The Glass Bead Game's rules do not exist, and it cannot be played in any meaningful sense. It is a game described, incompletely, in Herman Hesse's landmark novel Magister Ludi (published in German as Das Glasperlenspiel, that is to say, The Glass Bead Game).
Ardent science fiction fans like, say, me, will happily claim Magister Ludi as a work of science fiction, since it takes place in a future where society is vastly different either from Germany in 1943, when it was published, or from anything remotely resembling our own. Those who believe that works of literary value cannot be ascribed to any genre other than "literature" will, of course, resent the imputation.
In the society of Magister Ludi, the world is evidently run by an academic, technocratic and benevolent elite that decides things for the greater benefit of society, but without the messiness of elections and assemblies; it is reminiscent of something out of Le Guin, or possibly of the Hungarian "engineer socialism" movement. Things such as celebrity, marketing, and the loud and tedious lowest-common-denominator of modern television are entirely unknown. And the academic elite who rule the world, while living in a self-denying and monastic fashion, devote their efforts and intellectual attention largely, but not entirely, to The Glass Bead Game.
It's quite unclear how the game is played, except that one player essays a set of ideas, and his (not her, this being Hesse) opponent ripostes with some other set of ideas that an undefined set of rules transforms into a change in the gamestate. There are literal glass beads, which are moved on some kind of literal board, but they are simply metaphors for an intellectual contest on a fair deeper and more vital plane. While existing games focus down reality to a tight subset of strategic concerns, Hesse's conception of The Glass Bead Game is that it does the reverse: the board and its pieces somehow expand instead into the full potential space of both objective reality and the realm of philosophical and ideological disputation among humans.
Clearly, Hesse never had any clear idea of what The Glass Bead was, or might be; and this is, in fact, an acceptable stance for a writer of speculative fiction. He's not attempting to conceive a game; he's attempting to conceive a future ruled by the academy, a future in which intelligence and not the brutal methods of the totalitarians, hold sway. He's writing, in a way, his own version of Utopia, although that Utopia is equally ill defined; in fact, I just had an argument with Karen about that. My impression is that, in Magister Ludi, the academic elite rules benevolently and wisely; hers is that this is a neo-Medieval society in which academics surely rule, but must in fact rule on the backs of an oppressed peasantry. Hesse never shows us what the lives of those who are not academicians is like, so her and my interpretations probably say more about our own interior lives than Hesse's intent.
In looking for links for this article, I encountered this site, which I regard as anathema; it is, in essence, a bunch of New Age nuthatches attempting to annex Hesse's conception in pursuit of their own counterfactual maunderings about reality. Hesse did not conceive of The Glass Bead Game as some sort of self-actualizing process supporting greater intuitive awareness of the mystical underpinnings of the universe; he viewed it as a mechanism for academic disputation about ideas with consequences, about things where truths were provable or falsifiable. Hesse is somewhat incoherent on the subject, which as I've argued is acceptable in a work of speculative fiction, since you are attempting to imagine something that does not exist at present and is therefore essentially unimaginable in its future shape; but this is not a reason to adopt his work as justifying incoherence.
Still, however incoherent, the nature of The Glass Bead Game is worth pondering for those of us who care about games, because it makes so many of the debates we worry about today look picayune. Can we get closer to virtual reality? Can we ever tell stories as affecting as those of film? Can we strive for a game that no one can possibly deny is art?
Do those questions matter, when we could strive for a game than incorporates and encapsulates the sum total of human knowledge, and seeks to extend it?
Those who think games are in their infancy, and have not yet achieved anything like the stature of greatness and artistic value to which we should strive sometimes say "We need the Citizen Kane of games," the idea being that Orson Welles's Citizen Kane was the first film to which people can point and say "art!" without embarrassment. The problem with this is that we do not need "our Citizen Kane"; we need a game of undeniable greatness in the context of game-ness, not film-ness. And I have, in fact, argued that we have it, in Civilization.
But perhaps Civilization does not suffice. Very well, then. In that case, rather than looking for "the Citizen Kane of games," let us instead look for a game of transcendent value as a game. Hesse's vision is incoherent, and therefore nothing we create will ever quite accord with his vision, but if my choice is striving for Citizen Kane or The Glass Bead Game, I know which I'd rather struggle toward.
