the glass bead game

"Final novel by Hermann Hesse, published in two volumes in 1943 in German as Das Glasperlenspiel,
and sometimes translated as Magister Ludi. The book is an intricate bildungsroman about humanity's
eternal quest for enlightenment and for synthesis of the intellectual and the participatory life.
Set in the 23rd century, the novel purports to be a biography of Josef Knecht ("servant" in German),
who has been reared in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite
to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game,
which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic,
and philosophy. This he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game). "

a passage:

"The rules, sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing
upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music, and capable of expressing and establishing
interrelationships between the contents and the conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines.

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as,
for example, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors of his palette.

All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras -
on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like an organist on the organ. "

How to implement a game like that?
It sounds like hypertext theory so one way to go at it could be that players create links between "cultural objects"
(text, sound, image, music, scientific formula, video clip, statistic, etc) they put at play on a board.
Following this line of thought there is http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone/index.html who sets the basics.
To augment the level of complexity, the next step would be to theorize how each link could cover as much ground as
possible or how they could register into an interdisciplinary strategy etc
I have a problem with the boards "hipbone" is using because they are irrelevant to the gameplay as I see it / a
game like "the glass bead game" should have a board as extensible as our culture can be; one way to do it
might be to apply the six principles of the rhizome as listed by Deleuze and Guattari
(Connection, Heterogeneity, Multiplicity, Asignifying rupture, Cartography, Decalcomania) to a serie of boards slightly
more complex, like the one used in "the player of games" by Iain M Banks:

" (...) Gurgeh and the drone called Worthil were, seemingly, at one
end of a huge room many times larger than the one they in fact occupied. Before them stretched a floor covered with a
stunningly complicated and seemingly chaotically abstract and irregular mosaic pattern, which in places rose up like hills
and dipped into valleys. Looking closer, it could be seen that the hills were not solid, but rather stacked, tapering
levels of the same bewildering meta-pattern, creating linked, multi-layered pyramids over the fantastic landscape, which,
on still closer inspection, had what looked like bizarrely sculpted game-pieces standing on its riotously coloured surface.
The whole construction must have measured at least twenty metres to a side.
'That,' Gurgeh asked, 'is a board?' He swallowed. He had never seen, never heard about, never had the least hint of a game
as complicated as this one must surely be, if those were individual pieces and areas.

'One of them.'

'How many are there?' It couldn't be real. It had to be a joke. They were making fun of him. No human brain could
possibly cope with a game on such a scale. It was impossible. It had to be.

'Three. All that size, plus numerous minor ones, played with cards as well. "

The thing is, I would like to give the "Culture" treatment to the board and the gameplay of Azad :-)

What other novel is openly inspired by "the glass bead game"?

Anyone would like to brainstorm on the theory of such a game?

Here's another quote from "The player of games" to show some directions possible for the gameplay:
"(..) memorising the moves each piece could make, as well as their values, handedness, potential and actual morale-strength,
their varied intersecting time/power-curves, and their specific skill harmonics as related to different areas of the boards;
he pored over tables and grids setting out the qualities inherent in the suits, numbers, levels and sets of the associated
cards and puzzled over the place in the greater play the lesser boards occupied, and how the elemental imagery in the later
stages fitted in with the more mechanistic workings of the pieces, boards and die-matching in the earlier rounds, while
at the same time trying to find some way of linking in his mind the tactics and strategy of the game as it was usually
played, both in its single-game mode one person against another - and in the multiple-game versions, when up to ten
contestants might compete in the same match, with all the potential for alliances, intrigue, concerted action, pacts
and treachery that such a game-form made possible."

That was a very competitive and agressive game made by a cruel empire but I like to keep in mind an "ideal game" would not
have tobe so limited; many styles of play can be possible, different shades from competitive to collaborative.

It could be a good playground to theorize democratic progressive values and actions and how they fit within different complex systems,
Theory of Everything, game theory, hypertextuality, cognitive science, multimedia, autopoiesis, pop culture theory or whatever etc etc

ps I'm not interested in no esoteric nonsense and other kaballah :-)

I hope it will be a subject of interest.