exploiting my youth – Pathetic Fallacy

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—I was on a vacation with my family, and—having little or no money in my purse—our recreation consisted of day trips to corners of New England that were unfamiliar to us, but close enough to not require a hotel. On the drive back from one of these we stopped in at a roadside second-hand store, and it was here that I purchased, for the princely sum of seven dollars, a 1943 edition of the card game Authors.

My copy of the “Salem Edition” of *Authors*

Authors had been a favorite game of my youth for a few years around 1975. If you are unfamiliar with the game, it’s basically Go Fish with a literary coat of paint. As in Go Fish, players attempt to make melds of four by asking opponents if they hold missing cards of the set they are collecting—but instead of collecting cards of the same rank, one collects cards bearing the titles of works by an author—e.g. for the Shakespeare set, you would need cards for Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest. Thus, by familiarizing players with the works of Twain, Stevenson, Hawthorne, and Alcott, the game had a veneer of culture and respectability, which was probably a plus in the eyes of my mother, whose own parents forbade playing cards in the home, as these tools of the devil led inevitably to gambling.

Not my copy, but the 1960’s–70’s edition of Authors from my childhood

I was charmed to see that the 1943 cards had the same design as those from the 1970’s. Most legacy games go through major re-designs every decade or so; look at all the various editions of Clue, for example. However, the illustrations from my Parker Brothers set (1943) were not only included in the Whitman edition (first published in 1951¹ and in various editions through the 70’s), but also by a later edition published by U.S. Games Systems (1986) with the last version using these designs (at lest, the last I could find) printed in 1996.

First edition (probably), Whipple & Smith, 1861

This isn’t to say that these were the original set of illustrations, or even the original selection of authors. The first version of Authors was published in 1861 by the Salem, MA company of Whipple & Smith, and its cover featured American short story writer Washington Irving and (checks notes), um, British poet Thomas Macaulay?

If you search for the creator of Authors you may find a credit for Annie W. Abbott and a date of 1843, fully 18 years before the game was first published. This confusing chronology is because Ms. Abbott created a card game called Dr Busby which had almost exactly the same play as Authors, except instead of collecting sets of four books, players collected cards representing members of four fictional families. Stewart Culin, writing in The Journal of American Folklore in the July–September, 1893 issue, claimed that Dr. Busby was retooled into Authors by an unnamed Salem man²; I have also read the claim that Abbott herself was responsible for the new game. But whomever was responsible, both Authors and Dr Busby are based on Go Fish, whose origins are murky, but which may have come from ultimately from the Italian game Andare e piscere in the 15th Century.

It’s everyone’s favorite game, *Dr. Busby*

Wherever and whenever Authors came from, other publishers soon began to publish their version of the game, with differing selections of authors in a variety of formats. In my earlier essay about Parker Brothers’ game design in the 1970s, I referenced Philip Urbanes’s 2004 book The game makers: the story of Parker Brothers from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit, which I thought might fill in some details for this essay. Unfortunately, Urbane discusses Parker Brothers’ initial publication of Authors only in passing, noting that around 1870 to 1890, the company began publishing existing games that they did not originate; Authors was one of these (copyright wasn’t the same back in those days).

Parker Brothers was headquartered in Salem, MA, the same as Whipple & Smith and (as mentioned) where Authors was originally conceived; some combination of these facts no doubt led to naming the 1943 version of the game the “Salem Edition.” Parker Brothers distinguished its versions from the competition with high-quality illustration and state-of-the-art reproduction, and sold several versions at the same time, with names like “the Nickel Edition,” and “the Petite Edition De Luxe.” Even the game’s title varied on the cover of different editions, from The Game of Authors, to Great Authors, to Household Authors, which is my favorite because it implies that every good home should have a stock of writers³.

Early Parker Brothers’ editions, c. 1870, c. 1893, 1897, 1910

The Salem Edition (my edition) seems to have been the first to use the familiar illustrations, which are unfortunately unattributed. Unless somewhere there are archives still extant that contain correspondence or billing from the 1940’s, the artist has been lost to time. However, they appear to be the work of one hand, or perhaps a few artists working under close direction. Even though they are remarkably of a piece with one another, there are some odd variations to note. While all seem to have been painted in watercolor over an underdrawing, some are noticeably darker, such as the Robert Louis Stevenson portrait, which has heavy shadows painted with opaque colors, possibly using gouache.

