mind that fills itself with sights and sounds, and the player’s role is, again, one of accounting rather than accountability.

This ideology of “wise passiveness” is reflected in the American literary context by a poet like William Cullen Bryant. Taking the torch of Wordsworth’s wise cipher, Bryant’s speaker in “The Prairies” (1832) collapses history and nature into a justification for the transcendent self of the present. Bryant writes:

The Prairies. I behold them for the first,

And my heart swells, while the dilated sight

Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch

In airy undulations, far away,

As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,

Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,

And motionless for ever.⁷⁸

The viewer “Takes in the encircling vastness,” transforming the immensity and incorrigibility of the natural world into a “sight” that locates the speaker who has mastered it, much as a Claude glass frames an image and points an optic line from the scene to the eyes of its viewer. Moreover, in this instance, “tak[ing] in” amounts to a similar accounting to that found in The Mansion of Happiness, where the player who takes in the most virtues is given his or her “due” in the form of forward movement toward the endpoint of the game. The ebb and flow of accounting is reflected in Bryant’s teleological perspective later in the poem: “Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise / Races of living things, glorious in strength, / And perish, as the quickening breath of God / Fills them, or is withdrawn.”⁷⁹ The player who stands at the endpoint of history, at the top of the game, occupies that position because the “breath of God”—or the roll of the teetotum—has made it that way. Within a naturalized Protestant ethic of grace and election, those who have experienced withdrawals of this “breath,” who have moved backward on the board, have only gotten what was due to them all along.

Yet if informed passivity is a virtue linking Mansion to early Romantic modes of privileged self-awareness, then we find an analogue for the interactive self of Life in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” While both Wordsworth’s and Bryant’s speakers appear to yearn for a perfect passivity within the game of life that allows them a certain amount of subjective interior transcendence, Whitman’s “gigantic and generous treatment” never quite leaves the active and exterior parts of this game behind. As an attempt at both prompting and rendering social life within the constraints of paper media, Whitman’s textual subject is always, as he writes, “both in and out of the game.”⁸⁰ Accordingly, his use of the second person and repetition in the poem shows him determined to leave the reader with a strong sense of implication, responsibility, and material embeddedness within the world he demarcates.⁸¹ Tracing the medial continuities between Bradley and Whitman enables a reading of “Song of Myself” that moves beyond the apparent categorical emptiness of its “I” and toward a more active understanding of the poem’s potentials and sensual interventions.

Walt Whitman and the Puzzle of Puzzles

A curious thing happens if you squint a bit at the title page and frontispiece of the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (Figure 6). Though the image of an author on the verso (that is, the left side of the binding crease) was a typical accompaniment to recto titling (on the right side), the proportion of image to text feels playfully conceived. A tiny (yet full-bodied save for the lower legs) Whitman gazes at you ambiguously, self-composed, leaning against one hip; you can barely make out the eyes, but it is certain that he looks in your direction—a challenge, an invitation? Glancing away from the intensity of this miniature man, you scan to the recto and are accosted by a massive bit of interposing signage, a constellation of font sizes that produces a near shouting effect: Leaves! of (this time even bigger) Grass! Below you note, in a more subdued font, the place and year of publication, “Brooklyn, New York: 1855.” In the context of the kind of public banners and billboards that historian David Henkin has so vividly recovered as part of our urban model of mid-nineteenth-century New York City, it’s almost as if the title itself were a sign hanging in the air, one much closer to you than the provoking man staring from across the way—as close, indeed, as this little green book, where even the cover evokes the grass just outside your door or under your feet as you read. This book—the book bent open in the reader’s hands, paper arching out against the fingers on either side—is nothing if not a “medium,” a center point of exchange between the body of the reader and the distant body of Whitman himself, whether figured on the verso or out loafing in the grass somewhere.⁸² This codex is the place where, if you feel the literal tension of those pages against the edge of your thumbs, you share a feeling as well as a set of terms with someone else through the mediation of something that is neither of you, although it is now and for this moment intimately associated with both at once. This shared association, a tactile dislocation of self relocated in the instant of readerly interaction, might be the starting point for a conception of the collection’s entry-point poem, “Song of Myself,” that takes a second look at its seemingly private, engulfing, lyric “I.” The book, and that “I,” are, in this view, less markers of some secret world to which we have stolen access, and more the markers and playfield for a staging of the type of association Milton Bradley would materialize five years later on the pasteboard grid of Life.

