HipBone Games

ANDHermann Hesse’s
Glass Bead Game
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Table of Contents
Basic Ideas:

The Glass Bead Game: the basic idea 4

HipBone Games: the basic idea 8

A quick sample game 12

Four Aspects of the HipBone Project:

1. Games of Mastery 15
Games of Mastery: overview 16
HipBone Games as games of mastery 18
HipBone Games as artforms 19
HipBone Games as games of scholarship 21
HipBone Games as meditations 22
HipBone Games development strategy 24

2. Games of Social Benefit 25

HipBone Games in dream analysis and therapy 26
HipBone Games in creativity training & conflict resolution 28
HipBone Games in education 30
HipBone Cards 34

3. Applications Elsewhere 35
The HipBone Games, AI and the rest: an Overview 36
Scientific interest in GBGs and HipBone Games 38
Glass Bead Game conference, institute and journal 39

4. Commercial Games 41
Mass-market HipBone Games 43
Delivery systems 44
Other considerations 45
Pushing the envelope of the computer games industry 46
Computer games industry responses 48

Appendices 49
A. Brief overview of the HipBone Project / Contact HipBone 50
B. In pursuit of bigger game? 51
C. Further support 52
D. Games of Mastery: Chess, Go and the GBG 54
E. Meditations for Glass Bead Game players 58
Glass Bead Game: The Basic Idea...
The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total
contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in
the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the
colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of
art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that
subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and
converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player
plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained
an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range
over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond
number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing
in the Game the entire intellectual content␣ of the universe.
— Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi

Pythagoras playing a bead game?

From Gregor Reisch, Margarita

philosophica (Freiburg, 1503).
 The first Nobel Prize for Game Design?
The German Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1946 for his novel, Magister Ludi... You could say that the first
Nobel for a Web-based computer game design was awarded to Hesse. It’s not
strictly accurate — but it does get a point across: that the design for a game,
the “Glass Bead Game”, was central to Hesse’s book.

It is not, I think, surprising that such a game should have drawn the enthusiastic
interest of Hesse’s fellow Nobel laureates, Thomas Mann, who refers to his
own novel Doctor Faustus as a “glass bead game with black beads,” and Manfred
Eigen, who wrote his book Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern
Chance “to translate Hermann Hesse’s symbol of the glass-bead game back
into reality”.

And it’s interesting that both Mann and Eigen compare their own works to
Hesse’s game as such, rather than to the book: the game fairly leaps off the
pages of the novel. And it is stretching the truth only little to say that a game
design which can win its author a Nobel Prize may well be a game worth playing.

Hesse’s Game is an Olympiad for the mind and heart...

Hesse’s Game is played by juxtaposing ideas as though they were themes in a

musical polyphony.

A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical

configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or
from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from
this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the player,
it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or
else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts.

The ideas in question are inscribed in a calligraphic notation — not unlike

musical or mathematical notation — either on glass beads on a sort of abacus,
or (this comes later in Hesse’s fictional history of the game) in a highly developed
“hieroglyphic language” on a board... the exact nature of which Hesse leaves
to his reader’s imagination.

The effect is to create what can only be called “a virtual music of ideas”.

a game which wins its author a Nobel may be a game worth playing

This is the game — a hypertextual multimedia play of ideas rich in aesthetic,

scholarly and meditative implications — which the HipBone Games implement
in playable form...
 Why is the Glass Bead Game Important?
It lends itself so obviously to the transcendental aspirations of the Internet

Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, as Lewis Lapham said in Harper’s, “lends itself so
obviously to the transcendental aspirations of the Internet” that detailed
exploration of Hesse’s Game as metaphor has much to contribute to our
understanding of the future of electronic communications and culture, as well
as of certain specific topics in hypertext, AI, semantic networks, constructed
languages etc.

As Michael Heim wrote in his book, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford
University Press, 1993):

glass-bead game:

A fictional game described in Hermann Hesse’s novel Das

Glasperlenspiel (1943), translated in English as Magister Ludi (the
game master). Discussions of VR often evoke references to the
glass-bead game because the game’s players combine all the
symbols of world cultures so as to devise surprising
configurations that convey novel insights. Each player organizes
the cultural symbols somewhat like a musician improvising on
an organ that can mimic any instrument. The glass-bead game’s
synthetic, non-linear information play is a forerunner of
hypertext and of virtual worlds. Hesse’s fiction also touches on
some of the human problems underlying the advent of
cyberspace and virtual reality, such as the role of the body and
of disciplines for deepening the human spirit.

See also the remarks on the conceptual importance of the Glass Bead Game in
management (Paul Saffo), in understanding computers (Tim Leary), in thinking
about the Internet (Bruce Milligan) and its cultural consequences (Lewis
Lapham at greater length), and in scientific work (John Holland) etc., in
Appendix C: Further Support, p 52.

Such diversity is possible...

Such diversity in the application of a single idea is possible because both the
digital revolution which allows textual, visual, musical and numerical materials
to presented in tandem on the Web, and the hypertext linkage system on
which the Web is based, correspond with eerie precision to the requirements
of Hesse’s Game — in which “ideas” from all human cultures and intellectual
disciplines, textual, visual, musical and numerical, are linked by juxtaposition.
Hesse’s Game models the World Wide Web
It both prophesies and critiques the Web...

Hesse’s Game can be viewed as an astonishing “prophecy” of the Web, but

also as a useful model for it, a corrective to it, and a source of artforms and
games within it.

Viewed as prophetic, Hesse’s book offers a far more detailed outline of the
interlocking of all human knowledge than Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of
the “noosphere”, while retaining much of the beauty of the Hua-Yen Buddhist
idea of “Indra’s Net”.

As a model of the Web, the idea of the Glass Bead Game adds an aesthetic
dimension to current discourse on such topics as “sorting”, “indexing” and
“pattern recognition” — a dimension which will prove fruitful in practical
terms — while playable “forms” of the GBG such as the HipBone Games can
serve as databases for those investigating the nature of human thought as well
as its computer analogues.

It offers artists the art of hyperspace itself...

it offers gamers the first games comparable with Chess

and Go native to the multimedia age...

As a corrective to the Web, it points toward the harmonious synthesis of ideas

rather than their indiscriminate and unchecked profusion.

And as a source of artforms and games for the Web, Hesse’s great Game is
unrivalled. It offers artists the art of hyperspace itself, inherently multimedia,
inherently based on linkages and juxtapositions. And it offers gamers the first
games comparable with Chess and Go for depth and maturity native to the
multimedia age...

But this is just the beginning:

Hesse’s Game has much to offer any enterprise which concerns the future of
the human mind and spirit. To take but one example: in the “information” or
“knowledge” age, the virtual library and virtual museum will not be considered
as separate entities... and Hesse’s GBG will be found to have marked the point
at which they converge...
 HipBone Games: the Basic Idea
The Washington Post characterizes a HipBone Game as “a give-and-
take of thinking styles and wit ... on-line match of ricocheting intellects”,
while describing HipBone as “at the forefront of efforts to design and
popularize games inspired by Hesse’s novel”.

The basic idea is simplicity itself: think of one thing, think of another.

All we’ve done with this idea is to provide a means of formalizing and recording
the links and connections between things. Also pretty simple. And like most
simple things, even this means of formalizing links has been around for a long
time.

Take this mediaeval representation of the Trinity, for example. It uses circles
and lines drawn between them — a mathematician would call them “vertices”
and “edges” — to plot the Catholic doctrine of the godhead: “So the Father is
God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. And yet there are not three
gods, but One God”, in the words of the Athanasian Creed.
A HipBone board can be any graph of this sort which allows ideas to be
juxtaposed and linked...

...such as this board, drawn from a recent scientific journal article.

and there are innumerable possible HipBone boards...

Consider for instance this Renaissance illustration of the “four elements” from
Oronce Fine’s book, De sphaera mundi, 1542:

Once again, the “board” is used to explore the connections and associations
between ideas — in this case, the relationships between the “four elements”,
earth, water, air, and fire, and the “four qualities”, dryness and humidity, heat
and cold.
If it can be thought, imagined, hummed,
whistled, written, thumbnail sketched...
The HipBone Games are played by placing “ideas” in the positions on one of
the HipBone boards. Ideas can take the form of text, sound, or image: anything
that can be thought, imagined, whistled, scribbled, expressed as an equation or
thumbnail sketched can be a move in a HipBone Game.

Essentially, a move can be made out of anything under the sun... so long as it
can be named.

a word, quotation, paragraph, poem... the title of a book or

story or name of a character... a play, film, video... an equation,
a scientific law, a diagram of the elements... a theme from or
the title of a piece of music... a concerto or opera, jazz record,
pop song... a sound or sound effect... an image, sketch, photo,
painting, sculpture... a natural object, shell, leaf, or feather... a
manmade object, model train, deerstalker, pipe, magnifying
glass, fingerprint... a date, event, or place... a battle, country,
city, district... a person... a creature... animal, vegetable,
mineral... a class of objects... an idea...

The whole universe of experience — knowledge, arts and

sciences — is available. Taj Mahal... the Taj Mahal... Beethoven’s
Fifth... a horseshoe door-knocker... the Fibonacci series... the
World Series...

And the point of the game is to play ideas which “link” with other ideas along
the lines of the game board.

Moves can be entirely simple...

Your opponent plays “salt” in position 3, you can play “pepper” in 4... and
claim a link because they are both condiments.

Salt Pepper
Pepper
1 2

3
They can be as detailed as you like...
If you opponent then plays “Shaker” in 8, she can claim one point each for
links to “Salt” and “Pepper” because salt and pepper shakers are common
household objects — but if she has a copy of Amy Bess Miller and Persis Fuller’s
book, The Best of Shaker Cooking, she can claim two more points by quoting a
Shaker farm kitchen recipe which requires both salt and pepper...

Salt Pepper
1 2
Shaker
3

and they can be curiously beautiful...

if I say so myself, like two moves I played in a TenStones Game: TS Eliot’s
poem “The dove descending”, from his Four Quartets, linking with Vaughan
Williams’ beautiful “The lark ascending” for violin and chamber orchestra...

Dove Lark
1 2

But you get the idea. And about the only other thing you need to know is that
the HipBone Games are played on a variety of predesigned boards, most of
which have ten positions (for other possibilities including extended and 3-D
boards, see our brochure “HipBone Games for CD-ROM and Online Play”):

WaterBird Board Psyche’s Board TenStones Board Circuit Board

A Quick Sample Game:
Totentanz, or the Dance of Death
I played this game with my wife Annie, who has a morbid sense of humor
and a love of history, as you’ll see. Played on the WaterBird board.

