Glass Bead Game

In his last novel, The Glass Bead Game (1943), Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) regarded the seventeenth-century German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) as one of the the precursors of the Glass Bead Game.

The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi or Das Glasperlenspiel is a (Nobel prize winning) novel by Hermann Hesse. It is also the key image in that novel: a game played by associating ideas around which an entire society is built.

A prototypical arrangement (made with just a few lines of code in Visual Python). Lit nodes indicate current activity. These nodes are random, but in an actual Game, Players "string" nodes together forming "attractors" in a Self Organizing system. Actual game rules (from an undisclosed German author) can be found. But skip to "RULES" below.

[…]

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

[…]

The Glass Bead Game is an immense Physics Of Information, representing the gamut of humanity's knowledge and its on-going, perpetual relationship to the social sphere - embodying an Epistemics Of Quantity.

Here is a translated version using wiki:

1) Each wiki page represents a bead. If the wiki were What It Wants To Be, user pages/beads would tend towards roundedness, while idea (or "concept") beads would have corners. (Ask Yourself: is the web itself, with its square screen, a bunch of beads?)

2) A bead can be voted up or down (ex. Thumbs Up). As they are voted up, the bead gets bigger by a one unit (voted down, smaller). Visualize The Wiki.

3) Beads can be Wiki Linked together to form associations with force proportional to number of links. This forms clustering. Note this force is not equal in both directions, because it gets multiplied by the Creator As Owner's User Ranking.

4) Beads can be clasped together and contained, forming groups (add a Category Wiki Tag) or broken into smaller beads (by Adding New Pages).

These are the three primary actions on the beads (voting, linking, and grouping). You'll see that wiki already embodies much of these rules naturally, which is likely why it is so powerful. But, you can't have the GBG without a Three Dimensional Visualization Model.

(Spoiler: With just these simple rules, there's a Self Organizing dynamic that tends to create constellations of linked content, orbiting around a center of authority.)

What is a bead then? It is a little universe of its own. One can enter a bead, and view its contents: a movie, a stub of an article, etc. A little pice of life inside the bead. But what really blows up the universe is when the bead contains a game playing within it.

[A tiddler is another name for a bead? Jeremy Ruston again recently called this a ludicrous name … ludi = "game". Tiddlers are the beads of Tiddly Wiki.]

Nice, I might use that for a Class name. Something interesting, in computer programming, a "string" represents a type -- characters "strung" together to form a type. (Strings, of course are used to string "beads" in the physical world, as in a necklace.)

I noticed your edits, beginning with 'Players "string" nodes together...' rather than linking them. Your reference to characters / beads strung together reminds me of these words of Nikos Kazantzakis:

"But it cannot be contained in the twentysix letters of an alphabet which we string out in rows; we know that all these words, these allegories, these thoughts, and these incantations are, once more, but a new mask with which to conceal the Abyss."

Hesse himself in The GBG refers to the limits of intellect and language. The Music Master advises Knecht where to seek truth:

The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.

Both of the above quotes collected as a theme countervailing the GBG: remuse.tiddlyspace.com

[…]

The key element, however, not discussed much in the book, is how the beads relate to the Real World. The Internet has unconsciously implemented part of it, with the wiki going further. Help me implement it in its totality with a Unified Data Model.

[…]