Figure 6. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn: Walter Whitman, 1855. Courtesy of Library Company of Philadelphia.

After the celebratory opening of “Song of Myself,” the speaker declares, “what I assume, you shall assume / for every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.”⁸³ Here, as with the interactive counters of Life, Whitman establishes an early interface between the first and second person as recursively connected positions, a structured place from which to understand circumstance and shape it accordingly: “You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”⁸⁴ As a result, the imperious “I” of the speaker’s effusion is inaugurated with a gesture that is equal parts ego and radical formal empathy: we are the same because we shall occupy the same grammatical place in the text, a place where “all sides” are “filter[ed].” The speaker’s use of “assume” in these opening lines reinforces this by playing on both a locating sense—“assume the position!”—and an informational sense—“here are the facts that can be assumed.” This multivocality of “assumption” foregrounds Whitman’s equivocation between locating the reader in a place and giving a range of data possibilities that he or she may work with at that location. As in Life, the position a marker assumes has an intimate relationship with the options available to it (the assumptions it may make).

These possibilities are enumerated throughout the poem as various character types, locations, and affections that radiate outward in a flurry of inclusive disjunction—“or”s that do not preclude the possibility of “both.” We see one of the most explicit statements of this in Whitman’s characterization of the grass that forms the poem’s central metaphor: “Or I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. / Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord … / Or I guess the grass is itself a child.”⁸⁵ This series of disjunctions never excludes any of the others; they are consistently additive, although only one may be read at a time. Each option maintains a singular quality both in terms of textual space and in terms of the temporal mechanics of reading. In this way, the repetitive syntax, while yielding a synchronic sense to the poem that many have noted, also acts as a textual metronome repeating a familiar beat that ensures the discrete separation of each possibility.⁸⁶

Moreover, in terms of format, there is the suggestion of the kind of newspaper printing work that had informed much of Whitman’s life. From the dense two-column arrangement of the preface to the irregular clustering of lines that distinguish his poetry throughout, Whitman cues the movement of the eye across discrete morsels held together and split apart by the cognitive gravity of the page and its whitespace. In both form and format, his collection figures both synchrony and diachrony. Being an American is being this or this, or all of these things, but only as time allows, only as one lingers or returns to a given option in an ever-growing list.

Demonstrating a strategically flickering interplay between the liminal and the discrete, Whitman uses the phrase “I am the” to reinforce this effect. In one short passage, he writes: “I am the hounded slave,” “I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken,” “I am the clock myself,” and “I am an old artillerist, and tell of some fort’s bombardment / …. and am there again.”⁸⁷ Here, analogous syntax reinforces the connection between each of these disparate narrative characters, linking them in an inclusive “I am,” notably in the present tense. Yet it also invokes the metronomic quality discussed above, acting as a reminder of those that have previously passed: the slave transforms into the fireman, and the fireman into the ticking clock. As a reader scans the disparate activity of these lines, they either say or think an “I am” that becomes, in Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s useful diptych, a “mimetic” script for subjecthood accompanying the “ontic” act of holding, sitting, standing, or lying down.⁸⁸ There is a strangeness to the inclusive disjunction of the language that I would argue mirrors the uncanny feelings of physical difference and relatedness in the poem. Here the flesh itself becomes a messy but nonetheless legible-in-flashes kind of poetry along with the text. “Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,” Whitman stresses in the preface, “and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”⁸⁹