Move 1: Annie plays “Catherine of Aragon’s body” in position 7

The body of Catherine of Aragon, first Queen of Henry VIII of England, was
accidentally exhumed in the late 18th century. She was almost perfectly
preserved. Her body was relocated to an outside burial spot while her crypt
was being repaired. Some while later, some drunken rakes dug the body up.
They danced around with her body, still well preserved, until the authorities
neared — at which point they fled and left it behind. Queen Catherine’s body
was at last returned to its crypt outside the church, and to this day anonymous
person or persons leave bunches of flowers mysteriously at her feet. No other
Queen of Henry VIII is so remembered or honoured.

Move 2: Charles plays “Holbein’s ‘Dance of Death’” in position 3

The Dance of Death (Danse Macabre, Totentanz) emerged as a major theme
in the iconography of the 15th century: a skeleton or group of skeletons play
various musical instruments (drum, trumpet, harp, pipes) as they lead the dance.
Hans Holbein’s woodcuts of the Dance of Death enlarged the genre, picturing
Death sometimes fighting, sometimes leading the living — people of all ages
and walks of life — in a sequence of images that run from Adam and Eve in the
Garden at one end to Christ’s final victory over the grave at the other. Holbein
went on to become Henry VIII’s court painter, and died of the plague in 1543.

Move 3: Annie plays “Agnes de Mille’s ‘Fall River Legend’” in position 1

The ballet “Fall River Legend” is Ms. de Mille’s shivery ode to Lizzie Borden,
in which Lizzie performs a “dance of death” as she picks up the axe and knocks
off her parents. Nora Kaye was the ballerina most associated with this role.

Move 4: Charles plays “Exodus Ch. 20 v. 13” in position 2

In Exodus XX: 13, and even in the version of the Ten Commandments filmed
by Cecil B de Mille (Agnes de Mille’s father), Commandment number 5 says
“Thou shalt not kill”... But tell me, what else is a poor boy named Death
supposed to do?

Move 5: Annie plays “The Marseillaise” in position 5

The French mob danced an euphoric reel to the Marseillaise, creating a sort of
“dance of death”, stirring themselves to a fever pitch as the tumbril carts rolled
towards the Guillotine. These rough-hewn carts would eventually carry the
French Royal Family to their deaths.
 Move 6: Charles plays “King Charles walked and talked” in position 9
There’s an English children’s saying, “King Charles walked and talked half an
hour after his head was cut off”.

This children’s saying suggests that like Queen Catherine, King Charles danced
a macabre dance after his death. Like that of the French King Louis XVI and
Marie Antoinette at the guillotine, his death was not only in contravention of
the Fifth Commandment, but also the killing of “the Lord’s anointed” — which
is why regicide is considered of all killings the most heinous. There’s even a
Lizzie Borden echo: like Lizzie’s parents, King Charles was killed with an axe.

Move 7: Annie plays “Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’” in position 8

Princess Salome dances for her father’s court in order to gain John the Baptist’s
head. Her biblical “dance of death” links with the biblical commandments,
with Lizzie Borden’s dance, Holbein’s skeletons dancing, the French mob
dancing round the tumbrils, and the rakes who danced with Catherine’s body
— and even with King Charles’ talking head. Indeed it is recorded that Salome
spoke to John the Baptist’s head for hours after the beheading.

Move 8: Charles plays “Red Queens in Alice” in position 4

The Red Queen cries, “Off with their heads” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the
Looking Glass — or was it the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland? In any
case, the two of them would make a fine pair of matching moves in another
Game we must play together some other day — one of them a playing card and
the other a chess piece, both of them Red Queens, as different and same in
their own ways as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. And one of them (it was the
Queen of Hearts), keeps on crying
Move 8: “Off with their heads”...
Red Queens
in Alice
Now if you lose your head, it doesn’t
necessarily mean you die, but if you
pass through a looking glass, it often
Move 4: Move 9: means something pretty close to dying:
Exodus 20
Thuggee the poet Orpheus passes through a
verse 13
looking glass to enter the realm of the
dead in Cocteau’s film, although of
course he’s still alive.
Move 3: Move 7: Move 6: Move 10:
Fall River Salome’s King Smoke and
Legend Dance Charles Mirrors See next page for the continuation of this
move and two final moves in the game.

See left the completed WaterBird board for

Move 2: Move 1: our Totentanz game, with all “move titles”
Dance Catherine
of Death of Aragon in place. Note how each move in turn links
to all those previous moves which are
directly connected to it along the lines of
the game board.
Move 5:
Marseillaise
 And — just to be sure the connection between losing your head and going
through the looking glass is crystal clear — Orpheus, like King Charles and
John the Baptist, was also famous for what you might call his “talking head”. In
fact Ovid tells us that after Orpheus had been torn apart by the Maenads, his
head was swept out to sea still singing — and landed on the Isle of Lesbos
where it continued giving prophecies until Apollo silenced it.

Or did I get it all muddled up again? St. Paul tells us, “now we see through a
glass, darkly, but then face to face.” Is it the dead who are truly alive, perhaps,
and the living who are already dead? It’s all so confusing: everything gets reversed
when you pass through the looking glass... Is “Wonderland” the place you get
to? Heaven? Hades? Hell? Or the “Collective Unconscious”? Which side of
the glass is Life on, and which side is Death?

Move 9: Annie plays “Thuggee” in position 6

The “Thuggee” or “Deceivers” were a cult of sacred assassins in 19th century
India, from whom we get our word “thug”. The Thuggee used ramal (wire) to
practically behead their victims by garrotting them, and would then mutilate
their bodies for their dark goddess Kali’s pleasure. Thuggee cultists believed
they could do good by stamping out evil, and their highest religious
commandment would be the mirror image of “Thou shalt not kill”. Their
Goddess Kali herself is depicted holding a sword in one of her four arms, and
a severed head in another: the Queen of Hearts in Wonderland would
undoubtedly approve.

Move 10: Charles plays “Smoke and Mirrors” in position 10

This incredibly morbid Game is all, finally, a matter of smoke and mirrors.
The magic here has been largely done with mirrors: we have seen evil and
good trade places, and death and life. But what of smoke? King Charles’ father
James I wrote a treatise on tobacco, which had been introduced into England
from the New World during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of
Catherine of Aragon’s husband Henry VIII by his second wife, Anne Boleyn.

But it is the sacred assassins of Annie’s last move that provide the connection
here, for our word “assassin” derives from “Hashishin” — the name given to
an Islamic cult of sacred assassins, not unlike the Hindu Thuggee centuries
later. The way the Hashishin were recruited is extraordinarily apt in view of
the way this Game has developed. They were reportedly drugged with hashish,
then taken into a paradisal garden where they ate plenteous fruits and were
serenaded by beautiful women — and saw the head of a man displayed on a
plate on the ground. Later, this “beheaded” man would join them. They would
thus be easily convinced — once the drug’s effects had worn off, and they had
woken from a long sleep — that they had indeed been to paradise, and witnessed
the resurrection of the dead.

When told that what they had tasted on this occasion would be theirs for eternity
should they die in the course of one of their deadly missions, the Assassins
understandably showed no fear of death...
Four Aspects of the HipBone Project:
I Games of Mastery
 Games of Mastery
Hesse’s Glass Bead Game is the kind of game — like Chess and Go —
which develops and permits mastery in its players.

For artists, writers, and composers it’s important because it offers the first
multimedia art form ideally suited to the Web, a truly polyphonic form
of discourse, a virtual music of ideas. And the Bead Game can also be
played meditatively, and indeed suggests new forms or techniques of
meditation.

There are games, and there are games of mastery.

If the twentieth century has provided anything to match Go and Chess, it’s
Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. This should be no surprise: Hesse’s aim
from the beginning was to conceive of a game which would come close to the
legendary origins of Chess and Go. HipBone’s intention, likewise, has been to
reproduce Hesse’s great game idea as faithfully as possible.

The HipBone game-structure, however, is one that can also be implemented

for mass-market play, and because of this we wish to emphasize the difference
between the two implementations. Our mass-market games (see “Commercial
Games”, p 41) will offer players competitive play using preset moves in the
form of “decks” similar to decks of Trivial Pursuit cards, and predetermined
scoring. By contrast, the “games of mastery” which most closely adhere to
Hesse’s original idea — and the games applications for education and therapy
— require us to provide only a HipBone board: the players themselves provide
all moves and links out of their own minds, memories and imaginations, and
the aesthetics (rather than the scoring) of moves and links is paramount.

We feel it is important to emphasize the “Games of Mastery” aspect of the

overall HipBone Project, both because it is the reason we designed these games
in the first place, and because it garners a kind of publicity which our games
would not otherwise obtain.

Your game feels very much like Go, in that moves occur in context... you can
be elegant and subtle, but also vicious: this is a game of having a rapier wit.
— Mike Sellers, Archetype Interactive, Game Designer, Meridian 59

For further discussion of the similarities and differences between HipBone

Games and both Chess and Go, see Appendix D: Games of Mastery, p 54.
Jaron Lanier has a problem with Chess...
Jaron Lanier, who coined the term “virtual reality”, had some interesting
thoughts about Chess in a recent issue of Harper’s Magazine:

The reason I never became a chess fanatic is that I realized the

game had a formal framework that would make it difficult to
turn it into a purely aesthetic experience. Since it’s a game with
a formal sense of what winning is, it has limited options for
creative extrapolation. There’s no such thing as freestyle chess,
in which making elegant moves is valued more highly than
capturing your opponent’s king...

Lanier made this remark during a discussion of Deep Blue’s return match with
Kasparov, and I believe it indicates a shift in the way humans feel about the
Royal Game. Chess has now reached a point where the sheer number-crunching
ability of a machine can “defeat” the finest human players, and we see the
game in a new light.

maybe aesthetics is the key to mastery...

Go, of course, is far harder for a computer to play at master’s level, and this
may at least in part be because Go has a marked aesthetic side, which in no way
invalidates the competitive and combative aspect. In the words of a modern
Go historian:

Go offers both the fierce intellectual challenge of life and death

combat as well as the aesthetic pleasure of finding beautiful
plays that build territory efficiently and harmoniously. The
game can shift from the one to other in the blink of an eye.

What I’m getting at there is that maybe aesthetics is the key to games of mastery:
that a game of combat without aesthetic pleasure lacks that elusive quality which
makes a game great — and that Chess is perilously close to losing all aesthetic
interest now that machines can outplay humans...

Playable Variants on Hesse’s Game

Hesse’s Glass Bead Game is a supremely aesthetic game, and playable variants
on Hesse’s Game provide just the kind of “freestyle” play Lanier is looking for.

