Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America by Douglas A. Guerra (review)

Douglas Guerra positions his study of nineteenth-century American board games within a broader account of the history of the book. Like the "semantic vectors" arrayed across the printed page of modern novels, the sequences of rules governing leisure-time amusements functioned as a medium for the "circulation of ideas through the arteries of culture" (197), the most important idea of which was the sovereignty of the self.

Any skepticism regarding this ambitious argument is convincingly offset by Guerra's close reading of Milton Bradley's Checkered Game of Life, which sold more than forty thousand copies soon after its invention in 1860. Play was organized around an opportunistic grid of "wealth," "matrimony," "school," "fame," "idleness," "poverty," "disgrace," and "jail," supplemented with behavioral norms that included "truth," "honor," and "ambition" and which together encompassed most of the human condition. Navigating this checkerboard of personal prospects required "a frequent choice of moves involving the exercise of judgment," as Bradley himself exclaimed upon applying for a patent (20). The game of life was accordingly designed as a trial run for life off the board, synopsized by Guerra with an epigraph from Whitman's "Song of Myself" (1855) that presents a similarly robust vision of the individual's newly open field of play. As such, Milton Bradley and Walt Whitman each promoted "life" into the exclusive subject of those who lived it, a creed that inverted America's traditional moral economy by re-constituting public order on the basis of private prerogative. The subsequent destruction of fixed hierarchies meant that "I" became the singular expression of my own talent and tenacity, a distinctly modern ethic which gave birth to a distinctly modern cultural hero in these same years, the self-made man. Or, as Guerra quotes Emerson's pithy characterization of this selfcentered gestalt: "You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstances" (47).

Games thus emerged as another of the age's proliferating oeuvre of tutorials offered to a public having to make sense of the compounding "choice of moves" that effectively determined each one's fate. Personal agency—the ontological foundation of American democracy—was transliterated into sets of "algorithms" that played out in the "specifically contoured performance space" of the board, beginning with "infancy" in the bottom left corner and reaching through any number of contingent routes toward "Happiness" (11). Each such biography was informed by a combination of "fortune" and "chance," which were eventually developed into board games of their own.

These "metaprotocols" (148) that "mobilized decisions" (41) were intended for family use, for schools, and as social entertainments filling leisure time. "Leisure" itself was another new category of industrial life, the direct product of divisions of labor which divided the day into work hours and those hours not contracted to anyone else that could therefore "properly be regarded as one's own." That free time was ideal for nurturing the faculties which allowed individuals to "better fit themselves to be good citizens," as contemporaries anxiously urged each other to do.¹ Games were no idyll, as such, but a dedicated method of socialization, a key to effecting "desired outcomes or behaviors in the broader world" (146) which turned Milton Bradley into a social theorist for the age.

Another genre of mid-century gaming was founded on narrational play, most familiar to contemporaries in the form of "Mad Libs" and compared by Guerra to the structural indeterminacy of Herman Melville's Confidence Man (1855). Again, the multiplicity of outcomes driven by the open-ended syntax of the game's design served to naturalize the operative logic of modern subjectivity. Destruction of the patriarchal household, together with any lingering notions of predetermination, meant that personhood would be built upon one's own character. That character, in turn, was deemed critical for engaging the chronic uncertainty generated by the era's "infinite … transformations" (77), as well as overcoming the ever-present...