Equally suggestive in a more conventional mode, the concreteness of each incarnation, the ability of the I/writer and linked you/reader to place themselves in the role that follows the “I am,” is specifically coupled to the passage of time. The “old artillerist” has a place (“[I] am there again”) just as he begins to “tell of some fort’s bombardment.” Telling a story takes time; it requires the teller to move in one narrative direction over another, to make choices. This interaction of temporal movement and identity reminds us of Life’s synchronic grid, where “Wealth” is always present, but players only enact its benefit in the right moment, in time, using the position they have assumed on the board. As a player’s eyes must drift across the possible positions available and settle upon the one that they would like to make, so must a reader (the “I” or “you” of Whitman’s poem) give attention to one thing at a time, even as they might remember the total assemblage. And as with Bradley’s counter, what holds Whitman’s ambivalent first/second person together is its unity as a place of decision making, along with its persistence as a thing that remains even after one has moved one’s hands away.

Apprehending the self as a possibility locus coincident with a body may account for Whitman’s declaration that the poem should be seen not as something one reads but rather as “someone.”⁹⁰ This term, “someone,” acts as a personal cipher or marker, only fully intelligible in the action of choosing to linger on one or the other of the character choices imagined by the transcendent speaker. One cannot understand who “someone” is in the abstract; the pronoun simply stands as a mathematical variable might, a formal placeholder, unable to produce an output on its own. Yet one might understand this someone as a specific person if supplied with information about either the person’s actions or the framework in which those actions were carried out. “Song of Myself” is at pains to produce the latter, but it makes appeals to the reader to provide the activity that will make this framework productive of a concrete self (rather than an abstract someone). “Not I,” Whitman writes, “not any one else can travel that road for you, / You must travel it for yourself.”⁹¹ The “you” of Whitman’s song gains its constitutive definition by making decisions of focus from within the possibilities enunciated by the poem, similar to Bradley’s algorithm.⁹² This “you” is a strategy for visualizing an inhabitable marker, for allowing any number of readers to imagine themselves as a part of the world Whitman creates. In other words, it is defined as an avatar: in and through its situational use. In the patent for Life, the usefulness of the game lies its capacity to “exercise … judgment”; in the original 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman echoes this focus, claiming that the poet “is no arguer … he is judgment…. If he does not expose superior models and prove himself by every step he takes he is not what is wanted.”⁹³

By 1856, Whitman was developing this figure in a specifically national mold, drawing again on the discourse of character that was so important to Bradley and other reformers. He writes to Emerson: “There is being fused a determined character, fit for the broadest use for the freewomen and freemen of The States … each indeed free, each idiomatic, as becomes live states and men, but each adhering to one enclosing general form of politics, manners, talk, [and] personal style.”⁹⁴ Here, again, Whitman defines the “fit[ness]” of this figure by its capacity for broad “use”; it is not a model to aspire to but a facilitator of any number of future models, a figuring figure. In this way, what Whitman refers to as “character” is, in its formal sense, less like the “character” described in Halttunen’s work and more akin to the avatar figure Bradley would develop in Life: a tool for developing a self as aggregated judgments, a formal index through which the “free” and “idiomatic” might be expressed and habituated. Because of this, we might say that Whitman’s “determined character” is the lithographic press itself—or the “forme” of the printing press, a wooden frame that held movable type in place during the printing process—rather than the iterated impressions made from it.

Coming to a similar conclusion, Wai Chee Dimock has argued that the self at the center of Whitman’s poem is “turned into a categoric idea, so that it can remain structurally inviolate even as it undergoes many substantive variations, even as it entertains an infinite number of contingent terms.”⁹⁵ Whitman does this, she claims, to eliminate the role of chance in the ethics of democracy. In short, the formal democratic subject must be vacated of luck, of the contingent, in order to guarantee the categorical equality of all human actors in general and all democratic U.S. citizens in particular. In order for there to be a universal and unified notion of justice, chance cannot play a role in its validity: “[Whitman’s is] a noncontingent poetics, which … in effect eliminates luck by eliminating the invidious distinctions it fosters…. The objects of Whitman’s attention are admitted as strict equals, guaranteed equals, by virtue of both the minimal universal “Me” they all have in common, and of a poetic syntax which greets each of them in exactly the same way, as a grammatical unit, equivalently functioning and structurally interchangeable.”⁹⁶ For justice to be equally applicable, from the slave to the auctioneer, the structure of subjectivity must be seen as strictly equivalent across the board.