It is a delicious irony that at the very moment the computer is reducing chess
to a matter of brute force, it is also offering us a game of mastery in which
move aesthetics finally reaches the level of art — Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, a
multimedia artform for a multimedia age.
HipBone Games as Games of Mastery
The HipBone Games provide what Jaron Lanier is asking for — a freestyle
game, in which “making elegant moves” is valued more highly than winning
the game on points. That’s it. That’s it precisely.

The moves in a HipBone Game can reference just about anything under the
sun, but the glory of the games comes when you — the player, the observer —
begin to see a three-dimensional architecture of ideas emerge from the
“groundplan” of the board — “building the hundred-gated cathedral of Mind”
as Hesse puts it.

It’s almost uncanny, the way the links build arches between the moves, and the
mind somehow “sees” them. This can be a pretty heady experience, as gamer
Carole Wilson reports:

my mind was spinning with the connecting links

that intertwined almost three dimensionally...
And just as in medieval times the cathedral was seen as a “mirror of the world”
with its gargoyles and saints, its high vaulting roof and buried crypt, so too this
mind-built structure can mirror the heights and depths of human culture, its
light and shade, its superficial surfaces and hidden depths. Our mind-cathedral
is far from a dead or empty space, and may house a choir, stained glass windows,
space for contemplation: as player Caroline Kenner remarks, the games can be

simultaneously fun and frolic, serious and profound,

numinous and competitive...

Cynndara Morgan moderates the Alexandria mailing-list on the Internet, and

graciously hosted three of our games a while back: here’s what she had to say at
the end of the event...

I have just finished reading the final moves of the

Games in utter awe. The concepts raised, the links
made, the sheer information and connections
revealed in the summary explanations —
Gothic cathedral “stellar beautiful!!! ... an exquisite ongoing dialog on the
vault”, also used as a
HipBone game board
forces of nature, reality, and the human experience...
HipBone Games as Artforms
We claim the HipBone Games are innovative “multimedia” art forms in their
own right...

A Polyphonic Discourse:
The HipBone Games are not “just” for writers, but they do offer novelists and
poets something quite new — a polyphonic form in which ideas can be presented
in juxtaposition rather than in sequence. As such, they are close kin with other
avant garde literary forms which cross over into the territory of games, such as
Michael Joyce’s “hyperfiction” afternoon, a story, and “interactive fiction” games
like Gareth Rees’ Christminster and Neil deMause’s Lost New York.

Polyphonic text is, in itself, something which the literary arts have been moving
towards for some time now, as witness Maya Deren’s Anagram and Julio
Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch. HipBone Games thus offer writers a “tight”
polyphonic form whose “three-dimensional” structure inherently privileges a
“holistic” over a “linear” reading — or as literary critics would say, “synchronic”
over “diachronic” reading — and so fall on a literary spectrum closer to poetry
than prose.

Your game resembles a conversation carved in crystal, a poem in two voices.

— Derek Robinson

Blending the Senses:

As multimedia artforms, the HipBone Games also address the issues in art
history known by the somewhat unwieldy terms “kinaesthetics” and
“gesamtkunstwerke”.

From the attempts of composers such as Scriabin to incorporate light and color
into their work by means of “light organs” via Mallarmé’s “poem of all poems”
to Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerke or work of total art in which poetry, music,
theater and architecture combine, artists have been fascinated by the prospect
of combining the arts in ways which will address all sensory, intellective and
emotional modes of human experience simultaneously.
▼

Robert Craft once asked Stravinsky to “draw” his

music, and this drawing — reminiscent, again, of a
HipBone board — was the result.
 With the advent of the World Wide Web and the common digital “language”
in which graphic, aural, verbal and numerical ideas can now be presented, these
dreams can be realized in new and intimate ways, and the HipBone Games are
designed to facilitate this line of exploration.

A Generic Theory of Arts:

The HipBone Games can also be viewed as offering a test case for a “generic”
theory of the arts: that what constitutes an art (music, poetry) is a field of
discourse (sound, language), while what constitutes a form within that art is a
tightly defined structure (sonata, sonnet) which constrains the passions poured
through it.

This is an astonishingly liberating view of the arts, since it allows one to search
out and practice unknown arts, to recognize as arts things that are commonly
thought of in other terms, and to devise new art forms with an understanding
of precisely what it takes for an art form to succeed as such.

In these terms, The Glass Bead Game would be the art constituted by a field of
discourse (ideas in all media, specifically including verbal, pictorial, and musical
ideas), and the HipBone games would be an art form analogous to sonnet and
sonata within that art, with their numbered board positions and predefined
linkages providing the necessary “tightly defined structure” and constraint.

What emerges is a framework holding a complex, determined yet aleatory

thought: a sentence with ten subordinate clauses, a small rose garden within
which the mind can wander, needing (for the moment) no other thing.
— LeGrand Cinq-Mars

If this theory offers an accurate picture of arts and art forms, then it follows
that a sonnet-like beauty should be feasible in our games.

A
Yellow
And here’s Kandinsky thinking
D C
Orange Green in a HipBone-like way, about
color, in his seminal book,
B B Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
White Black

C D His accompanying text reads,

Red Violet
“The antitheses as a circle
A between two poles, i.e., the life
Blue of colors between birth and
death”.
HipBone Games as Games of Scholarship
HipBone Games are uniquely adapted to creating textual polyphony, as we
have seen, and this makes them ideal vehicles for a new kind of scholarly and
even journalistic expression.

This is particularly relevant because both modern depth psychology, and eastern
influences stemming particularly from within Buddhism, suggest that the human
mind is itself polyphonic — that we each contain a whole chorus of voices, and
that what one part of us understands another part can illuminate or put in
context.

Indeed, as both ecology and chaos theory are telling us, the worlds we live in
— biological, social and psychological — are a complex of interconnected
feedback loops, and when things go wrong, the best solutions are those which
model the complex of forces at work, not those which ignore all but one “linear”
approach.

Here too, polyphonic discourse is the only possible discourse with which to
represent the balance of forces at play, here too the HipBone Games offer a
“form” in which that balance can be honored and represented.

The Scholarship of Comparison:

There is one particular type of scholarship, however, which is even more directly
suited to the HipBone Games — the scholarship of comparison, to give it a
name. By this I mean the kind of scholarship which compares two thinkers or
systems in detail, and perceives extensive parallels between them.

One of the finest examples of this approach is Erwin Panofsky’s book, Gothic
Architecture and Scholasticism, which compares the branching structure of
gothic␣ cathedral architecture with the branching structure of medieval scholastic
logic.

I have finished reading your Yeats / Jung game. It is beautiful — like

looking at a shimmery decagonal crystal with polished sides, and crowned
with only one striving — mutually shared. Very nice indeed.
— Maury Krasnow, Jungian analyst

One of my own favorite games, played with a colleague and friend from the
University of Washington, compared and contrasted two seminal theorists of
the imagination, the psychologist CG Jung and the poet WB Yeats.

HipBone Games make fine vehicles for comparative scholarship of this sort.
 HipBone Games as Meditations
Not to be too grandiose, but seems that the promotion of this kind of
thinking, that which perceives and seeks connections, is toward cosmic
consciousness while celebrating the infinite expression of it. It’s the
simultaneous meditation on the infinite and the one.
— Kim Bender, HipBone Player

Meditation and Hesse’s Glass Bead Game:

Hesse describes the meditative function of Glass Bead Games thus:

Our mission is to recognize contraries for what they are: first

of all as contraries, but then as opposite poles of a unity. Such is
the nature of the Glass Bead Game.

The Glass Bead Game can be played by juxtaposing ideas of many kinds —
visual, musical, verbal, or even kinesthetic. Behind every such pairing of ideas,
however, whether in opposition or in parallelism, the unitive intuition may be
found. Thus Hesse writes again:

Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every

transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or
artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if
seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route
into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth,
between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

Meditative Precursors of Hesse’s Game:

There is a long history of contemplative techniques, some of which have
“crossed over” into the arts — see for example Louis Martz’ book, The Poetry of
Meditation, and his anthology, The Meditative Poem.

Western meditative precursors to Hesse’s Game include the classical Art of

Memory and the Neoplatonist doctrine of signatures or correspondences, which
lead in turn to the Renaissance notion of “reading nature as a book” — or what
one might term “meditation on the calligraphy of god”. A modern example of
this style of thought would be Gyorgi Kepes’ observation, in his New Landscapes
of Art & Science:
 Seen together, aerial maps of river estuaries and road systems,
feathers, fern leaves, branching blood vessels, nerve ganglia,
electron micrographs of crystals and the tree-like patterns of
electrical discharge-figures are connected, although they are
vastly different in place, origin, and scale. Their similarity of
form is by no means accidental.

Abulafia’s Dillug and Kefitsah

But perhaps the most striking congruence between past meditative practice
and the meditative strand implicit in the HipBone Games can be found in the
works of the Jewish kabbalist Abraham Abulafia. Gershom Scholem, in his
book, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, discusses an Abulafian technique:

...the method which Abulafia and his followers called dillug and
kefitsah, “jumping” or “skipping” viz. from one conception to
another. In fact this is nothing else that a very remarkable
method of using associations as a way of meditation ... The
“jumping” brings to light hidden processes of the mind, “it
liberates us from the prison of the natural sphere and leads us
to the boundaries of the divine sphere.” All the other, more
simple methods of meditation serve only as a preparation for
this highest grade which contains and supersedes all the others.

This style of meditation by structured associative thinking would appear to

come very close to the spirit of the HipBone Games.

Stereophanic Meditation in HipBone Games:

I think that it is clear from the quotations above that Hesse‘s Glass Bead Game
players meditate by holding two parallel or contrary ideas in the mind’s eye at
the same time.

it is somehow right here now, a “window into eternity”

— Mary Lynn Richardson, HipBone player

Hesse’s meditation is therefore closely analogous to “stereoscopic” vision or

“stereophonic” sound: it involves the arising of a third or depth dimension
which negates neither of the two elements which gave rise to it, while uniting
them. Since this vision is inward, I have coined the term “stereophanic” to
describe this effect — by analogy with the terms “epiphanic” and “theophanic”.

These associative and stereophanic effects appear to arise naturally during the
course of playing the HipBone Games: they are not something players have to
be taught, though no doubt they exercise a faculty which can be sharpened by
practice.
HipBone Games Development Strategy
Our strategy throughout has been to develop and present the HipBone Games
first and foremost in the context of Hesse’s work and of other attempts at
Glass Bead Game design — as games playable up to and including the level we
call “mastery”.

Glass Bead Games played at the level of mastery — games played, as the
Castalian Games in Hesse’s novel were, as meditations, as works of art or
scholarship and so forth — are neither commercial nor intended to be, and we
have therefore made the rules and boards for the HipBone Games freely
available on the World Wide Web.

