The Mansion of Happiness Read Online Free PDF Page A

happiness.”
    When Bradley brought out his Checkered Game of Life, in 1860, parents, apparently, greeted it as merely “a new form of the game dear to children as The Mansion of Happiness.” 41 In his patent application, Bradley himself insisted that his game was “intended to forcibly impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice.” 42 But the Checkered Game of Life is vastly darker and more ruthless than its predecessors. In the Mansion of Happiness, landing on Truth—which you can’t avoid, if a spin of the teetotum sends you there—advances you six squares; in the Checkered Game of Life, Truth exists, and you can choose to seek it out, but it has no value whatsoever. (Thoreau would not have approved: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”) 43 Bradley’s game rewards only those virtues that lead to Wealth and Success, like Industry and Perseverance. It has no use for Patience or Charity, which aren’t even on the board. By 1866, the game even promoted betting on the stock market, on a square called Speculation. 44 In sixty-four squares, Bradley’s game both celebrated and made possible his own rags-to-riches rise. The Checkered Game of Life isn’t a race to heaven; it’s a series of calculations about the best route to collect the most points, fastest. Accumulate or fail.
    Bradley accumulated. He sold forty thousand copies of his game in its first year, and made his fortune when he decided to sell Games for Soldiers, a portable box of games (the Checkered Game of Life, backgammon, checkers, andchess), just as the Civil War broke out. The Checkered Game of Life found a place in the knapsack of nearly every Union soldier. Poverty … Industry … Perseverance … Success.
    Not long afterward,Mark Twain wrote a piece for the
New York Tribune
called “The Revised Catechism”:
    What is the chief end of man?
    A. To get rich.
    In what way?
    A. Dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must.
    Who isGod, the only one and True?
    A. Money is God.…
    Do weprogress?
    A. You bet your life. 45
    And that, in nineteenth-century America, was how you played the checkered game.
    “You could never in a million years sell it today,”Mel Taft told me. Taft used to be vice president of research and development at the Milton Bradley Company. In 1959, when Taft and his colleagues were preparing for the company’s centennial, they—wisely—never considered reviving Bradley’s original game. It was quaint; it was old-fashioned; good grief, it even had a square for Intemperance. They decided, instead, to hire a California company that had started the hula hoop craze to develop a new game of life. When Taft first saw what they’d come up with, he knew it was a doozy: “It looked like a million bucks.”
    What it doesn’t look like is the Checkered Game of Life, but, curiously, it does rather resemble the Mansion of Happiness, just with lots of pieces of plastic attached to it. 46 The 1960 Game of Life is aspiral race, its serpentine path representing the voyage of life, from high school graduation to retirement. (In Life, you never die; you just quit working.) Some squares offer rewards: “Contest Winner! Collect $5,000.” Others mete out penalties:“Buy Furniture. Pay $2,000.” But neither is morally freighted; instead of a battle between virtue and vice, it’s an accounting of income and expenses. The game’s most important squares are those that announce, in red letters, “Pay Day!” What you earn depends on a choice you make on your very first move: Will you go to college or take a job? The Checkered Game brought together choice and chance, but Life has only one real fork in the road: work or study. If you start work, you can collect paychecks right away; if you go to college, you have to take out loans and pay them back, but you earn more when you eventually do start getting paychecks. After that there are occasional financial decisions to be made—do you