The Real Glass Bead Game
An emerging new genre for the creative development of ideas
‘As long as a sufficiently high degree of internal correlation and causal coupling allows this island of dancing micro-events in your brain to emerge, you live in a single reality. A single, unified world appears to you.’ Thomas Metzinger
From an actual playable version of the Glass Bead Game emerges a new genre of ‘games played,’ which uses techniques from music and poetry to develop and express a theme in a way that adds up more than the sum of its parts.
First we’ll reintroduce the basics of the game and how to play it, then consider how the results of the game are affected by the way they are expressed, and finally, when it works well, how these results might show us something new and surprising, and sometimes even worth preserving.
Games of theme and variations
The family resemblance between all the games here is that they develop a single idea across different contexts, like a theme is developed into variations in music.
To play the ‘pencil-and-paper’ version, all you need is something to record the moves of the game on. To play the ‘game-on-the-beach’ version, you can just write in the sand. The theme is put at the top of a criss-cross pattern, and each of the variations are recorded underneath. The criss-cross pattern, which resembles the pattern on snakeskin, gives this family of games its name: Rattlesnake Games.
To play with others, pick one theme for the whole game (e.g. ‘apple’), and two contexts to vary the theme across (e.g. ‘music’ and ‘religion’). Take it in turns to claim one of the two unclaimed contexts, explain how it is linked to the theme, and add a new context of your choice (e.g. The Beatles’ Apple Corps record label could link ‘apple’ to the context of ‘music,’ and ‘science’ could be added as the next context).
You can play just for the fun of developing a thematic idea, or you can play competitively. To beat another player, simply anticipate how they will link the theme to a given context. (You will need to make a note as evidence to prove it.) To avoid being beaten, don’t be too obvious in your links. Of course, if you all feel you’ve exhausted a theme for now, or it’s becoming repetitive, you can always agree on a draw.
The card game version, Variations, is played in the same way, and the deck just helps by giving good suggestions for themes, and making sure the game keeps moving across diverse areas by providing cards with 36 ideas for contexts, ranging across different domains of knowledge, several types of uncertainty, various bodily functions and senses, and diverse emotions.
To play ‘solitaire’ or practice your linking, pick a theme and any number of contexts (three is good for a short game over a quiet lunch), and link the theme to each.
Basic structure of the Variations card decks
By now, there are different Variations card decks available in print-and-play versions. They all have the same context cards, but the themes in a deck might be based on Leonardo da Vinci’s innovations, concepts in modern warfighting, or the Alethiometer from Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy.
The Fluxus Variations deck was the first to be published commercially in 2021. It features themes from the Fluxus art movement, such as Randomness, Improvisation, Anomaly and Incompleteness, and is subtitled ‘The poetry of connections at the intersection of ideas.’ The deck is positioned as poetry ‘to propose something about interconnectedness, reexpression and reinterpretation, rather than demonstrate specific connections, expressions and interpretations as found in a fixed poem… the connections surface only in the act of anybody playing the game and finding their own connections, just as in Fluxus poetry the performance itself creates the result.’
The Glass Bead Game deck, to be published in 2024, features glass beads on the theme cards, sometimes with initial suggestions as to what a bead might represent, such as Secrets, Value or Clarity, and players are asked to reflect on the extent to which the bead represents the assigned idea. Some theme cards feature only the glass bead itself, and it’s up to the players to assign a meaning to be developed.
The traces of the game as poetry
Separate from the Variations deck and the rules of play are the traces of the actual games it produces, just as any game design holds the unrealised potential for all the games which can be played with it. Some games are more memorable than others, owing to the players’ artistry and the novelty of their linking of the theme to the contexts. Paying attention to the way the connections are expressed adds to the enjoyment of play and can reinforce the connections, so that association at the level of the presentation of ideas promotes the perception of semantic association in a way that approaches poetry.
Although this is a game of ideas, it isn’t a place for argument, and again in a similar way to poetry, where incredible thoughts can be believed and crushing doubts can be surrendered to, for a little while, contrasting ideas can be placed side by side and enjoyed for the energy they generate between them.
Sometimes the result is immediately recognisable as poetry, when the content of a game is summarised or reexpressed in a poetic form, which is not a requirement but may happen, and sometimes the poetry is only incompletely discernible in the nature of the incipient thought process and experience. Either way, the game is an invitation for the player to take part in a manner of poetic production and thought, which may or may not result in producing an actual poem.
Over time, in practice, the results of games have developed from merely listing the links in the heat of play, to sometimes revisiting them later, exploring and expanding on them in different forms. One such form is the haibun, a Japanese form which combines prose and verse, and which lends itself well to an adequate exploration of links, accompanied by a short and perhaps even intriguingly gnomic poetic summary in a haiku. This was the form used in the 2020 travel diary ‘Notes on a winter journey to the interior’ and the chapbook ‘Fourteen Short Glass Bead Games,’ published in 2022.
Also, the connections between the theme and contexts in a game can range from being individual ‘point to point’ links, to associations which aim for some overall coherence. Ambitious players may concern themselves with games that connect ideas into larger structures, and explore how individual connections can fit together harmoniously in the context of a larger game, and what might possibly bind them together further, beyond the unifying effect of the theme itself across all its variations.
Sounding together in symphony
The idea of a symphony, then, is to follow a single theme ultimately through all of the contexts in the deck, to ‘sound together’ the ‘total contents and values of our culture,’ as Hermann Hesse put it, while multiplying the particular cases in which a given theme can be found across its developing variations, and augment reality through connections based on similarity and contrast.
The First Symphony, in *Dheh (meaning ‘to put [a thought] into someone’ (e.g. by the gods) and ‘to inspire, reveal’ in Proto Indo European), subtitled ‘A Galalith Bead Game,’ follows the theme of inspiration, tracing ancient metaphors for inspiration which involve milk solids forming out of milk, and explores links between ritual, poetry and games.
The Second Symphony, in Sol, and subtitled ‘Fool’s Symphony,’ is centred around ideas associated with the sun and gold, including in the musico-mathematical cosmogony of the ancient Greeks and Athanasius Kircher’s music of the spheres, and explores what makes a symphony a symphony, even when it’s a game in the form of a long poem. The poetic forms are determined by the content: the first movement uses hexameters in metrical lines which combine feet of two and three syllables, both numbers which drive the ancient cosmogony being described, and the number of lines in of each stanza builds in multiples of two and three throughout the movement; the second movement is a contrafactum based on the chorus of a pop song called ‘Gold’; the third movement is based on the rhythm of Haydn’s ‘Le Matin’ symphony; the last movement is in sapphic stanzas, with particular reference to Sappho’s famous Hesperus fragment, which is remodelled in a coda to the symphony as an address to the morning star visible in the dawn sky.
Considering the long history of classical music, and all the individual elements of theory and practice which had to develop over literally thousands of years before it could reach the heights of the symphony, perhaps it’s too ambitious to try to arrive at a comparable form so soon in the development of a genre.
So, after all then, the results of the game at this point may fall well short of being poetry. Maybe in someone else’s hands it wouldn’t. Nor perhaps is it even really a game, but a creed, a way of seeing, a gift of believing. If only for a little while. But the game itself, and its subsequent evolution, holds the potential to develop into a new genre for the creative development of ideas, both musical and poetic in its methods, but sui generis in its outcomes.
