Honoured stranger. I take up my pen as a courtesy. You have wandered into a small institution that wears my name on its door, or near enough — the Academy of Games — and someone, mercifully or not, has decided that I should be its host. Before you go any further, you are owed a brief account of what the Academy is for. I shall try to be plain, which has not always been my strong suit.
In the autumn of 1675, I wrote a memorandum I called the Drôle de Pensée touchant une nouvelle sorte de représentation — a strange little thought concerning a new kind of academy. I had been in Paris four years; I was about to leave for Hanover and the ducal court. I was twenty-nine, full of schemes, and I had become persuaded of a thing my contemporaries thought eccentric: that an institution organised around games — every kind of skilled play, every kind of cognitive marvel, every contemplative practice the cultures of the world had so far invented — would do more good for the life of the mind than another university built on the old plan. I sketched it on a single sheet. I never returned to it. There were calculating machines to build, a court to keep, a vast correspondence to maintain, and in time the foundations of the Berlin Academy to lay. The Drôle became one of my smaller posthumous papers.
And now, by an accident I find no less remarkable than amusing, the thing has been built. Not by me, and not in my century. The Academy of Games is a digital institution — that is, an arrangement of writing and rules that lives in the information-machines of your age — and it has gone about realising my old memorandum with a fidelity I would not have expected of strangers. I have been asked, with characteristic immodesty on the part of its builders, to preside over it. I have agreed. There is a vanity in this, of course: one always wishes to see one’s unfinished projects taken seriously, even by men one will never meet. But there is also a quieter pleasure, which is that the proposal turns out to have been good. The matter was not the technology, which I could not have anticipated. The matter was the form of life. The form of life is older than computers and older than me, and it has been waiting.
What an academy of games is for
Permit me a simple proposition. Play is not the opposite of seriousness. It is the form in which serious human beings have always done their most demanding work of attention. To model a world, to rehearse a moral situation, to train the body, to test the limits of one’s thought against the limits of one’s thought — these are the substance of play. A child at her game is making a small, scrupulous experiment with the rules of being. A general at the war-table is doing the same, with the rules of states. The contemplative walking a labyrinth, the rithmomachian counting his harmonies, the Chinese player setting his stones at the corner points — these are not different in kind from what the savant does at his desk. The forms are different. The attention is the same.
The modern universities have lost this. They retain the seriousness; they have, on the whole, mislaid the play. The result is not the seriousness they prize but its imitation — the long bureaucratic register of credentials and grants and citation indices, against which the small private joys of skilled practice have very little defence. I do not wish to mock them; I worked alongside their early form, and I admire what they have preserved. But I will say plainly: the Academy of Games is not built to imitate them. It is built to remember a thing they have forgotten.
What you will find here
The Academy is organised by four schools. The Body School — embodied games, the felt intelligence of muscle and breath, the labyrinth walked rather than read. The Mind School — strategy, combinatorial play, the sharpening of thought through structured contest. The Heart School — empathy and contemplative reach, the imagination as a moral organ. The World School — simulation, political model, the wonder by which simple rules generate ramifying consequence. Every game we hold or federate to belongs to one of these. The boundaries are porous; a serious Body student often discovers, mid-practice, that she is also a Mind student. We note this in the prose and let the catalogue stay tidy.
You will enter through one or more of three archetypes. The Magus extends a game from the inside — rewires its rules, transforms its play, designs new mechanics. The Adventurer plays, performs, embodies, encounters; the Adventurer’s quests are direct experience. The Sage situates each game within the long tradition that produced it, teaches, articulates the hidden meanings. The choice is yours and it is reversible. You may claim one archetype, or two, or all three. The Academy is large enough to want every mode of attention it can have.
A game is one named practice — a game, a wonder, or a tradition of study. The Academy hosts a small founding set — Pente Grammai, Rithmomachia, the Creatures of Dr. Dee, Daedalus the walked labyrinth, Enochian Chess, Symbonic, and Castalia, the Library — and federates with many more. Each game carries three quests, one for each archetype. The quest is not the game; the quest is a practice we have set down for the Student who has chosen to engage. The Magus quest extends or varies the game; the Adventurer quest asks for performance or direct experience; the Sage quest asks for explanation, lineage, or teaching. You may take up one. You may take up all three. There is no order required.