I think that games actually
I think that games actually have a lot of artistic potential, under some definitions of 'art'. Unlike film or literature or painting or whatever, games actually use the players as a vital part of their system. A good movie or illustration will use the viewer's expectations and anticipate their perceptions in order to make them interact with it more deeply, but they don't even come close to how intimate even the most basic game gets with its players.
I guess real quick I should give my definition of 'art', since it may very well be different from yours. I see art as anything that communicates things that can't really be communicated directly. This can be the sharing of a specific emotion, or it can be an exploration of a subject matter that just describing directly wouldn't do justice to, or something else not easily communicated. I see art as a pill that delivers concepts far deeper into the mind than normal direct explanation can.
That said, the glass bead game as an ideal sounds like a huge step in the wrong direction to me. Rules, even super complex and nuanced rules, used for scoring and categorizing philosophical concepts inevitably drag the discussed philosophy away from reality and into a hypothetical and artificial world. I feel like this is almost anti-art, taking subject matters too complex to be done justice by direct explanation and trapping them within the even less flexible rules and ratings of an artificially created game.
I think what works a lot better is just to force the player into situations and choices and challenges that give them a lot to think about, and not to try to attach a direct score or rating to the choices they make, but simply to give in-game consequences. Don't get preachy and don't try to control the player's choices with reward cycles or whatever, just give give the player hard moral choices and reasons to care about the consequences of their actions. Show the player what their actions caused, don't tell the player 'you did correct' or 'you did incorrect' with a simple scorecard.
This is a weird and gigantic topic that I've been dwelling on for a while. This is the first time I've tried to actually put it into words, though, so I apologize if I'm not as clear if I want to be. If any part was weird or didn't make sense to anyone I can try to clarify what I meant by it on request.
Grails
My Holy Grails of game design are the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from the Neil Stephenson book of the same name, and the fantasy game from Ender's Game.
What other literary ideals are there for games? Killswitch? Jumanji? Calvinball?
HipBone Games
I met Charles Cameron, the proprietor of HipBone Games (http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone/) on Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms site, and he introduced me to both Magister Ludi and the Glass Bead Game, which we played on Brainstorms with like-minded folk. I found it very creative and usually very interesting how making those connections got very organic after awhile (and also was reminded of James Lee Burke's Connections series).
Charles has "rules" and game boards for playing the glass bead game up on his site and I encourage you to check it out.
"... the academic elite who
"... the academic elite who rule the world, while living in a self-denying and monastic fashion, devote their efforts and intellectual attention largely, but not entirely, to The Glass Bead Game."
It's been a while (10 years or so) since I read the book but my memory is that the Castillians - the monk like intellectuals of the book - are explicitly separate from the running of the state and eschew technological or economic considerations in order to maintain their much vaunted intellectual purity. My recollection is that maths and music - which the narrator views as the most abstract disciplines - are held in the highest regard by the Castelians and the glass bead game evolves as a kind of language to map concepts from one abstraction to another and in this sense and from the sparse descriptions the game is given it always seemed to me not particularly game like (but as you say that's totally par for the course in speculative fiction and a whole massive topic of conversation all by itself).
I also remember the book being written in a way that kind of pokes fun at the pomposity of the central conceit; the dry academic style of the narrator with it's (obviously flawed) protestations of historical objectivity, and the fact that Knecht, the object of his adoration leaves Castillia behind... I think Hesse's relationship with his fictional world is more ambivalent than he's given sometimes credit for.
I also have plenty of questions about the comparison between castellia and some of Le Guins societies but I feel like I'm already derailing this comments thread too much so I'll stop now.
None of which is to say I disagree with your final point about games and Citizen Kane which I think is absolutely spot on.
Art, craft, surprise and games (w/ a bit of TV thrown in)
I teach History of Advertising one night a week. As part of that course, we discuss the difference between art (which influences advertising and vice-versa) and craft (the skills necessary to create within a particular medium). At one point, the definition of art that I came up with was, "Work that surprises through craft." That is, you can have a very technically proficient piece (great craft) that is not really art, because it is essentially a showcase for skill, with no real message or meaning beyond, "This has been created well." For example, I would hold up many blockbuster movies and TV sitcoms as examples of excellent craft (they entertain, make us laugh, etc), but not really art.
I've argued recently that the AMC show "Mad Men" is the first example of a TV show that is art, per se, within that medium. The "Citizen Kane" of TV. There has been artful TV before, but it has largely been "other arts shown on TV." For example, if I watch "Citizen Kane" on TV, I'm not watching a work of television art; I'm watching film art on a TV.
