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