The level of detail varies, probably owing to the source material being copied; this material would have included photos and engravings of the authors, as well as earlier versions of the game. About half have a highly painterly background of washes in blue, green, and yellow; the others are presented on flat white. And one portrait, that of John Greenleaf Whittier, has an entirely different ground treatment which almost resembles airbrush.

Wait, John Greenleaf who now? This edition contains two authors that were cut from the deck when the designs transferred to Whitman publishing: William Makepeace Thackery and John Greenleaf Whittier. The English Victorian Thackery is still read today, primarily for his novels Vanity Fair and Barry Lyndon. The American Quaker abolitionist Whittier, however, is not a name you will know unless you study 19th Century American literature, and then only as an example of a poet who was popular in his lifetime, only to fall into obscurity when his earnest, moralizing style failed to resonate with 20th century tastes. It’s not surprising that editions of Authors reflect the forever evolving literary canon. The Rare Book School at the University of Virginia had an exhibition of Authors cards in 2025 that focused specifically on the writers who have come and gone through many, many versions over the last 150+ years.

The novelists, playwrights, and poets selected for the 1943 portraits are mostly Victorian, with the most recent work referenced being Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger (1916)⁴. Looking over the assortment of writers, it’s impossible not to note that they are all American or British, white, and—save for the exception of Louisa May Alcott—male. Aside from this chauvinism, it’s also interesting that for a game published in 1943 there were no Modernist authors—this was the era of Hemingway, Faulkner, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fitzgerald, Eliot, etc. Probably the choice was in part set by earlier versions of the game. And perhaps there was an editorial decision to avoid living writers. Whatever the criteria, the game’s roster of authors is stodgy, academic, and leans heavily on sentimental and Romantic writers.

All of this was lost on me as a child when I played the game. I assumed that the authors selected were, in fact, the greatest and most important names in literary history, and for many years I kept the titles on the cards tucked away in my memory. This was my first brush with the idea of a canon, and I found it appealing because it implied that great books were finite and that it would be possible to read them all, and then I guess I thought you would be done. These days I’m less inclined to think this way, although I do have a podcast about the subject.

My copy of the 1943 edition has a few interesting features. It has it original rule sheet, beautifully block printed in a variety of typefaces, including a midcentury geometric sans-serif font that closely resembles Futura. This sheet calls the game “PARKER BROTHERS’ IMPROVED GAME OF AUTHORS” and declares that it is the “BEST EDITION.” My favorite passage of these rules comes at the end, where it lists “other PARKER GAMES” which include Monopoly, Rook, and Camelot, which is noted as: “the most absorbingly interesting of all games of skill, and many times more exciting than Checkers.” I have no idea what the game of Camelot is, but I chose to believe the claims made on its behalf, and I won’t Google to learn otherwise.

The game box also contains a shallow tray of yellow cardboard discs that the rules calls “counters” (with quotation marks). These are to be awarded for each meld a player makes, but with the twist that first three are given, then two, then one, and then back to three, etc. This mechanic seems so tacked-on that my assumption is the discs were cast offs from holes punched in another game that some office manager decided to repurpose. Also in amongst the cards there is a rule card from a later Whitman edition of the game, which is (oddly) far more worn than any of the portraits.

Right, Center: the original rules sheet, front and back; Left top: the “counters”; Left bottom: what are these doing here?

Finally, my copy of Authors also contains both a faded lavender wooden checker and a Scrabble tile of the letter G. These were left mysteriously by its previous owner, and one can only imagine how each contributed to any house rules.

How and why the designs transferred to Whitman is a mystery to me. I know Whitman primarily as a children’s book publisher, particularly for its licensed works featuring Disney characters. ↩︎
Quoted in Kaplan and Miller; see note below. ↩︎
If you are even more fixated on this subject than I am, there is an exhaustive 476-page catalog of every known edition of Authors and ancillary games: The Game of Authors Compendium Stuart R. Kaplan and William G. Miller (2021). ↩︎
This is a peculiar choice. In his final years, Twain wrote several divergent drafts of The Mysterious Stranger, perhaps his most bleak and existential writing ever. The eventual posthumous publication in 1916 was cobbled together with parts rewritten by Twain biographer Albert Bigelow Paine. Contemporary scholars do not ascribe this edition (the one referenced in Authors) to Mr. Clemens. ↩︎

Brave New World

This essay is about autism, so bear with me through the roundabout introduction. Disclaimer: while I make a lot of general claims about people with ASD, I can really only speak about my own experiences, and then only in confused and broken sentences.

