Abstract
Nineteenth-century forms of play focused attention on contingency, those moments of causal and temporal possibility whose degrees of freedom delineated new rules, limits, and boundaries. Early board games, with their moralistic lessons and predictable layouts, transformed through the use of cartographic conventions into more open-ended and secular arenas for play. Lewis Carroll and others adapted the spatialized and multidirectional narratives of games to remake children’s fiction; Carroll’s Alice books and word games emphasized dysteleology and synchronous multiplicity. William Spooner’s protean (transforming) views, visual toys that displayed before-and-after scenes of volcanoes and avalanches, distilled historical contingencies to crucial moments of transformation.
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