The Glass Bead Game
In 1943, Hermann Hesse published Das Glasperlenspiel (“The Glass Bead Game”).
Readers’ views of the novel vary widely. Some see it as a social statement, a product of its time of writing just before and during the second world war. Others place it alongside previous novels of Hesse which document his personal growth, and the ongoing tension between spiritual solitude and social engagement. For many, the main interest of the novel is the game of the title, not as a symbol or metaphor, but an actual playable game.
The game itself is a central theme of Hesse’s novel. He gave only sketches of how it might be played in practice, but made it clear that it is a game of comparisons and analogies across different subject areas. These connections may be in the tradition of Pythagoras, Lull, Kepler, Kircher and others who searched for the unifying principles of all knowledge, poets and artists such as Bashō, Eisenstein, and Duchamp who applied techniques of recontextualization and re-expression in their creative process, philologists and anthropologists tracing homologies within Vedic, African, and indigenous American and Oceanic ritual and society, or philosophers and linguists such as Peirce, Husserl, de Saussure and Karcevskij who explored the effects of varying and comparing forms and meanings.
This site explores some of the playable versions of the game which have most closely attempted to follow Hesse’s original vision, and in particular the work of Paul Pilkington, one of a group of game designers bringing Hesse's Glass Bead Game to life in an ongoing series of books, articles and game designs.
Games based on ratio and proportion
The history of the development of the game in the novel echoes the history of mathematics in the seventeenth century, as shaped by mathematicians with a deep interest in music theory (see Maths and music for an exploration of Hesse’s connection to that tradition). The ancient Greek theory of ratio and proportion, which Greek music theory was built on, provided the basis of the first playable Glass Bead Game proposed in a series of books published in 2010. This version of the Glass Bead Game can be played at many levels of complexity. Its moves can be deeply technical, or conversationally playful. The resulting games are presented as tables or mandalas which are constructed from individual moves which are each in the form of a ratio, and range over a small number of different subject areas.
A move in a game about music and astronomy might ask: “If the solar year in astronomy is like the octave in music, what is the lunar month's equivalent in music?” A more playful game about music and fashion asks: “If Alexander McQueen is the Jimi Hendrix of fashion, what is McQueen’s Purple Haze?” Another asks: “Who is the Napoleon of football, and what was his Waterloo?” A more intimate game enquires: “Where is your Ithaca?”
§ The first volume (Volume 1 - Preface) presents “A basic form of play, genealogy, and examples” including a short game concerning music and mathematics (From acoustics to modern music), architecture and I Ching, and many other examples including a game move linking a couplet of Arabic poetry, a theme from Bach's Art of Fugue, and an I Ching Hexagram (Arabic : Bach : Change).
§ The second volume (Volume 2 - Preface) presents a game involving gods, metals, planets and trees (particularly mercury and hazel), considers the evolution of naming and classification systems in each subject area (Classification systems), and the possibility of a root and centre of all knowledge (The root of the tree).
§ The third volume (Volume 3 - Preface) explores connections between war, poetry (Poetry), dance and cookery from before the dawn of man to the present day, through ideas of rhythm, order and what makes us human (Rhythm, Structure and Order).
A forthcoming volume promises to collect and challenge notable examples of glass bead game moves from literature, the media, and other diverse sources, and will put into play a range of opening gambits intended to inspire further exploration and elaboration of the form by others, especially in more informal contexts.
Games based on theme and variations
Games proposed more recently by the same designer involve players choosing a single theme which is then varied by recontextualising and reexpressing it in different contexts.
Where the glass bead games of 2010 used the ratios and proportions of mathematics and music as building blocks, these later games reach back further and deeper into the human ability and urge to use and reuse the same forms (sounds, signs, or physical objects) for different purposes, and to express the same idea or achieve the same purpose through the use of different forms.
These ideas have flowed through the western tradition since Heraclitus’ central dialectic of the one and the many:
Εκ πάντων εν και εξ ενός πάντα。
From all things, the same use; from the same thing, all uses.
In eastern tradition, which influenced Hesse very deeply, they find expression in the ancient Vedic concept of inspirational meditation (Sanskrit: धी, dhī) which developed into chan (Chinese: 禪) and zen (Japanese: 禅) Buddhist thought as applied by later poets such as Bashō, and in the pre-Buddhist early Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu:
天地，一指也；萬物，一馬也。
All kinds of things can have the same one meaning; all kinds of meanings can come from the same one thing.
In other traditions, homological and magical thinking embody the same concepts of the interweaving and interworking of all things.
There’s a simple pen-and-paper/ game-on-the-beach version of this type of game called Rattlesnake, in which players choose the themes and contexts quite freely, and another version called Variations where the themes and contexts come on a pack of cards, and help to ensure that games play out across a wide range of knowledge, culture and experience. The context cards have settled for now on four groups representing knowledge, uncertainty/belief, the sensual body, and emotions. The theme cards change from pack to pack, and so far the decks have featured the innovations of Leonardo da Vinci (2019), themes from the experimental mid-20th century Fluxus art movement (2019), and most recently, in a version called Chuang Tzu’s Art of War (2020), concepts from the philosophy of confrontation from the U.S. Marine Corps Book of Strategy (Warfighting, 1997). Of course, a future planned deck (and long term work in progress) will be based on the theme of glass beads.
Examples of games, both with and without actual glass beads, are being shared on an ongoing basis at Paul's Twitter account https://twitter.com/RatataLucchese. A metagame discussion about Paul's ongoing exploration of the glass bead game and related topics is to be found at https://twitter.com/JustKnecht. Some much older tweets based on the earlier ratio and proportion format are archived here at Volume 4 - The Twitter Project.
Paul's most recent writing on the game and related subjects, and several examples of related games, can be found on Medium here.
Playfully using the language of the game itself: in bringing the dreamer’s concept into reality, these games do for Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel what Gothic architecture did for Plotinus’s light-drenched Enneads, what the Bolshevik revolution did for Marx’s Capital, and what the World Wide Web did for Gibson’s Neuromancer.
The books are available at:
Email: JustKnecht@gmail.com