From my freshman to my senior year in high school I was on the Scholastic Bowl team. If you are unaware of what this is, because you spent your youth doing cool stuff like playing actual sports or making out in cars, I will explain. Scholastic Bowl is a varsity competition for nerds, where two teams of four players represent their schools by being the first to buzz in and correctly answer questions posed by a moderator, quiz-show-style. It’s basically “University Challenge” from that one episode of The Young Ones. It purports to be a measure of academic knowledge, but the questions are pretty much bar trivia about the humanities and STEM.

This was a game that was basically made for teenaged John, and it’s not hyperbole to say that I pretty much carried my team: I answered around 80% of the questions and usually buzzed in early—that is, before the moderator was done reading the question. It’s not that I was smarter than my teammates, it’s that I had weirdly eclectic interests and an ability to retrieve facts from my memory with speed and precision (I have lost this skill in middle age).

For an activity that took up so much of my teen years, I recall no specific matches, but there was one question, and my answer, that I remember lucidly. It was toward the end of a match that was nearly tied, and the score was making me tense and focused. The moderator asked the toss-up, “who wrote the New World Symphony?”

I buzzed in immediately and responded, “Dvořák.”

The moderator looked confused and peered down at his question card. “Could you repeat that?” he said.

“Dvořák,” I repeated.

He examined the card a few seconds more and then said, “I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. Would the other team like to respond—”

I loudly interrupted: “Is that spelled dee vee oh, ar-with-a-caron ay-with-an-accent, kay?”

Everyone in the room was taken aback; a student reprimanding a moderator was a completely out of order. “Because that’s pronounced duhVORzyahk. It sounds like it has a Z, but it doesn’t, so you must be reading it incorrectly.”

I suddenly realized that my coaches and teammates were staring at me like I had done something wrong, so I added in a softer voice, “because it’s a Czech name…”

Strangely, while this exchange is etched in my memory, I don’t actually remember whether we got the ten points for a toss-up or not.

I tell this anecdote neither to flex about what a precocious kid I was, nor to admit that I was an incorrigible smartass (both of these are true). My point here is to illustrate the way that autistic people’s minds work. We tend not to pay attention to authority. We are very committed to the idea of truth; we are also committed to the idea of justice—these two positions are intertwined. This insistence can (and does) lead to black and white thinking about things that aren’t black and white, but it also means a belief and fealty to objective truth and fairness.

I don’t mean to imply that autistic people can’t prevaricate. There’s a popular truism that ASD renders one incapable of lying; this is ridiculous and implies that we are a fantastical race of fairy children, magically bound to speak truth. It’s more accurate to say that we aren’t willing to lie for the sake of politeness or to make someone feel better. If someone asks me how I’m doing, or if I like their haircut, I’m going to tell them, even if they really weren’t looking for a straight answer. It would feel inauthentic to do otherwise.

Likewise, an autistic heightened concern for fairness—what psychologists call justice sensitivity—is also tied to our sense of integrity. Good faith and equal treatment matter a lot. At its best, justice sensitivity motivates care for others and the questioning of social conventions. However, it can also lead to a rigid and judgmental outlook, and when this is paired with an indifference towards hierarchy, the outcome is know-it-all punks like me ill-advisedly sassing the very people who give out the points.

But, to be fair, the New World Symphony really was written by Dvořák.

Games without frontiers

My parents were (and remain) staunchly liberal, but for people who lived their twenties through the eras of beatniks and hippies they were (and remain) pretty square. In the 70s my dad had sideburns and a mustache and smoked a pipe; my mom had a bob cut and wore knee-length skirts. Their record collection consisted of mostly classical and musical theater albums with probably the most scandalous disc being a copy of Herbie Mann’s Push Push¹. It’s a wonder, then, that my childhood was filled to the brim with subversive boardgames. By this I mean games designed to promote skepticism, free thinking, and in some cases, out and out Marxism. This essay focuses on the eggheaded, leftist games of my youth.