What Dimock highlights here dovetails with the general ethic of fair play that, in important ways, acts as a limit to the actions and potentials of the avatar figure as discussed. In gaming terms, the price one must pay for playing a game is to accept its rules, as well as its form, format, and medium. These limitations rule out certain possibilities, both strategic and otherwise. For instance, we saw earlier that the rules of Mansion insisted on purely linear motion. Because this structured the possibility of the player’s counter, it forced the player to move to “Immodesty” when a less linear rule system might have allowed a move to “Truth” or “Humanity” instead. Through this, the game guaranteed a structural interchangeability, a kind of justice, for all the players; it produced a discrete output for any input the chance roll of the die might impose. This is not to say that luck does not play a role, but from the perspective of the player its role is strictly determined by rules of the game. The self cannot take advantage of its own luck one way or another, and so the concept of luck as we understand it can be said to disappear. Contingency may exist in the spin of the teetotum, but in effect (to borrow Dimock’s phrase) it looks as much like determinism as anything else—it looks, in fact, a lot like the “breath of God” that Bryant imagines—because all players are forced into an “equivalently functioning” agency.⁹⁷ Accordingly, Mansion produces a selfhood that is akin to the self Dimock reads into “Song of Myself, “a self that is beyond luck [and correspondingly] is … barred from the contingent.”⁹⁸ The present analysis of Life, however, offers an alternative perspective on Whitman’s poem, one that is developed through an understanding of the operational differences between Life and Mansion.

While the rules of Life do adjudicate certain core conditions of winning and losing, contingency is built into the role of the players—even beyond their unruly interactions around the game board—via a foregrounding of the tactical roles they might take within the algorithm at any given turn. Whitman’s use of the second-person perspective and inclusive disjunction shows him employing a similar mechanism, despite the syntactic and categorical concessions he makes to enable it. While the text itself may be notably “silent about those objects that, for us, are not categoric, not interchangeable or substitutable,”⁹⁹ it is only as silent as a game board without players. Whitman invokes this in one of his most pointed passages, calling to mind both the symbolism of gaming amusement and the chaotic role of interpersonal sensation. He writes:

Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

And that we call Being.

To be in any form, what is that?

If nothing lay more developed the quahaug and its callous shell were enough.

Mine is no callous shell,

I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

Is this then a touch? …. quivering me to a new identity.¹⁰⁰

Indeed, via a purely formal analysis the poem appears “callous.” But one cannot determine “callous[ness]” simply by appearance; one must be willing to “touch” or interact with the object in question, and it is precisely on the issue of interaction (a central aspect of the avatar figure) that Whitman lingers in this passage. Here, he is at pains to force the poetic medium to reach out, despite the coldness of the textual space, to develop a relationship with its readers. If, as he has written earlier, “you shall assume” the same position as the “I” of the poem, then the sensational image of “stir[ring], press[ing], [and] feel[ing]” serves to draw you into the ontic materiality of holding a book, of touching that book with your fingers and restlessly moving about in your seat. And, tellingly, what you are touching in this moment is the material document of this poem, a poem Whitman described in his notebooks as “someone,” just as he does here in the moment of touch: “To touch [your?] person to some one else’s is about as much as [you?] can stand.”

Again, this “someone” is a variable in need of substantiation; and this substantiation requires a nonabstract agent such as the reader. What of yourself will you begin to associate with the book, the ideas, the time spent in reading, the place that surrounded you, and this thing that kept you there? How will these associations change both you and the book? With these questions in mind, it is not surprising that Whitman seizes the moment of touch to foreground the “instant[aneity]” and disruptiveness of this sensational connection to the poem as a path to “new identit[ies],” stable points of focus in the undecided algorithm that makes up the poem. One might see here a correspondence between the “callous shell” and the game marker, and the non-callous shell that such a marker becomes when it is touched by the player—moved in ways that “quiver” it to a new position of possibility on the board, a potential “new identity.” If Whitman’s text is silent in these moments, it is because interactivity takes place across the interface of the book, between the text and the reader, between the player and the avatar. Again, “Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, / You must travel it for yourself.”¹⁰¹ An avatar, in one sense, may be a figure of formal representation, but its fundamental value for Whitman lies in its ability to mediate between a productive simulation and the user’s reality. “Folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects,” he claims in the preface, “They expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.”¹⁰²