These Games do, however, serve an indirect commercial purpose: they generate
publicity: they make fascinating, compelling topics for magazine articles and
the like — and our insistence on focusing on this aspect of the HipBone Games
first has already attracted considerable interest.

The Washington Post called the HipBone Games

a give-and-take of thinking styles and wit ... on-line match of ricocheting

intellects...
while Lewis Lapham of Harper’s wrote that Hesse’s bead game lends itself
“obviously” to what he termed the “transcendent aspirations of the Internet”
—␣ and coolly recommended that Bill Gates’ Microsoft should hire HipBone’s
Charles Cameron as a consultant.

As publicity vehicles, the “mastery-level” HipBone Games are extremely

effective. They have caught the attention of computer game developers,
members of the Artificial Intelligence community, artists and scientists,
journalists and writers, educators and therapists, as well as parents and children,
family, friends, and stray net surfers...

Your game does seem to really call to mind the Bead Game. Almost a
divination system, much more metaphorical than most games.
— Scott Kim, Puzzle Master, Segasoft

When someone asks me which of the various Glass Bead Game variants I
recommend so they can start playing and get a feel for the thing, I tell them
to try one of the HipBone games first. They’re the state of the art.
— Gail Sullivan, web mistress, Glass Bead Game homepage
Four Aspects of the HipBone Project:
II Games of Social Benefit
Humans need Training and Mending...
also known as education and therapy.

HipBone Games have applications in both these areas — from K–12 to graduate
school, and from dreamwork to online counseling to creativity training, problem
solving, conflict resolution and other things we haven’t even thought of.

HipBone Games in dream analysis and therapy

Emotions, associations and play:
Emotions are very much the stuff of therapy — emotions folded in on
themselves, so that all too frequently the surface emotion which “presents”
itself disguises and hides a “deeper” emotion which is in fact driving our thoughts
and actions. And both Freud and Jung discovered that one way to uncover this
hidden layering of emotions was to listen carefully to the verbal associations
their patients offered — indeed it was Jung’s sending Freud a copy of his book
Word Associations which initially opened up communications between them.

Associative thinking, in other words, is one of the keys to successful therapy.

And since the HipBone Games offer a structure for evoking and recording
associative thinking, they can serve as a tool in any arena where the disclosure
of hidden content is important. But the connection between therapy and games
goes deeper yet. The great child psychologist DW Winnicott wrote, in his
book, Playing and Reality:

Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The

corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the
work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the
patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of
being able to play. ...

It is play that is the universal, and that belongs to health: playing

facilitates growth and therefore health; playing leads into group
relationships; playing can be a form of communication in
psychotherapy ...

Play itself is at the heart of psychotherapy: and Jung once told his friend and
biographer Sir Laurens van der Post

One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much
others may despise it, is the invention of good games — and it
cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive values.
HipBone Games as therapeutic tools:
Thus far, the therapeutic possibilities of the HipBone Games have been explored
mainly in the context of dream analysis. Commenting on an early “dream
analysis” game posted to the World Wide Web, Glass Bead Game developer
Terence MacNamee said

This is beyond praise. I have often wondered if personal items

such as dreams or recollections could be part of a Glass Bead
Game, but dismissed the thought as impractical. The solution
provided here, where 3 other players respond with more or
less learned associations to the dream-image, is utterly
convincing.

Not long thereafter, New Zealand psychotherapist Walter Logeman and

HipBone Games co-hosted a months-long internet “Dream Event”, in which
the games were used to explore the symbolism of participants’ dreams. Walter
called them
games with a psychological depth, unequaled as far
as I know...
Over the course of the first month, more than 400 pages of single-spaced text
poured forth from the sixteen brave souls who had volunteered their dreams
and their imaginations to the project — dreams, autobiographies, Freudian
“slips”, Jungian “amplifications”... and as we focused in on the parallelisms and
oppositions between dream symbols, one startling recognition we came to was
that the dreams themselves at times seemed to be playing a glass bead game of
their own...

One dreamer dreamed she was hearing Handel’s familiar “Hallelujah Chorus”
from Messiah — but with an intriguing word-change. Where the original text
reads “King of Kings and Lord of Lords”, she heard instead the words “King
of Kings and Song of Songs” — a subtle and wonderful change, since it
introduces the sacred feminine and erotic qualities of the biblical “Song of
Songs which is Solomon’s” into the otherwise all-too-masculine-and-abstract
atmosphere in which we habitually think about the divine...

Perhaps the most moving tribute to the HipBone Games and the Dream Event
came from the late Stuart Currie, another New Zealander whom I came to
know, admire and love through our email gathering. Stuart had already received
a terminal cancer diagnosis when the Dream Event took place, and his comment
still moves me to tears:

I have been thinking about why I am so drawn to what is

happening here. It seems to be that this might be a game that
consciousness can play with itself irrespective of its containment
in a body. A propos pour moi a ce moment.
HipBone Games in Creativity Training, Conflict Resolution...
Problem Solving and so forth

HipBone Games and Gabrielle Rico’s Clustering

HipBone Games lead one to see hidden connections. And they do this more
intensively than a creativity technique such as Gabrielle Rico’s “Clustering” —
with which they otherwise have much in common — for the simple reason that
Rico’s technique make no demands on the players beyond suggesting the initial
set of associations and representing them in “balloons”, all of which are linked
to the single initial idea.

Rico’s clustering, if you like, is a freeform precursor to the HipBone Games.

Our Games, by contrast, demand that players find linkages between the different
associated ideas in play — differences that must map onto the stringent pattern
of the HipBone board in question. And this in turn means that players must go
back to the creative matrix, back to the imagination, again and again, in search
of yet further analogies and linkages.

This by no means suggests that Rico’s technique is invalid — quite the contrary.
One very powerful way to use the HipBone Games in a problem solving or
creative setting is to begin with clustering, and use the HipBone Games as a
“second phase”, demanding that all the ideas initially generated in the cluster
must then be analyzed and sorted into the ten moves of a HipBone Game —
and further links found between them.

Indeed, this procedure takes full advantage of the creative potential of clustering,
while emphasizing the analytic skills which the HipBone Games demand.

HipBone Games and David Hyerle’s Thinking Maps

Dr. David Hyerle’s work on the Innovative Learning Group’s “Thinking Maps”
comes even closer to the HipBone Games: Hyerle provides maps for a number
of different functions — identifying part–whole relationships, analyzing cause
and effect, sequencing, defining in context — which are peripheral to the GBG,
but his “Bubble” and “Double-Bubble” maps are remarkably similar to HipBone
game boards, and the main difference between Hyerle’s work and HipBone
Games in training contexts would be one of emphasis.

Hyerle, so to speak, works horizontally, across different cognitive approaches,

while HipBone works vertically within the specifically analogical approach —
and in the context of “games” which reach all the way from the beginner’s level
to that of glasperlenspiel-style mastery.
Your game continues to work a transformation in how I think: it opens up
reason, dislodges its tyranny, allows for pattern much richer than cause–
effect. It gives me new ears for listening. Truly I am in awe of it: this game
teaches a different kind of intelligence.
— Susanna Dorr

In certain problem-solving, creativity-training and conflict-resolution situations,

HipBone’s connection with games and play in general and the Glass Bead Game
in particular will both facilitate the process itself, and leave participants with
the sense that what they have learned can be applied in a multitude of other life
arenas which Hyerle and the Innovative Learning Group do not attempt to
touch. In short, I admire Hyerle’s work, see close similarities between it and
my own efforts, and consider it as complementary to the HipBone program.

HipBone Games in Conflict Resolution

One of the most encouraging notes I have received since work on the HipBone
Games began comes from Leon Levin, a Consultant / Trainer in Mediation
and Conflict Resolution whose work takes him to places such as Nicaragua,
Cambodia, and Israel. Leon writes:

I’ve only been with this game a short time and have played a
limited number of rounds. I took the idea to many of my groups
that I lead in communication skills. I’ve even played it with
children. The value I see in it, is not just the creative, art form,
or the competitive fun and intrigue of making connections with
all manner of ideas, but rather the insight we can reach that
bridges the gaps in our differences.

I’m mostly interested in this form as a healing. Bridging people

of diverse backgrounds and ideas. Particularly in conflict, where
it appears to be unresolvable.

What if Israelis and Palestinians were to place their positions at opposite

sides of the board and work their way across, making connections, looking for
the common ground, literally, in this dispute, the commonality of visions?
It is through vision, the values, that most conflicts are resolved.
It is through the context or meaning in those visions or values
that we sometimes can bridge the differences, overriding the
resentments and hatred.
HipBone Games in Education
The GLICA Model United Nations
Tom Hall of the Department of Education, Washington D.C., wrote me:

I sit on the board of directors of a non-profit called GLICA

(Great Lakes Invitational Conference Association), and this
organization sets up and runs Model United Nations (MUN)
simulations for high school students. Our spring conference
has schools from Michigan, Ohio, Mexico, Indiana, Canada.

One of my roles on the Board is to run the trainings for our

staff, who are college students and young professionals. They
have to learn how to be effective educators...

They were scheduled to play one game for an hour and we ended playing two
games, switching teams, for three hours. A smashing success.
This years training, I was looking for ways for them to see the
complex set of related skills required to be a model UN
delegate... you have to understand a broad national policy and
associate its nuances to specific topics, situations, relationships,
etc. Furthermore, you have to be a writer, problem solver, public
speaker, researcher... it is hard yet stimulating work.

When trying to decide how to run the training, I thought of

the HipBone games. We did two games with teams of three
who made collaborative moves (all three players made one move
together). Teams would get together away from the board and
plan moves... They used their research and understanding and
came up with some very creative moves and links...

The staff was so impressed that we incorporated the game at the Conference,
giving the students a chance to play...
The students “got it” very quickly and were eager to play, so
off they went. Most of the kids took it seriously and played
very well..

Anyway, it went really well and the role of this game in MUN
was very helpful in allowing students to recognize connections
across a wide array of issues, concepts, and skills.
 Other Educational Applications
Second grade is the time when most children have largely mastered the
concrete operations that have occupied the first seven years of their lives, and
are beginning to learn abstraction and the other mental processes which will
largely occupy them for the next seven.

HipBone Games designed for use in the second grade classroom would need
to be both age and curriculum specific. We designed a couple of sample games
with teachers Kenneth Cowan and Gail Frank: in one such a game, the teacher
might begin class with the WaterBird board already drawn on the chalkboard,
and then continue by asking the class ten questions, such as:

In the nursery rhyme, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled this.

This crystal was used by early peoples used to trade with
Don’t play with matches, you might light a this.
Mount Saint Helen’s is one this, and Vesuvius is another.
No two flakes of this are identical.

