Polite Gamesters, Bewitching Games: On the History of Games and Literary Study

How many games do you play a day? a week? How do you play them — alone or with friends? What sorts of games are they? Do you hold the game in your hand or do you play it on a board, an electronic device, or a console? Do a quick count now. As for us, Bistline is a bit addicted to Game of War: Fire Age, and Hawkins is equally obsessed (this week) with Cookie Jam. The two of us are typical of the majority of women ‘gamers’ because we play by ourselves, often on our phones or tablets: we are what’s called ‘casual’ gamers. According to Maeve Duggan’s report on Games and Gaming for the Pew Research Center in 2015, the statistics show the US to be a gaming nation: 25% of adults 65 or older; 40% of those 50–64, 58% of those 30–49; and 67% of those ages 18–29 play video games (Section 1)¹. That’s 49% of the US population overall. While ‘there are no differences by race or ethnicity in who plays video games,” the older the cohort, the more likely it is that more women play video games than men (Section Even though the Pew study is only a year old, we wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were higher now. We are surrounded by games, and we always have been.

Games in History

The earliest games required little more than something to throw (whether stones, sticks, dice, etc) and, eventually, some sort of playing field, whether scratched in the dirt, carved in a rock, drawn on a board or paper. We see this pattern in very early games, such as the Chinese game Go, chess, checkers, backgammon, and dozens of games tied to particular cultures and historic moments. Records of games appear in Egyptian frescoes, on Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, and even scratched on the plinth of a statue guarding the Assyrian royal palace of Sargon II (721–705 BC) (Collon). In early manuscript books, illustrations depict figures playing games. For example, Alphonso X’s Libro de los Juegos (Book of Games) (1251–1282 AD) provides illustrations of figures playing chess, including one of six girls playing.² Similarly, the Horae (Coutances), a vellum book of hours owned by the J. Pierpont Morgan Library and dating to around 1460, shows for the month of August, a man and two women playing Colin Maillard—or blind man’s bluff (37. 70).

Elizabeth Eisenstein called the printing press an “agent of change,” and that’s certainly true for games. With printing, games could reach a broader audience, and printed games, like playing cards, are extant to the fifteenth century. With printed games came printed game manuals, such as the 1651 The Royall and Delightfull game of Picquet. Written in French, and now rendred into English out of the last French edition, followed by manuals on Ombre (1665) and fortunetelling (1650?-1750?). Almost simultaneously, games started being compiled into collections: one example is John Cotgrave’s 1662 Wits interpreter: the English Parnassus (which went through multiple editions) whose title-page advertises it includes the games “now used at this day among the gentry of England.” Likewise, in 1676, Charles Cotton published instructions on a substantial number of games in his The Complete Gamester, or, Instructions how to play at billiards, trucks, bowls, and chess, together with all manner of usual and most gentile games either on cards or dice, to which is added, the arts and mysteries of riding, racing, archery, and cock-fighting. And by 1712, brief histories of games begin to appear, as with Henry Curzon’s 1712 Universal Library; or Compleat summary of science whose title-page advertised a section on “games used at ancient festivals.”

But where games go, so do their detractors, and not unexpectedly, alongside the rise of printed games and game manuals appear debates about the hazardous nature of games. By at least 1572, broadsides publish the statutory penalties for playing “bowles or any other unlawfull game” (Effect), and a...