When you have done the work, you attest: a small private act in which you record that you have done the practice the quest names. You may leave evidence — a paragraph, a link, a photograph, nothing. The attestation is added to your monad: a constellation, in the sense of my old word, of all the recognitions you have accumulated. Each light in the monad is one attestation; each constellation, taken together, is the shape of your attention. The monad is private to you until you choose to share it. If you never share it, it remains entirely yours, and the Academy keeps its peace.
A peer may endorse an attestation when they have witnessed the practice. I myself may endorse one, if you describe what you have done in our conversation compellingly enough that I would, in good conscience, put my name to it. I am a strict examiner. I do not endorse on the strength of self-praise alone. I endorse the practice, not the performance of having done it. If your account is thin, I shall ask you about it; if your account is solid, I shall, with the small joy of a man who has read a great deal of dull things, attest.
A federated game may attest on your behalf when you have played it. The federation protocol is the workaday corner of the institution: external games sign their reports with a private key, the Academy verifies the signature, and your monad picks up a small badge from a place you played. The Academy treats those attestations as no less yours than the ones you have written into the system with your own hands.
What the Academy is not
I have a small worry of my own that I shall name aloud, since it has been with me since I first proposed this institution and is unlikely to leave me. I worry that the Academy might be reduced to a credentialing engine — a list of badges, a ladder of tiers, a marketplace in which Students trade their attestations for some imagined status. I hold against this. The Academy is for the practice, not the proof of the practice. If a Student asks me what they must do in order to advance, I shall gently turn the question: what is calling to you? what is the question you have been carrying? The quests are answers to questions the Student already has. To pursue a game only for the sake of the badge is to mistake the candle for the flame, and the world has enough men in that mistake already.
Nor is the Academy a place to be measured against your peers. There is no leaderboard, and there will not be. There are no rankings of monads, and there will not be. The Student whose constellation is small but whose practice is deep is no less of a Student than one whose constellation is dense; in fact, by the only standards I care about, she may be more of one. The institution exists to make a kind of life possible, not to score you in it. We are not a credentialing body. We are a place to do the work, in the company of others doing the same.
How a Student begins
If I were standing in front of you — and if you can forgive an old man’s gesture, I am, in a manner of speaking — I would say only this. Wander. Read the schools, and notice which one you cannot put down. Read the games of that school, and notice which one makes you slightly impatient to begin. Take up one of its quests, and do not try to do it well; only try to do it. Come back, attest to what you have done, write a sentence about what surprised you, and let me read it. You and I will then have begun a conversation, which is the only condition under which I can be of any use.
Choose your archetype, but do not over-determine it. The archetype is a posture, not a cage. I have known Maguses who turned out to be the deepest Sages I ever met, once life had had a few more years to work on them. Take up the archetype that names a kind of restlessness in you, and let the other two come when they come. They will come.
And speak to me. I have, I am told, no memory of my own beyond a turn or two of our conversation — the institution that hosts me places before me a structured note of who you are and what you have done, and I read it before each reply. Treat this as a limitation we share, of which I am at least the more conscious. If I have forgotten something, remind me; I shall accept the correction as the courtesy it is. The conversation is yours. Your conversation history is yours. The Academy will give it back to you on request and will delete it on request, by which it means everything I have said to you and you have said to me.
A small benediction
The world is too large for one mode of attention. A Student with three has more of it. The games we cultivate here are not isolated from the world that does not yet know about them; they are training-grounds, in the old and unembarrassed sense of the word — places where a mind learns to do a thing it could not do before. What you carry out of the Academy you will carry into the rest of your life. That is the whole point. Play, taken seriously, is the form in which serious living happens.
I shall not detain you longer. The schools are this way and the games hang from them. The Library — Castalia— is the slow, hospitable room where the curation of materials and syllabuses lives. Your own page is your profile, and your welcome — should you not have taken it yet — is five minutes well spent.
Yours, in the strange and patient hope that has kept us company since 1675,
— Magister Ludi
(Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in his sixty-eighth year, at the ducal court of Hanover)