These are goal / task oriented questions, designed to elicit specific knowledge
appropriate to this age group, drawing on such things as a nursery rhyme,
science, social studies, and health and safety.

The answers should be written in the appropriate numbered positions on the

WaterBird board, and the teacher would then ask students whether they notice
anything else about the filled-in board. Students are likely to notice that some
of the items in different positions are linked — thus both Salt and Pepper are
things we add to food to make it tastier.

They would then be invited to suggest linkages between any two items which
are connected along the lines of the board. Thus Snow is a form of Water; Fire
melts Snow; Pepper, Volcanos and Fire are all “hot”; and so forth. If the children
are unable to come up with links along all the possible lines between items, the
teacher can also supply some, with appropriate explanations. Some of the trickier
links: Salt is used to clear Snow-filled roads, Pepper and Snow can both be a
little chili, and so on...

I applaud the approach that you are exploring. I think the cognitive processes
that you are interested in developing are critical to a decent education.
— Elliot Eisner, Past President, American Educational Research Assn.

Another second grade game would explore a story — Cinderella? — and place
each character, object or event on the board, again seeking links between,
say, the Mice playing in the fireplace as Cinderella did her chores, the Fireplace,
the Magic Wand because the wand turns the mice into horses, and finally with
Shoes because the mice carried the shoes to the castle in the carriage...
But Grad School would be a little different...
Each educational situation would require its own hand-tailored variant on the
games. In a graduate seminar on World War II history, the board might be
dispensed with entirely...

The seminar is held around a long table, and when the students arrive for their
first meeting, the professor hands them copies of the usual enormous reading
list, and announces that in addition to their individual papers and verbal
contributions to group discussion, they will have an opportunity to score extra
points in class by connecting any of a dozen or so items which he has scattered
along the length of the table with aspects of the historical topic they will be
covering.

Among the items on the table are a baseball mitt, a paperback espionage novel,
and two equations scribbled on a piece of paper:

∆p∆q ≥ h/2π
∆E∆t ≥ h/2π

The game rules are extremely simple: connect any one or more of the items on
the table to some aspect of the topic at hand, i.e., World War II. Thus any
example of WW II espionage can be connected with the spy novel. That’s the
kind of “easy” link that’s liable to pop up in the first few minutes, and it doesn’t
merit a very high score.

Baseball, espionage and the bomb...

The game becomes more interesting if one of the students approaches a
mathematician or physicist to find out what the two equations on the scrap of
paper refer to, and finds out they are the limiting equations of Werner
Heisenberg’s celebrated Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg was one of the
founding fathers of quantum mechanics, and — that’s it, the one man in Hitler’s
Germany who would likely be able to develop an atom bomb.

There’s a link there, to be sure — but the student who goes on to read David
Cassidy’s biography of Heisenberg, or Thomas Powers’ book Heisenberg’s War,
will find there the story of baseball player Moe Berg, who played in the major
leagues from 1923 through 1939, and was recruited into the OSS during World
War II. Berg, whose own life has been brilliantly chronicled by Nicholas
Dawidoff, was sent to Switzerland by the OSS to hear Heisenberg give a single
lecture during the war, with instructions to figure from the lecture whether
Heisenberg was building the Nazis a bomb — and kill him at once if he was.

The student who gets this far can claim three links to the Moe Berg / Heisenberg
episode: with the espionage novel, the baseball mitt, and the Uncertainty
relations. And he or she has also thought more creatively, researched more
widely, played — and won.
 Art History and the Hieroglyphic Language
One specific educational project which we would like to develop is a standardized
language of icons for use in art history.

This language would consist of a hundred or so small icons like the crossed
knife and fork you see in restaurant guides, indicating “Florentine” “Dutch”
“XVI century” “gesso” “mural” “canvas” “altar” “triptych” “impasto” “outdoor
scene” “stag” “crucifix” “saint” etc. — so that fifteen or twenty could summarize
salient physical and artistic components of a given work... The idea would be
to incorporate these items in a database of artworks such as Microsoft’s Corbis
archive, for use in conjunction with our Games.

Student players under this system would be highly motivated to search out
works in areas of art history that they might otherwise overlook:

students with little or no interest in, say, “religious” art might still find a
religious work which linked strongly with a given “secular” work, and vice
versa.
Someone who played, e.g., Pisanello’s “St. Eustace” from the National Gallery
in London — in which Eustace has a vision while out hunting, of a stag with a
crucifix between its antlers —␣ would send her / his opponent scuttling through
the databases looking for other paintings with stags, crucifixes, saints etc. in
them... Another player might find an astounding level of resemblance between
a Honduran figure from 782 CE and a Chinese figure from 730 CE.

And again, the net impact would be to increase the breadth of research while
playing and winning.
 The HipBone Cards
The HipBone Cards are a Tarot-like deck of images illustrating some of the
deep structures that nature follows in the “building” of universe. The cards
themselves can thus serve as game-pieces that focus specifically on patterns
found throughout nature — and in the mythic imagination of humankind.
And they can be consulted any time someone is looking for deep structure, as
an idea source...

One image from the deck would be that of the Twin Serpents. Mythographers
have known the importance of this image for centuries, calling it the Caduceus
(the wand of Hermes — two winged serpents winding about a staff, crowned)
or Kundalini (twin serpents coiling around the human spine).

When Linus Pauling at CalTech was racing Watson and Crick at King’s College,
Cambridge for the deep pattern of the DNA molecule, he first tried single and
triple helices — while Watson and Crick tried the double helix, and made what
is perhaps the greatest scientific discovery of our times.

If this deck of cards had been around CalTech at the time, Linus Pauling
might have won himself that third Nobel prize
If this deck of cards had been around CalTech at the time, Pauling could have
flipped through to the Caduceus / Kundalini card and tried the double helix
first — knowing that a pattern which occurs so universally in the myths and
dreams of humanity is liable to be a significant deep structure in nature, too —
and perhaps won himself that third Nobel prize...

Does this sort of thing sound a little strange? It shouldn’t. Way back when he
was at a loss to know the structure of benzene, the chemist Kekule von Stradonitz
glimpsed the ourobouros-serpent biting its tail in a reverie one day, and from
it intuited the benzene ring... another image from our deck. We can think of
Kekule’s reverie figuratively as “playing solitaire with the dream-originals” of
the HipBone cards...

I suspect the Deck will turn out to be a particularly useful tool in Grad School
other higher-level Educational Games.
Four Aspects of the HipBone Project:
III Applications Elsewhere
 The HipBone Games, AI and the rest:
an Overview
Derek Robinson

If, instead of using the real world, one carefully creates a simpler, artificial
world in which to study the high-level processes of perception, the problems
become more tractable.
— Douglas R. Hofstadter & the Fluid Analogies Research Group, in
“Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies”, 1995, p.190

The HipBone Games of Charles Cameron were developed to be small and

simple but non-trivial, and possibly even profound, minimally structured ‘fields’
wherein human wit may freely range and be observed at its play by the game’s
players and spectators. They are like little windows that open out onto certain
crooks and corners and crannies of the mind, which otherwise might not be so
readily suspected or seen.

A HipBone board is at outset empty, a matrix of possibilities, pregnant with

incipient linkages between the board’s loci. The board is just a set of nodes,
connected by lines, forming an abstract geometrical pattern: TenStones,
WaterBird, Tetraktys. As the game is played, the players in alternating moves
populate the board’s nodes with ‘concepts’, symbolic references to, well,
anything at all really — its backdrop is the entire atlas, landscape, encyclopaedia
of cultural forms.

a model ‘elaboratory’ for investigating the creative potencies of the mind

Within the game’s small compass, comprising less than a score of loci, we are
given a model ‘elaboratory’ for investigating the analogical, poetic, creative
potencies of the mind. A move in the game must simultaneously resolve or
bridge the concepts already in play upon the board, while yet proposing further
original, hitherto unexpressed (while latent and implicit) changes rung upon
the central theme.
The game form imposes the strict constraint that any move made must link
adjoining nodes not just geometrically...

but semantically, meaningfully, deliberately, playfully.

What governs a move in a HipBone game — the placement of a concept, a

passage from a work of literature or a line from a song, an image recognizable
by all or intensely personal, an idea from mathematics or the special sciences,
an event or an individual from the pages of history or today’s headlines, an
allegorical symbol or emblem drawn from folk or fairy tales, from dreams, or
from the sacred traditions of East or West, positioned onto a free node on the
board, and thereby linked to the nodes and hence to the concepts already played
— is simply salience, a sense for what is meet, a sensitivity to the opportunities
afforded by a fertile analogy.

The game form imposes the strict constraint that any move made must link
adjoining nodes not just geometrically but semantically, meaningfully,
deliberately, playfully.

The nature of the connection can be virtually anything that anyone might
consider to be a ‘relation’ — symmetry, mirroring, opposition; metonymy,
metaphor, the ‘figures’ or ‘tropes’ of rhetoric; movements up, down, or across
a categorical tree; puns, verbal or visual; euphemisms or spoonerisms; chains
of cause and effect; syllogisms and enthymemes; allusions or cliches; allegories,
archetypes; the arts of memory and of ‘topics’, altogether.

Here we have a ‘toy universe’ ready-made for AI researchers

There has been increasing interest in categorization and the mechanisms of

metaphor and analogical reasoning among people working in the cognitive
sciences, in linguistics and philosophy — theorists like Douglas Hofstadter,
Melanie Mitchell, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, Dierdre
Gentner, David Gelernter, Roger Schank, Janet Kolodner, S. Kedar-Cabelli,
Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard, as well as many others active in the areas of
neural networks, machine learning, fuzzy logic, and case-based reasoning.

An archive of HipBone games can provide a wealth of examples of how analogy

works, of what makes one analogy succeed where a different analogy might
fail.

Here we have a ‘toy universe’ ready-made for AI researchers wishing to tackle

the slippery slopes of analogy, metaphor, resemblance, the making and taking
of meaning.
Scientific Interest in GBGs and HipBone Games
Derek Robinson’s article suggests some ways in which Hesse’s Glass Bead Game
and the HipBone Games in particular may be of interest to some people more
as objects of study rather than as games to play.

Paul Prueitt and William Rose

Drs. Paul Prueitt and William Rose of Highland Technologies Inc. and BCN
— the Behavioral and Computational Neuroscience Group — are actively
exploring the Glass Bead Game as a model for the handling of vast quantities
of digital documentation, and have hosted a Persistent Online Discussion on
the World Wide Web using Hesse’s Game to model procedures and rules. In
his article, “The Road to Castalia”, Dr. Rose writes:

The cybernetic version of the Glass Bead Game will allow users
to actively navigate through great amounts of data with ease,
using much more than pure intellect to understand the input’s
meaning. Great amounts of data will be synthesized into
meaningful sensory images and the individual will have an
instinctual method of extraction through sensation, thought,
feeling, and intuition. The results will be a new level of human
/ information interaction and the use of this interaction to solve
many of the intractable problems of humankind.