The power he ascribes to poetry is in the way it reminds one of the unfathomable excesses within “things”—that which goes beyond their conceptual “reality” as “dumb real objects.” The body itself would be just such a “dumb real object,” a “callous shell,” if it weren’t constantly interposed with associative sensations that prompt it to “talk wildly,” to adopt new models or playfully turn “traitor” to its typical habits of behavior, framed by a static concept of self. Instead, “Being” is found, Whitman says later, in a “villain touch” that extends beyond any concept, and that suggests a certain bodily liberty over conceptual models of self: “All truths wait in all things…. What is less or more than a touch?”¹⁰³ What you see represented in Whitman’s poem is a manifold or categorical person, but what you feel and experience in the seeing of this “person” is an act of touching, a contraction of feeling and thinking that is part of the radical potential figured by the piece. As in Bradley’s Life, Whitman’s avatar figure can be viewed as an attempt at achieving a legible and outward-directed view of freedom within the increasingly restrictive context of “reformist interiority and middle-class institutionalism.”¹⁰⁴ The cost of this legibility is implication in a system of possibilities that is not, strictly speaking, free in the most powerful sense of the word. “Both in and out of the game,” the avatar is a figure that exists avowedly with one foot in the rule systems or ideologies of its moment: in this case, the interiorization of culturally dictated identity categories, outward character as the representation of self, and a general drive toward human proceduralization that corresponded to specific forms of technological growth and engagement in the middle nineteenth century.¹⁰⁵

Yet, as we have seen, both Bradley and Whitman’s representative interventions use these ideological poles as tools to leverage the agential, using legibility to imagine a parallel and tactically unpredictable ability. In Bradley’s game, players were encouraged to see matrices of traditional values as opportunities for crafting an accountable and publicly materialized individual agency. This agency was undoubtedly bounded by the underlying algorithms of the game, but these algorithms became the basis for strategic habituations that a player could transpose into a mathematically complex number of recombinations suited to different situations. Similarly, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” used ambivalent pronouns, repetitive syntax, and complex lists of “American” character traits to visualize the poetic speaker as a model for a self, an avatar that could legibly incarnate—“celebrate” itself even—and fully interact with the world around it without an assumed divide between thought and feeling. In Whitman, the recombination of known quantities, achieved by putting atemporal representations in contact with temporal realities, forms a basis for thinking through how a “someone” becomes an agent, how a “you” becomes an “I,” as well as how this process is both figured and given matter on the page—not just for writers but for readers as well. To read game and poem together is to disallow certain all-too-easy erasures of dimension, to remain focused on elements of media interaction that were a part of everyday life, and to take seriously the idea that authors and readers were aware of these dimensions. The construction of self and avatar was indebted not only to conceptual or grammatical innovations but also to the cognitive environments that gave a body to these innovations.

Before developing these embodiments further in the chapter that follows, it’s worth reinforcing that Bradley and Whitman, examined in parallel, give us considerable insight into the specific range of resources being employed to reimagine agency in the mid-century moment: fixations on the graphic affordances of visual media, attempts to materialize the potentials and limitations of categorical forms, and deployments of interactivity used as a way to constitute social bodies both near and on paper. In both Bradley and Whitman, it is clear that the important value may not be whether you win or lose but how you play the game. Yet in both it is equally apparent that no matter how we may wish it, we never play alone—the question of “how you play” is given shape by materials outstripping any individual. Teasing out the implications of this operative social agency, an “individualism” conditioned and incarnated, if not fully dictated, by nonindividual interactions, requires a move into the less celebratory, more darkly lit territory of confidence men and transformation games.