LITMIR.BIZ

      On the Uses and Abuses of Games

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