WFF ‘n Proof (1962)

I believe my Dad acquired his copy of WFF ‘n Proof in college. In any case, this strange dice game was kicking around the house as far back as I can remember, and as long as I can remember I was trying, and failing, to learn how to play. WFF ‘n Proof is a game where players roll a handful of odd wooden dice whose sides were (mostly) Roman letters. Then they attempt, using propositional calculus, to arrange the dice into a string of atoms and connectors to produce valid statements, or what the game maker Layman E. Allen referred to as “well-formed-formulas (WFFs).” Just for fun, instead of the standard system of symbolic logic, this game uses “Polish notation,” a system of expression developed by logician Jan Łukasiewicz in which the operator is placed before its operands. Did I mention I tried to learn this game when I was seven?

This game did not strike me as particularly odd as a child. My parents were the type to let their kids play with adult things (if they weren’t dangerous or inappropriate) and let us work out what we could. Besides, my dad was a professor of theology and philosophy and occasionally taught symbolic logic, and he had an old copy of Stephen Barker’s The Elements of Logic (1965) that he gave me and my brother to read. So, proof that autism is hereditary!

I may never have learned to play WFF ‘n Proof, but I was in love with its odd presentation. The game came (in its original edition) in a plastic wallet with foam rubber housing for the dice, a thick rulebook that was more like a short novel, and a tiny hourglass for timing moves. Whatever happened to these tiny hourglasses? They used to have one in every game. As an adult, I once bought a copy of this game off eBay, only to find that foam rubber does not age well over the decades (to see what I mean, Google “original Yoda puppet”).

As niche as the game is, it is still in print today.

The Propaganda Game (1970)

The WFF ‘n Proof company (which billed itself as “games for thinkers”) also produced other games. One, which my family also owned, was The Propaganda Game, and it was here that my education as a skeptic began. This game was also developed by Layman E. Allen, but also credited Lorne Greene, Commander Adama himself². In a statement on the box, Mr. Greene outlines the game’s purpose:

In a democratic society such as ours, it is the role of every citizen to make decisions after evaluating many ideas. It is especially important then that a citizen be able to analyze and distinguish between the emotional aura surrounding the idea and the actual content of the idea. It is to this goal of clear thinking that THE PROPAGANDA GAME addresses itself.

In contrast to WFF ‘n Proof, The Propaganda Game‘s rules are very simple. A set of cards are printed with a series of short arguments or appeals to the reader, and the players have to identify what kind of propaganda is being employed. If they get it right, they slide their tiddley-wink marker up the score sheet; if they get it wrong, they go back a rank.

The game is subdivided into various propaganda categories, such as “Techniques of Self-Deception,” “Techniques of Language,” “Techniques of Exploitation,” etc. Within each category, there are eight to ten techniques to identify, such as “Prejudice,” “Academic Detachment,” “Drawing the Line,” “Not Drawing the Line,” “Wishful Thinking,” “Tabloid Thinking,” and my favorite, “Causal Oversimplification,” which I believe is 85% of discourse online (the other 15% is straight-and-out lying). These categories and their techniques were first proposed in the book Thinking Straighter by George Henry Moulds (1966).

As you might imagine, a lot of this is subjective, and even as a child I found myself yelling back at Allan and Greene: “That’s not Drawing the Line! That’s just being clear!” Apparently I am not alone in my complaints, as tournament rules for this game use an amended guide, available online.

The most amusing aspect of the game is the “Clear thinking chart” used to keep score. Each rank has an unflattering name that corresponds to how easily propagandized the player is, such as “Brooklyn Bridge Buyer” or “Bilker’s Bonanza.” If you are unlucky enough to slide into negative numbers you end up in the “Ding-a-ling section.” It was a different time. There was also an interesting mechanic for games of three or more players where each voted on the correct technique, so the game not only introduced participants to propaganda but also to the Asch Conformity Test.