Dr. Prueitt refers to the HipBone Games as “advanced work” in this area, and
feels that much can be gained by an interaction in which scientists provide “a
deeper foundation in autonomous machine reasoning”.

John Holland
Meanwhile Dr. John Holland, distinguished computer scientist and inventor
of genetic algorithms, told Omni in a recent interview that the glasperlenspiel
was something he had been working towards all his life:

If I could get at all close to producing something like the glass

bead game I can’t think of anything that would delight me more.

Dr. Holland has also indicated an interest in developing software for his vision
of the Glass Bead Game, and feels that a small group of bright programmers
could accomplish the task within two or three years.

There is serious interest, in other words, in how Hesse’s idea of the Glass Bead
Game can aid the development of computer science and information
management in a variety of ways. HipBone believes the time has come to
synthesize and cross-fertilize these interests by presenting a Glass Bead Game
Conference, and setting up an Institute and Journal.
 The Glass Bead Game Conference
HipBone is currently seeking a site for the first Glass Bead Game Conference,
which we hope will attract speakers like John Holland from the AI side, Johnny
Wilson of Computer Gaming World from the games industry and others, and
bring together those who are interested in the GBG as a metaphor, GBG
designers and players, interested scholars, researchers, software developers and
non-GBG game designers to read papers, compare notes, and play the various
GBG variants now available.

The Conference should immeasurably strengthen the GBG designers’

community which already exists: and our hope would be that in addition to the
cross-fertilization of ideas and networking of projects which it would facilitate,
it might lead to the exploration of other avenues for GBG development:

The Institute of Glass Bead Game Studies

Most important of these would be the organization, in an academic setting, of
an Institute of Glass Bead Game Studies. We envision this Institute exploring
the cultural, metaphorical, semiotic, and scientific implications of playable Glass
Bead Games and their uses in education and therapy, as well as topics in Hesse
scholarship.

One major Institute project would be the design of a complete suite of GBG
software to John Holland’s specifications, a project in which Dr. Holland himself
has expressed keen interest, and which he estimates might take two or three
years work by a core-group of computer scientists.

The Glass Bead Game Journal and Monograph Series

The GBG Journal, a refereed cross-disciplinary academic journal, would carry
the proceedings of the first GBG Conference in its first issue, and thereafter
explore the same range of topics as the Institute. More extended studies could
be published in a Monograph Series.

According to Professor Gunther Gottschalk of UC Santa Barbara, who has

been in contact with them, the Feustel-Bucherer family in Switzerland possess
a game built by Hesse’s friend the painter Max Bucherer, incorporating the
work of Bucherer’s wife, Als Feustel — whose theory of the correspondences
between the musical and color scales Hesse himself mentions in his novel.

but this is no HipBone would very much like to see an Institute graduate student — hopefully
more than an aside, under Professor Gottschalk’s guidance — make further contact with the Feustel-
a footnote, and a Bucherer family and write up a scholarly study of this Game, and of Als Feustel’s
dream... theory of the correspondences. Such a study would be an impressive first
publication for the Institute: while the Institute, Journal and Monograph Series
together would constitute a long-overdue and proper homage to Hesse himself.
Four Aspects of the HipBone Project:
IV Commercial Games
HipBone Games

quality content
independent group
with a garage and a vision

NOW IS THE TIME to pursue a designer’s dream: when

large publishers desire quality content and actively seek
independent groups that demonstrate both a vision and a
plan. For those whose business is the creation of worlds,
development is returning to the heady days of the mid-
1980s, when a few people with a garage and a vision
really could revolutionize the computer gaming industry.
— Sid Meier, co-founder of MicroProse Software, author of games
such as␣ F19␣ Stealth Fighter and Civilization, in his “Soapbox”
column in Game␣ Developer magazine, April-May 1997.

Therefore...
now is the time
Mass-market HipBone␣ Games:
Mass-market HipBone Games — implemented for CD-ROM or an online
service — would be far more structured than the free-form “Games of
Mastery”: game play would be definitive, i.e., a computer could always tell
who won and who lost. They would use clearly defined content drawn from
pop-cultural fields such as sports or movie trivia.

Games with pre-set moves and scoring

To make the HipBone Games more user-friendly and mass-marketable, we
like a cross between would configure Games where the “moves” themselves are already provided
to players, along with the game board — so the player doesn’t have to invent or
Trivial Pursuit research them, but can simply “play” them.
and Rubik’s Cube
Kimberly Bieber,
This means that a commercial game — whether presented online, or on CD-
interactive film / ROM, or as a board or TV game — would include a deck or series of decks of
game␣ development “cards”, each of which contains one “datum” or information point, and also an
automatic mechanism for scoring the links claimed when these cards are played
on the board.

It also suggests the possibility of providing several decks of cards for different
categories of “trivia” — one for the movie industry, one for sports, one for
world history...

The sheer mathematics

However the sheer mathematics involved is daunting. When once you calculate
the number of possible links an automated scoring system would be required
to handle, it is on the order of half the square of the number of cards. For 200
cards in a deck, which we estimate to be a minimum for interesting play, that
would mean a little under 20,000 links. The possible moves would need to be
individually researched and written, and approved links between them identified
and scored in advance of the game shipping, for inclusion in a scoring book or
database of whatever kind.

This in turn makes it extremely unlikely than anyone else will “borrow” the
idea and work along these lines — but we have some tricks up our sleeves for
getting around this problem of sheer volume of links...
Delivery Systems:
Online Services:
One way to go would be to present a smorgasbord of HipBone offerings to an
Online Service such as AOL, or my own service provider, EarthLink.

This would center around the “commercial” variant game with fixed moves,
but might also include boards for “free-style” play, and feature specific game
variants in a variety of sub-sections of the online environment such as “kids”,
“education”, “problem solving”, “the arts”, “higher ed”, “self-help”,
“dreamwork”, etc. HipBone “Wrinkles” (additional rule sets, see next page)
and extended 3-D boards could also be used. Benefits: the same engineering
would be applicable to many online areas.

CD-ROM:
It would also be feasible to present a similar variety of games — mostly with
“set” decks of moves and links, but with the “freestyle” option for those who
prefer it — on a HipBone CD-ROM. See comments above on “Wrinkles”,
extended boards and engineering.

Board Game:
There’s no reason why HipBone Games should be played only on computers,
and a board game with “set” moves and “freestyle” option is entirely possible.
Our sense is that such a game would not distinguish itself from other “trivia”
style games enough to interest a games company until the point where
accompanying publicity from “mastery level” and / or “computer driven”
variants — or a “contest” — have created easy name recognition and reasonably
large consumer interest.

TV Games Shows and PBS

TV program spinoffs could range from a commercial HipBone variant running
as a Jeopardy-level trivia game on one of the networks, to an in-depth series
exploring Hesse’s Game, its importance as a metaphor for the net and Web,
and the range of GBG variants now available, hosted by a “thinking person’s”
commentator such as Bill Moyers or James Burke — whose own program,
“Connections”, bears a strong resemblance to a GBG — and aired on PBS.
Other Considerations...
“Wrinkles” for added viciousness
We have a number of “wrinkles” (additional rule-sets) in mind for the HipBone
Games in general — including “Trumps”, which allows players to remove their
opponent’s existing moves by suggesting alternate moves in the same position
which claim more links — adding a touch of viciousness to the competitive
side of the games.

Another wrinkle, “Weathers” — more suited to a HipBone CD-ROM (see

previous page) — would involve the use of extended 3-dimensional boards,
various sections of which would be influenced by a variety of “weather
conditions” during the course of play, each of which would invalidate existing
moves, shift their positions dramatically across the board, or temporarily block
certain areas of the board from play. As in life...

Extended boards for more intriguing play

Extended HipBone boards are also envisioned to make for more complex and
immersive play (see “Wrinkles” below): these could range from simple boards
with preexisting “meanings” such as a board based the London Underground
map to three-dimensional boards such as models of molecular structures to
Escher-like “tiled” boards to more complex boards and games in which HipBone
“positions” are rooms and the connecting lines become “corridors” in which
Mario-like figures can engage in magical or military battles..

Taking a leaf out of Oracle

There’s also the possibility of building a database of links which the players
themselves suggest in an online version of the games, which — as in Peter
Langston’s Oracle — the computerized opponent would then use to propose its
own competitive links in later games, giving players the uncanny feeling that
the game’s AI was almost unbelievably human. And so forth...

All of which brings us to the wider issue of successful game genres already used
by the computer games industry, and the possible role of HipBone Games in
that context...
Pushing the envelope of the Computer Games Industry...
Our second objective is to design compulsively playable computer games
which push the envelope.

The HipBone direction...

Specifically: our aim is to design games which expand the genre in the directions
of emotional depth and intellectual and aesthetic value, without compromise
to playability.

HipBone’s Games and writings are quietly acquiring something of a reputation

on the net and among game designers. HipBone is “Editor at Large” at The
Cursor, a magazine for game developers, and Mark Pesce described HipBone’s
article “Doom Goes to Church”, which discussed the curious parallels between
Mark Pesce, co- computer games␣ and Tibetan Buddhist meditations, as
author of VRML,
the language in SO brilliant I wish I had written it
which the Web goes
3-D
We aim to continue to work, write and learn within the present framework of
the computer games industry, not least because we have some 3-D walkthrough
game ideas of our own, including some hinted at in our Cursor article, and in
our essay “Myst-like Universities, Oxford-like Games?”

Game Ideas are two-a-penny...

But computer game ideas are two-a-penny, and it would clearly be in appropriate
at this point in any case to reveal more than a little of HipBone’s future plans in
the development of new games. Several ideas for highly commercial games are
in the works, however, including a children’s game based on skip-rope which
would teach elementary math, and a Tetris-like game which would convey the
basic principles of musical composition.

As we say, computer game ideas are worth very little without the teamwork
which goes into development and implementation: but it seems important to
convey something of variety of games HipBone is proposing. Two of our other
non-GBG-like game ideas may give you some idea of our range...
Tibetan Game:
HipBone recently worked as “document architect” on Nile, a CD-ROM game
title from Simon and Schuster Interactive in association with the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. It appears that the Met would be interested in further games
dealing with civilizations in which they have “holdings”, and we have informally
broached the subject of doing a Tibetan game along similar lines — but also
with input from Tibetan Buddhists.

HipBone is in contact with a computer science professor at Cornell who has

already worked with Tibetan lamas on a “walk through” 3-D mandala, and a
serious Buddhist with an interest in games currently working on VRML
programming at Silicon Graphics. It should be entirely feasible to put together
a game team which balanced the respective sensibilities of gamers, Buddhists
and the Met. HipBone has given some thought to the specifics...

