Glass Bead Game

The GlassBeadGame or MagisterLudi or DasGlasperlenspiel? is a (Nobel prize winning) novel by HermannHesse. It is also the key image in that novel: a game played by associating ideas around which an entire society is built.

Just a quibble: Nobel prizes in literature are not awarded for or to books, rather to authors for a body of work.

Synopsis:: "Setting his story in the distant, post-Holocaust future, Hesse tells of an elite cult of intellectuals occupying themselves with an elaborate game that employs all the cultural and scientific knowledge of the ages. The most imaginative and prophetic of Hesse's works."

Paperback: ISBN 080501246X ; Hardback: ISBN 084466524X

And there's "Hermann Hesse's Futuristic Idealism. the Glass Bead Game and Its Predecessors (European University Papers. Series 1: German Language and Literature)" by Roger Norton ISBN 3261008563

See also: The Glass Bead Game Wiki http://www.ludism.org/gbgwiki/, and a portal http://www.glassbeadgame.com/

While speaking to RichardDrake in the pub the other night I was reminded of the GBG and some attempts to run games over the web.

There are in the US a number of people who want to play the GlassBeadGame. They have a couple of mailing lists (one of which I used to contribute to quite frequently, before Wiki consumed my soul ;). A couple of years back, I went to the States for the express purpose of meeting some of these people, interesting folk.

Some of these people have devised various GBG sets ("set" as in snakes-and-ladders set), to enable people to approximate the game. In Hesse's novel, the game is highly ritualized and has an invented formal language associated with it. Some of the realized games follow this route. One is like a card game, one is a board game, see http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone/ and one is highly formalised, see http://www36.pair.com/waldzell/GBG/index.html

There were for a while a few attempts to use the web as a medium for game playing: a "move" would be a URL, more or less, but I don't remember any of them being successful, I believe because there was too much bureaucracy involved in submitting a move to a moderator and so on. However, when discussing the open nature of Wiki and its relatives (and some of the responses to that openness we had seen) with Richard I realized that a Wiki may well be the ideal electronic medium for a GBG, and that, unintentionally, the WikiWikiWeb is the closest thing to a GlassBeadGame, in function and spirit, (albeit focussed on a particular domain) I have yet seen. --KeithBraithwaite

See "Little Manual for Players of the Glass Bead Game: The Way of Visual Contemplation" by George Pennington ISBN 0906540305

I have read that Hesse was quite annoyed that people would ask him how they could play the GlassBeadGame -- RobertField

No doubt. That's like asking LewisCarroll where the rabbit hole is. While I liked all the GBGers I met in the states, and while their many games were interesting and worth-while as games, I did at the back of my mind have the feeling that somehow they just didn't get it (not that I would claim to). -- KeithBraithwaite

Hi Keith! Good to read you again. -- HipBone. Hi Charles, its good to be read by you again. How did you find your way to the Wiki? I'm participating in a seminar on knowledge management as part of Howard Rheingold's "brainstorms" online community, the topic of the GBG came up, and someone on "our" wiki http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?GlassBeadGame mentioned that there was a synchronous mention in "another" wiki, referencing this page. -- HipBone

Robert, I wrote a longish piece about this issue [fashioning playable variants after Hesse's Game] a while back, see http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone/Consider.html Basically, Hesse (a) claimed to have played the game himself, in an autobiographical poem, and (b) appears to have derived it from a game (a physical game, in a box, with moving parts) devised by an artist friend of his called Max Bucherer. Neither of these facts leads me to suppose that we'll ever be able to play "Hesse's GBG" as such, but both encourage me to think devising playable variants is a worthwhile endeavor.

I also find it fascinating that ChristopherAlexander was writing about the need for a Glass Bead Game before the publication of "A PatternLanguage", and that JohnHolland is on record as saying that he hopes his life work (in genetic algorithms &c) will add up to a GBG... -- HipBone

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