Lie, Cheat & Steal (1971)

I remember when my parents purchased this game (at my brother’s and my behest). It was at Straus’s, which was the frou-frou department store that once was the pride of Youngstown, Ohio. In those days before being destroyed by malls and big boxes, department stores often carried unusual games, toys, and other novelties, and that included the output of tiny producers. Lie, Cheat & Steal was published by now long-defunct Reiss Games, whose output mostly consisted of abstract strategy and party games, although they also apparently made a board game based on the 70’s scandalous paperback The Happy Hooker. Lie, Cheat & Steal (herein, LC&S) was a highly jaundiced game about political campaigning, as described on the box bottom:

LIE, CHEAT & STEAL is the game of unscrupulous politics. You and one to five of your shifty friends can get in on the dirty-dealing, back-stabbing and thinly disguised thievery that make up the real political world.

You buy and sell votes, steal from the Public Treasury, and libel the other players to get ahead. The Senate may investigate you. You may even go bankrupt. But don’t give up! LIE, CHEAT & STEAL gives you plenty of opportunity to come back and win.

LC&S actually pre-dates Watergate, but it does reflect the era’s cynical views about corruption and money influence. Modeled somewhat obviously after Monopoly, the players roll dice to move clockwise around the board, acquiring money in unscrupulous ways to eventually buy votes. Along the way you land on spaces with names like “Tammany Hall,” “Chicago Machine” and “League of Women Voters Luncheon.” In the course of the game you might become the subject of a Senate investigation and have to take the witness stand. You collect “feathers in your cap” or “black eyes.” Neither my brother or I understood the meaning of any of this other than the “Jail” space, but we did ask our mom a lot of questions, and she did her best to explain the machinations of American Politics.

The *LC&S* board. I thought the guy in these pictures looked like a character in an Inspector Clouseau cartoon.

LC&S was probably the most playable amongst the games I describe in this essay, but that’s not to say it was all that fun. Like Monopoly, it ran long, and by the end I was happy when anyone would win, just as long as the game was over. As far as politics went, I was already pretty cynical and needed no board game to disillusion me.

Class Struggle (1978)

I have no idea where my dad got this game, but I suspect he sought it out because of its press coverage. The bottom of the box (I think it was the second printing of the game) enumerates its infamy:

FIRST book about capitalism to come packaged in a game box… FIRST game to be written up in a NEW YORK TIMES editorial … FIRST game ever to be played on the radio (for two hours on WBAI) … FIRST game ever to be sold by Scribner’s, 8th Street Bookshop and Salter’s Bookstore, three of New York’s most famous bookstores FIRST full-scale board game to present the side of the workers. FIRST board game ever to be sold in both Toy and Stationery Departments in Bloomingdale’s .. FIRST game ever to be sold out in one week in
Bookmasters, N.Y.C. …

Class Struggle was developed by political professor Bertell Ollman of NYU and it’s really less of a game than a recapitulation of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, with a rule book that is nearly as long as its source material. The pre-Photoshop collage on the cover shows Nelson Rockefeller arm wrestling Marx. Nelson has a few hundred dollar bills in his suit’s breast pocket, in case the point isn’t clear enough. In this game, one player is “the workers” and the other is “the capitalists” and they are caught in an arena of dialectical materialism, as represented by a cluttered and hastily-designed board. If there are more than two players, other factions are used, like academics or professionals, and these can make alliances with either the workers or the capitalists. The game, at least in its early editions, came with components that were at once elaborate and cheap, the strangest of which were the dice, which seemed to be cast in some sort of yellow epoxy that chipped easily.

The *Class Struggle* board. Will the world end in Socialism, Barbarism, or Nuclear War?

The game was not so much fun as it was funny. I imagine if you were a student of political philosophy your would get many sensible chuckles. But for me it was another clockwise slog around the board, and the games’s many potshots at Capitalism seemed like casual oversimplification. Callback!

When my parents moved from my childhood home to a new place a couple of decades ago, they cleaned out a lot of the games that had survived our many basement floodings, and one of them was Class Struggle, which they offered to whichever son would take it. I said thanks but no thanks. I think Rob may have taken it, which in hindsight might have been a lucrative move. Because however unfun, the game has developed something of a cult status over the years, with online retrospectives, contemporary re-imaginings, and even original sets sold at auction. An ironic fate, considering the game’s whole raison d’être.

The 70s were filled to the brim with photos of hairy shirtless guys. ↩︎
Yes, I know that he’s primarily known for Gunsmoke. This sentence is here just to annoy Boomers. ↩︎