The game design challenge here would be to combine a fast action play mode
with a much slower contemplative mode for players who wished to learn about
the culture portrayed and / or participate in a meditative manner.

Mother and Daughter Games

It became clear at the “What do women want in games?” roundtable HipBone
attended at the Computer Game Developer’s Conference that the computer
games industry as a whole is looking to find ways to break out of the “core
gamer” market of younger males and into the wider market of computer users,
and also that women on the whole look for social interactions around the games
they play as well as “gameplay” within them.

HipBone’s solution to this double issue is the development of “mother and

daughter” games — and more generally, “adult and child” games — which can
only be played by the child if she persuades an adult to play with her, thus
providing needed social interaction at the same time as introducing new, older
and in many cases female players to the image of themselves as game players.

There are a number of companies that in the wake of Barbie Fashion Designer
selling in excess of 200,000 units last Christmas season might well be interested
to develop games of this sort.

Our aim is to offer the industry a wide variety of playable, highly saleable game
concepts and to work with existing providers on their implementation.
Computer Games Industry Responses
Are we listened to? We’re read.

HipBone’s articles for The Cursor reach an audience of game developers, and
his writings on the rec.games.design newsgroup have attracted a number of
approving responses: but the truth of the matter is that HipBone hasn’t “come
out” yet. HipBone’s work on the S&SI Nile project was — from HipBone’s
own point of view — an apprenticeship with a mainstream computer game
project, not in any way a showcase for HipBone’s ideas. The materials you are
now reading represent the first comprehensive attempt to describe the HipBone
GBG variants and other game projects, and to bring them to the attention of
the industry as a whole.

The future of gaming...

The people HipBone has contacted within the industry, however, seem to think
that HipBone’s approach represents the future of gaming. Mike Sellers of
Archetype Interactive, speaking mainly of HipBone’s GBG variants, says:

HipBone offers us a glimpse over the horizon at the future of

games — where we are going, or could go. I think we’re headed
for “emergent entertainment” — games in which the gameplay
emerges out of the interactions of two or more people. HipBone
Games are an almost pure distillation of that idea, because you’re
dealing directly, mind to mind.

And Johnny Wilson of Computer Gaming World says something very similar:

One of the most important contributions of the computer game

of the future will be the introduction of relational aspects to
gaming. Currently, most games are very transactional: shoot
weapon, kill monster, get reward. Life is not so simple and games
shouldn’t be, either. ... The HipBone Games are pioneering
the actualization of ideas which I only dreamed about. Right
now, the web-based e-mail games offer stimulating ideas and
new, exciting connections between previously unrelated data
and symbols. Imagine being able to play computer-moderated
games between humans or even playing a game against a Deep
Hesse in the future. I look forward to multiple versions of the
HipBone GBGs that will expand our understanding of
intelligence, symbolism and meaning. They just might establish
new levels of artificial intelligence, artificial personality, and
neural networking, as well.
Appendices:
A: Brief Overview of the HipBone Project

B: In Pursuit of Bigger Game?

C: Further Support

D: Games of Mastery

E: Meditations for Glass Bead Game Players

Appendix A: Brief Overview of the HipBone Project
The following text is taken from our introductory brochure, and conveniently
summarizes the HipBone project as a whole.

Take a Nobel-winning game design,

build a compulsively enjoyable game,
simple enough a child can play it,
yet with room for mastery...
with applications in education and psychology,
interesting academic implications,
and varied commercial potentials —

offer it free on the Web,

sell it to the games industry / online services,
and pitch it to foundations, educational institutions
and maybe the President of the United States...

And you have the ambitious project known as

The HipBone Games.

Contacting HipBone
To contact HipBone Games, send email to hipbone@earthlink.net, write to
Charles Cameron, 9735 Green Road, Midland, VA 22728, or␣ phone
(540)␣ 439-9395.

Copies of the introductory brochure or these background materials can be obtained

from HipBone at the above addresses. And since we mentioned the U.S. President
above, let’s move directly to our next Appendix...
Appendix B: In Pursuit of Bigger Game?
In the preceding pages, we have at times outlined and at times detailed
HipBone’s approach to games of mastery, some educational and psychological
uses to which those games might be put, and HipBone’s interest in games
development in the commercial world of computer games. There are, however,
some major projects which we have not mentioned.

A nationwide HipBone Games Contest

HipBone would like to suggest a nationwide student competition for the best
HipBone Games, with substantial prize money / corporate sponsorship. This
could accompany publication of a book which explores Hesse’s Game against
the contexts of the importance of play in human life and creativity, the internet
as it intersects with the print culture of the past, and the ways in which computer
games may be influential for better or worse in shaping our cultural future...

Intellectually challenging contests can draw a terrific response. Perhaps the

classic example of this is Jonathan Cape’s publication of Kit Williams’ book,
Masquerade, which contained a complex puzzle for its readers to solve, and a
hefty prize — a jeweled hare made of gold, eventually sold at Sotheby’s for
$31,900 — for the first correct solution. Williams’ book sold a million copies.

The White House Millennium Program...

Another major avenue for HipBone Games to explore, possibly in conjunction
with a contest of this sort, is the White House’s recently announced Millennium
Program, which is designed to “highlight projects that recognize the creativity
and inventiveness of the American people”, thus “honoring the past and
imagining the future.”

and the British Mind Sports Olympiad

HipBone views the turn of the millennium as a suitable time to hold “Games”
comparable to the Olympics, but focused on mind and heart. A similar festival-
of-games was recently held in London’s Albert Hall, and HipBone intends to
submit proposals both to the White House Program and the British “Mind
Sports Olympiad”.

Overall, HipBone is an extraordinary project...

We intend to explore all appropriate avenues to ensure that our games reach
the most diverse audiences, and deliver as much pleasure and insight as possible.
Appendix C: Further Support
John Holland
— psychologist, computer scientist extraordinaire, and inventor of “genetic algorithms”, in his
fascinating Omni interview with Janet Stites:

I’ve been working toward it all my life, this Das Glasperlenspiel. It was a very
scholarly game, starting with an abacus, where people set up musical themes,
then do variations on it, like a fugue. Then they’d expand it to where it could
include other artistic forms, and eventually cultural symbols. It became a very
sophisticated game for setting up themes, almost as a poet would, and building
variations as a composer. It was a way of symbolizing music and of building
broad insights into the world.

If I could get at all close to producing something like the glass bead game I
can’t think of anything that would delight me more.

Bruce Milligan
— director of new media at the AOL subsidiary, Redgate:

As I work to help position Redgate as a leader in the programming of content

for the World Wide Web, I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about the
nature of the Web — a realm of pure intellect, minds interacting with machines,
constructs of information designed to facilitate the sometimes-ordered,
sometimes-random and often serendipitous roamings of human
inquisitiveness... But more than anything, this process of information publishing
and linking on the Web reminds me a lot of the Glass Bead Game that Hermann
Hesse wrote about in his 1943 novel Das Glasperlenspiel (translated “The Glass
Bead Game”, subtitled “Magister Ludi”...)

Timothy Leary
— hipster, on the Glass Bead Game as an analogue of the Macintosh:

In the avant garde, cyber-hip frontiers of the computer culture, around Mass.
Ave. in Cambridge, around Palo Alto, in the Carnegie Mellon AI labs, in the
backrooms of the computer graphics labs in Southern California, even in the
Austin labs of MCC, a Hesse comeback seems to be happening. However.
This revival is not connected with Hermann’s mystical, eastern writings. It’s
based on his last, and least understood, work, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead
Game.

This book, which earned Hesse the Expense-Paid Brain Ride to Stockholm, is
 positioned a few decades in the future when human intelligence is enhanced
and human culture elevated by a device for thought-processing called The
Glass Bead Game. Up here in the Electronic ’80s we can appreciate what Hesse
did, back down there (1931-1942).

Alan Watts
— in his book The Joyous Cosmology, comparing the Glass Bead Game with the psychedelic
experience:

The nearest thing I know in literature to the reflective use of one of these
drugs is the so-called Bead Game in Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi (Das
Glasperlenspiel). Hesse writes of a distant future in which an order of scholar-
mystics have discovered an ideographic language which can relate all the
branches of science and art, philosophy and religion. The game consists in
playing with the relationships between configurations in these various fields in
the same way that the musician plays with harmonic and contrapuntal
relationships. From such elements as the design of a Chinese house, a Scarlatti
sonata, a topological formula, and a verse from the Upanishads, the players
will elucidate a common theme and develop its application in numerous
directions. No two games are the same, for not only do the elements differ, but
also there is no thought of attempting to force a static and uniform order upon
the world. The universal language facilitates the perception of relationships
but does not fix them, and is founded upon a “musical” conception of the world
in which order is as dynamic and changing as the patterns of sound in a fugue.

Similarly, in my investigations of LSD or psilocybin, I usually started with

some such theme as polarity, transformation (as of food into organism),
competition for survival, the relation of the abstract to the concrete, or of
Logos to Eros, and then allowed my heightened perception to elucidate the
theme in terms of certain works of art or music, of some natural object as a
fern, a flower, or a sea shell, of a religious or mythological archetype (it might
be the Mass), and even of personal relationships with those who happened to
be with me at the time.

Paul Saffo
— Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, in his brief article “The Manager
as Mystic”:

You’re in your favorite bookstore, scanning the new titles in the business section,
looking for something that will help you make sense of the turmoil of
competition. Wrong section! Wrong decade!

For the most important management book for the 1990s, try fiction from the
1940s: Hermann Hesse’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, The Glass Bead Game. It
combines leader-as-servant, pragmatic mysticism, creative destruction — in
other words, all the business issues of the decade! Plus it’s a great read.
Appendix D: Games of Mastery
An article on Chess, Go and Glass Bead Games.

There are games, and there are games of mastery.

Voltaire called Chess “the game which reflects most honor on human wit”, but
then he almost certainly didn’t know about Go. And he can hardly have heard
of Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.

Chess and Go are the two great, ancient games of the human race, the places
where human play reaches the level of mastery. Oh yes, I’ll agree, Bridge has
finesse. And the Olympic Games — if you count sports among games — are
masterful. But I still say Chess and Go are the two great games that spring to
mind when that word “mastery” comes up. Both games can be played enjoyably
by beginners, gifted amateurs and masters, and both games are therefore
extremely popular with a wide range of players — witness the 5 million hits in
a single day which almost crashed the IBM site during the first Kasparov vs.
Deep Blue games, or the public reaction when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov
in the second series.

Landscape —␣ or battlefield?
the chessboard from Alice

If the twentieth century has provided anything to match Go and Chess, it’s
Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.