Same for great shows like "All in the Family," "Mash," "BSG," etc. They were either vaudeville or theater or movies... made for a smaller screen. "Mad Men" uses the strengths and narrowness of the medium to its own ends. It *knows* it's a TV show, it knows *you know* how to watch TV, and it works with that.
As to games (especially video games), the trick is that (using my own definition), it is hard to surprise through craft, when the craft is (partly) up to the player, and surprise itself is (partly) impossible in a medium where there are "rules." It can be quite frustrating to play a game where you think you get XYZ reward in return for XYZ action, only to find that... nope.... XYZ now gets you nothing. My son, when playing solo video games, will sometimes comment, "That's not fair..." when
something happens that is unexpected. We've talked about this quite a bit, as concepts of fairness are important to young kids. But he still feels that if a game does something truly unexpected (from a meta standpoint; not just a "wow, that's a cool new monster" thing), it's a negative thing.
I will agree with you that "Civilization" is "game as art." I remember two friends playing it so much on my machine that we went out and bought them their first PCs. I also remember having surprising realizations late in several games where I went, "Oh, crap. Yeah. That makes sense. I did the 'bad thing' a couple centuries ago, and now I'm reaping what I sowed." That, to me, is an indicator of art. I was truly surprised... but it wasn't just shock value or random ka-blooey generation.
It is hard, though. In any art, sure... but games more than most, I think. Poetry and fiction (which I work in) have a history of allowing and encouraging surprise. You don't feel offended, for example, at the end of a book where it turns out the narrator is one of the characters, and not an omniscient "god voice." If done well, we are apt to say, "Oh! Cool!"
I remember being deeply impressed with the craft of (ahem) World of Warcraft. Wandering some of the locations and just looking around... stunning stuff. But I wasn't surprised *through* the craft, but *by* it.
The original "Thief" may also have come close. The first real first-person-sneaker took so many of the FPS truisms and turned them upside down. And, in the process, made you feel things (tension, fear, glee) that were unlike other game-y feelings.
Yeah. I'll stick to those for now. "Civilization" and "Thief" count as games-as-art. Both surprise us, within a context they create and support, through the skillful presentation of game-craft. We feel like better gamers, more involved gamers, when we are done.
A professor of mine once said that all great writing is about two things: it's about what it's about, and it's about writing. I think games are like that, too. Any great game... any "game as art..." will make you not just enjoy that game, but enjoy and understand "gaming" even more.
HipBone
I actually played Charles's version on Brainstorms, ten or more years ago, and it was interesting albeit, of course, nothing much like Hesse's game.
Taking the wrench that is game and using it as a hammer...
I think there's this trend to use a wrench as a hammer/game to create something creative, then people continue using the word 'game' even though they are not using it as a game.
Instead they are using the rules and constructs much like the rules and constructs of musical instruments. Here the rules create something which is like music in how expression and form intermingle, but from a new vector other than sound.
I kept my soap boxing to my blog :)
http://philosophergamer.blogspot.com/2009/11/taking-wrench-that-is-game-...
Citizen Kane
I always thought Elite was the Citizen Kane of games!
Holy Grail
Sorry, I read other users' comments after first commenting.
For me the holy grail of games, the ultimate one, is human conversation, witch in itself is an art, and has many desired features of games: a 'magic circle', in wich every conversation takes part; a changing but known set of rules (depending on context); pre-defined goals (convince someone, make someone feel better, show anger) which inevitably reach unexpected outcomes; 'players' must continuosly self-adapt to 'rival moves'...to name a few.
My 2 cents :)
Earlier "Citizen Kane" than Civilisation
For an earlier game-as-art than Civilisation, how about The Landlord's Game by Elizabeth Magie.
It had a message, good game-play, and has the cred of being ripped off and turned into a highly commercial work.
The Glass Plate Game
I'm interested in using manipulatives in constructive argumentation, and I've been interested in an attempt to recreate the Glass Bead Game, called the Glass Plate Game. I just haven't had a successful attempt at trying it.
http://glassplategame.com/history.php
Glass Plate Game
I am Dunbar Aitkens, co-inventor of the Glass Plate Game. If you would be interested in this I'd be happy to try, instead of a face-to-face playing, playing either by email or phone. For the board and pieces to manipulate on it, we'd be using the web site.
- Dunbar