Your life has been gamified. When you log your run with a smartphone app, shop at your local supermarket and collect rewards, or book a holiday online to get points, you are playing games. However, while you might not be aware of how your everyday life has been gamified, the central role of games in our lives is nothing new. For centuries across the world, games have guided and inspired informal conventions and interactions between people, societies, and cultures. For example, the modern-day game Snakes and Ladders has its roots in a South Asian game called the Game of Knowledge, a cosmological game that represented the journey of souls through existence towards liberation. More than just entertainment, it was used for education, divination, and self-reflection in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the British brought it to Europe in the late nineteenth century, it was stripped of its original content and repurposed for teaching Victorian morals to children. However, even that fell away, and today the game is purely abstract and played among adults and children across the world. It could lead us wonder: Why do we know so little about the history of games? Believe it or not, games are intertwined with our knowledge of the heavens—and so to understand games and their social function today, we also need to understand the history of the astral sciences.
Ludic Knowledge and the Astral Sciences
The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Research Group “Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia” (ASTRA) is devoted to exploring how cosmography and heavenly knowledge has been communicated, traveled, and integrated across Asia, including examining omens and divination. Central to Asian cultures for centuries, games have often brought ludic knowledge into dialog with cosmography and divination and performed the astral sciences through a playful exchange of ideas. However, to date, there has been virtually no research on the history of games in Asia, with the exception of a few studies on chess and Snakes and Ladders, and their connection with the heavens.
Based in ASTRA, Postdoctoral Scholar Jacob Schmidt-Madsen’s research project “Rolling the Planets, Moving the Heavens” seeks to remedy that. As Schmidt-Madsen explains, games have been used as a pretext to meet and socialize, as a form of negotiation between different cultures, and even as a foreplay to courtship. Indeed, rather than focusing on merely games and their rules, Schmidt-Madsen brings a cultural analysis to examine three nineteenth-century Sanskrit texts that describe games within their pages that have never before been published or translated to explore how living traditions of play have been codified as knowledge and brought into conversation with the heavens.
The first text is the Cetovinodanakavya, or the poem on the diversions of the mind, written by the astrologer Daji Jyotirvid from Kolhapur in 1821. It describes the joys and hardships of pilgrimage and includes a detailed section on games to be enjoyed while traveling between holy sites. The second text is the Kautukanidhi, or the treasure of pastimes, written around 1850 by Krishnaraja Wodeyar III, who ruled the Princely State of Mysore from 1799 until his death in 1868 and was an avid inventor of games and puzzles. During his reign, Krishnaraja transformed astrological dice games into elaborate models of religious and scientific knowledge systems. The third text is the Kridakaushalya, or skilfulness in games, written by the astrologer Harikrishna Sharma from Aurangabad in 1872. Harikrishna saw games as straddling the divide between play and prognostication and prefaced his description of individual games with a discussion of the mystical properties of game board diagrams as tools of divination.
Prognostication, divination, and navigation through games is nothing new. In fact, taken together, these three Sanskrit game texts document the early modern reception of a wide variety of traditional South Asian games that have long been associated with the astral sciences as cosmological models or tools of divination. The study of these texts brings to light new perspectives on the history of games and illuminates how games perform the astral sciences in our everyday lives in and of themselves. To see games as performing the astral sciences is also to see and experience knowledge of the heavens in a different way.
Performing the Astral Sciences
To get a deeper understanding of the creative mechanisms that have guided astral sciences and games across the whole of the Asian geography, it is necessary to look beyond parochial borders and hegemonic narratives. The performance of astral knowledge through games and play can help us understand how our observations of the heavens have been communicated, transported, and integrated throughout human knowledge cultures for centuries.
At a time in history when everything in our lives has been gamified, it is even more pressing to understand the history of games and how we are playing with the stars. The next time you log your run with a smartphone app, shop at your local supermarket and collect rewards, or book a holiday online to get points, think about how the stars, the planets, and the moons have guided our lives, our cultures, and our social relations forever through games.
Read more
Jacob Schmidt-Madsen interviewed for the Berliner Antike-Kolleg blog
Jacob Schmidt-Madsen’s article “Discovering Dadu: A Ludemic Enigma from South Asia” in Board Game Studies Journal