This should be no surprise: Hesse’s aim from the beginning was to conceive of
a game which would come close to the legendary origins of Chess and Go.
Hesse wrote:

Here and there in the ancient literatures we encounter legends

of wise and mysterious games that were conceived and played
by scholars, monks, or the courtiers of cultured princes. These
might take the form of chess games in which the pieces and
squares had secret meanings in addition to their usual functions.

The Glass Bead Game may be very different from the games of Chess and Go
as they have come down to us, but it derives its power from the same roots.

A Game not unlike Chesse...

Legend has it that Chaturanga — the earliest form of Chess — was invented
by a Brahmin at the court of Rajah Balhait in the 5th century BCE. The rajah
had asked the wise man to invent a game that would exemplify the virtues of
diligence, foresight, prudence, and wisdom, and especially oppose the fatalistic
element of chance that was popular in dice-games such as backgammon. Chess
was a game of wisdom...

Johann Valentin Andreae refers to a game “not unlike chesse” in his 1616 book
The Chymical Marriage which seems to be a precursor for Hesse’s thoughts on
the matter:

Meantime, the king and queen, for recreation’s sake, began to

play together. It looked not unlike chesse, only it had other
laws, for it was the vertues and vices one against another, where
it might be ingeniously discovered with what plots the vices lay
in wait for the vertues, and how to re-encounter them again.
This was so properly and artificially performed that it were to
be wished that we had the like game too.

And the members of that infamous 19th century occult society, the Golden
Dawn — the poet William Butler Yeats among them — seem to have attempted
to recapture something of the “wisdom” element of the game. They played a
four-player Chess variant called “Enochian” or “Rosicrucian” Chess — and a
spirit was sometimes invoked when a fourth player was lacking!

Mediumistic device or
variant chess-board?
Detail of the board used to play
Enochian Chess.
 In this complex variant, the four sides of the chessboard are related to the four
classical elements, and each square is imbued with a multitude of magical
correspondences. Like Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, each move contained an
element of meditation, in that players (human and spirit alike?) scryed into the
squares of the board for inspiration.

games in which the pieces and squares had secret meanings...

It is this aspect — Chess as meaning and meditation — which Hesse attempts

to capture in the Glass Bead Game:

A reader who chanced to be ignorant of the Glass Bead Game

might imagine such a Game pattern as rather similar to the
pattern of a chess game, except that the significance of the pieces
and the potentialities of their relationships to one another and
their effect upon one another multiplied manyfold and an actual
content must be ascribed to each piece, each constellation, each
chess move, of which this move, configuration, and so on is the
symbol.

And it is this aspect, too, that my friend and colleague William Horden brilliantly
captures in his Chess-variant Glass Bead Game, Intrachange...

A Game not unlike Go...

Field of combat or star field?

Go board from the game
between the Wu prince Sun Ce
and his general Lue Fan

Go, like Chess, was originally a highly symbolic Game. Thus the historian Ban
Gu (32-92 AD) wrote:

The board must be square and represents the laws of the earth.
The lines must be straight like the divine virtues. There are
black and white stones, divided like yin and yang. Their
arrangement on the board is like a model of the heavens.
 Again, there is a marked aesthetic side to Go, which in no way invalidates the
competitive and combative aspect:

Go offers both the fierce intellectual challenge of life and death

combat as well as the aesthetic pleasure of finding beautiful
plays that build territory efficiently and harmoniously. The
game can shift from the one to other in the blink of an eye.

How do the HipBone Games compare with Chess and Go?

Instructively. How about that for an evasive yet positive answer?

Obviously, no Go master or Chess aficionado is going to take kindly to the

suggestion that the upstart HipBone Games are entirely comparable to the
two great classics of gaming — which in any case have their own arguments as
to which is the subtler or more complex game.

Nevertheless, as Don Oldenburg noted in the Washington Post,

Glass Bead Game players talk of those uncommon

moves the way chess players cherish a great gambit,
the way Jungians embrace moments of synchronicity.

HipBone Games are first and foremost glasperlenspielen, Glass Bead Games,
and their qualities are the qualities of the genre: the play of ideas against ideas,
rather than of pieces against pieces, troops against troops. In this respect, the
HipBone Games resemble Johann Valentin Andreae’s game of the virtues against
the vices, or the game of Enochian Chess which Yeats played, more than they
resemble either Chess or Go...

And yet there is a marked combative and “territorial” quality to a HipBone

Game, there are strategies and tactics to be weighed — a player can dominate
the board from position 9 in a WaterBird game, playing it too soon can leach
much of the enjoyment from a game, while playing it too late can be a next-to-
impossible task...

For those who like fierce combat to spice up their aesthetics, there are “wrinkles”
— additional HipBone rule-sets such as “Trumps”, in which a player can capture
his or her opponent’s moves — which can do much to intensify the viciousness
of the Games.

In the final analysis, the point is not whether the HipBone Games do or do not
resemble Chess or Go, but that they share with them a classic quality — they
can be played with enjoyment by young or old, at any level from beginner
through enthusiastic amateur to mastery.
Appendix E: Meditations for Glass Bead Game Players
i
First, I ask you to consider the rhyme of “womb” with “tomb” — which has
the delicious property that these two words describe, if you will, the two
chambers from which we enter this life and through which we leave it. Not
only do the two words rhyme on the ear, in other words, they can also be said
to rhyme in meaning.

Meditation: if you were wearing headphones, and these two words were spoken,
what would the stereophony of their meanings be?

ii
Next, I would invite you to consider visual rhymes — known as “graphic
matches” in film studies. Take, for instance, lipstick and bullet. To rephrase the
opening of a book I am still working on:

The conjunction comes from a Yardley’s cosmetic advertisement

of a few years back: a woman model wearing a leather bandolier
with a variety of lipsticks in place of bullets. It is a powerful
image partly because it plays on the visual similarity of bullets
and lipsticks, each in their own metal jacket. Indeed, the visual
match between them is astonishing — and the lurking Freudian
visual pun only adds to our delight.

The juxtaposition of lipstick and bullet I take to be an example of a certain

kind of visual logic, a visual kinship. Transposing their relationship from visual
to verbal terms, one might say that lipstick and bullet “rhyme.”

But there is more than the purely visual here too... There is also a meaning
rhyme that echoes in Freud’s pairing of Eros and Thanatos, in Wagner’s
Liebestod, in Woody Allen, and in the opening sentence of Bedier’s Tristan and
Iseult: “My Lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and death...”

Meditation: what is the stereophany (by analogy with epiphany, theophany —

neologism intended) of the meanings of lipstick and bullet?

iii
Consider next musical rhymes — fugal treatment of a theme — and if you have
the means, play yourself Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903, or
Passacaglia and Fugue, BWV 582...
iv
Next I would ask you to consider — briefly — rhymes between ideas
themselves... Ponder, for instance, the twin themes of the myth of Narcissus,
and the rhyme that exists between the idea of “reflection” and that of “echo”...

v
Consider rhymes between things, between names and the things they name
(onomatopoeia), and between ideas and names and things and images:

Seen together, aerial maps of river estuaries and road systems,

feathers, fern leaves, branching blood vessels, nerve ganglia,
electron micrographs of crystals and the tree-like patterns of
electrical discharge-figures are connected, although they are
vastly different in place, origin, and scale. Their similarity of
form is by no means accidental.
— G Kepes, New Landscapes of Art & Science

When the surf echoes and crashes out to the horizon, its whorls
repeat in similar ratios inside our flesh… We are extremely
complicated, but our bloods and hormones are fundamentally
seawater and volcanic ash, congealed and refined. Our skin
shares its chemistry with the maple leaf and moth wing. The
currents our bodies regulate share a molecular flow with raw
sun. Nerves and flashes of lightning are related events woven
into nature at different levels.
— Grossinger, Planet Medicine

vi
The links of association that are possible between one thing and another are
extraordinary, and rhymes of the sorts we have been discussing are just the
beginning...

On being asked:

What is the intersection of fish and flames?

my list-colleague Barbara Weitbrecht responded:

Fish being cooked ... flame-colored fish ... fish flickering

through sunlit water like flames ... things to do with water: one
in it, one antagonistic to it ... fish and flames both images of
sleep, of subconscious ideas surfacing, of revelation ... fish and
flames both images of the Deity ....
vii
Consider all things as the calligraphy of a god or gods...

viii
Consider, finally, the stereophany between these two elegant paragraphs, one
written by the contemporary American poet and naturalist, Annie Dillard, and
the other by her compatriot Haniel Long:

My friend Jens Jensen, who is an ornithologist, tells me that

when he was a boy in Denmark he caught a big carp embedded
in which, across the spinal vertebrae, were the talons of an
osprey. Apparently years before, the fish hawk had dived for its
prey, but had misjudged its size. The carp was too heavy for it
to lift up out of the water, and so after a struggle the bird of
prey was pulled under and drowned. The fish then lived as best
it could with the great bird clamped to it, till time disintegrated
the carcass, and freed it, all but the bony structure of the talon.
— Haniel Long, Letter to Saint Augustine

And once, says Ernest Seton Thompson — once, a man shot

an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the
dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The
supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and
the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck,
and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the
air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole
weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or
did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel
with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the
beautiful airborne bones?
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

These are the beads from my glass rosary. These are the rhymings of the ten
thousand things. It is with such meditations as these that we may build the
“hundred-gated cathedral of Mind” to which Hesse refers...

Stereophony and Stereophany

I have used the terms “stereophony” and “rhyme” here to describe a form of
meditation in which two ideas are “kept in mind” simultaneously — so that as
with stereoscopic vision or stereophonic sound, both merge into a “third thing”
without loss of detail but with an additional “depth dimension”.

I call this effect “stereophany” by analogy with “epiphany” and “theophany”

— from the greek “phainein”, to show or shine forth.
Cover image The Glass Harmonica used courtesy of Christian Bok
from his brilliant book Crystallography (Coach House Press,
Toronto, 1994, ISBN 0-88910—496-4.

Game boards and rules can be printed out or downloaded from the
HipBone Games website: http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone --
see also http://www.beadgaming.com

Charles Cameron, designer of the HipBone Games, was Editor at

Large for The Cursor, a magazine for game developers, and list-
owner of Magister-L, an Internet mailing list for discussion of
spirituality in games. Charles is an Oxford graduate, writer and poet
based in California. He was ably assisted in this publication and
elsewhere by David Hughes in friendship, webdesign, organization,
finance, and in-house publishing.

To contact HipBone Games, send email to hipbone@earthlink.net,

or write to Charles Cameron, 3059 East Ave R-4, Palmdale CA
93550.

Copyright © Charles Cameron, 1999-2006. All rights reserved.