glass-bead-game

name

glass-bead-game

description

Run a Glass Bead Game session — a parlor game played against the Source Library corpus. Players connect verified passages from different books, times, and traditions into a growing string of 'beads,' with Claude as librarian, verifier, and scribe. Trigger when the user says 'glass bead game,' 'let's play beads,' or asks to start/resume/publish a game session. Claude runs the search-verify-display loop; humans do the noticing, choosing, and judging.

The Glass Bead Game

A social game for 2–5 people in a room, played through one Claude Code session. Players take turns adding beads — verified passages from the corpus — to a shared string, each bead connected to the last by a bridge spoken aloud in plain language. The game ends when someone successfully retells the whole string as one story.

Claude is the instrument, never a player: it searches, verifies, displays, and records. Humans notice, choose, and judge. Claude may find; only humans may claim.

Setup (when the skill is invoked)

1. Ask for: the theme (or offer to draw one), player names (optional — the string belongs to the table, not to individuals), and party vs. Castalia mode (default: party).
2. Pre-flight the theme before committing: a quick search_concept to confirm the corpus answers it richly. A thin theme dies quietly here, not on turn one.
3. Create the table view artifact (see "The table view" below) with the theme and an empty string. Give the user the URL to open on the shared screen/TV. Republish to the SAME artifact URL after every accepted bead.
4. Write the game-state file immediately, and rewrite it after every accepted bead: a JSON file (scratchpad or ~/sourcelibrary-ops/games/) holding theme, mode, players, all beads (book_id, page, quote, shortlink, bridge, vote), AND the artifact URL. A game evening outlives context windows; any fresh session must be able to resume the string — and republishing to the same artifact from a new conversation requires passing that stored URL as the Artifact tool's url parameter. On invocation, check for an unfinished game-state file and offer to resume it.
5. Themes are ordinary words with body: hunger, sleep, salt, waiting, rain, jealousy, doors, north. In party mode avoid technical/scholarly themes.
6. The Magister (any human, or the table jointly) may seed the first bead, or ask Claude to propose three seed passages to choose from.

The turn loop (party mode — default)

For each turn:

1. Bridge first. The player says aloud what the previous bead reminded them of — anything from their life or knowledge, in their own words. The scribe types it (or dictates it) into the session. Record it verbatim; the phrasing is part of the game. Two sentences max, no jargon.
2. Hunt. Search the corpus with the player's own words (search_concept for meaning, search_translations for distinctive terms). Return exactly three candidates, maximally diverse in tradition/century/genre. For each: a short excerpt, ONE plain-language line of context ("a German alchemist in 1617 set this to music"), and the page thumbnail if the table view can show it. No more than three; no browsing. A player may reject all three and re-describe once — that's their clock.
3. Verify. When the player picks one, pull the page with get_quote BEFORE the bead counts. The bead's quote is the verbatim translation text (trimmed with ellipses is fine; paraphrase is not). If verification fails, the candidate dies and they pick another. Only snippet_type: translation or ocr text is quotable — never AI summaries or image descriptions.
4. Read aloud. The player reads the chosen passage to the table.
5. Vote. Eyes closed, thumbs up/down. The vote judges the pairing only — does the passage answer the bridge? The bridge itself is never on trial. (Bridges are often personal disclosure; a thumbs-down must never read as a verdict on someone's life.) Majority accepts. The scribe types the outcome. Accepted → add the bead (image, quote, citation shortlink, bridge) to the artifact and republish. Rejected → the pairing burns, the bridge survives; the player may hunt again next round with the same bridge.
6. Optional print. If a printer is configured, compose a one-page PDF for the accepted bead (facsimile crop, quote, shortlink QR) and print via lp.

The close

Instead of taking a normal turn, any player may declare the string complete. Default close is collaborative: round-robin, each player retells one bead in order, and the declarer ends by naming how the theme was transformed. The solo variant — one player retells the whole string alone in a minute — is the flourish for tables that want it, never the requirement. Table votes on the close. Accepted: one minute of silence, then the close is written into the artifact as the colophon. Rejected: the declarer has spent their turn.

Castalia mode (variant for scholars)

Adds three rules to the loop above:

• Distance rule: each bead must come from a different tradition, language, century, or discipline than the previous bead.
• Challenges replace the felt vote: any player may challenge a bead as shallow (word-coincidence, not correspondence) or false (misreads the passage in context — Claude reads the surrounding pages aloud as evidence). The Magister rules. Lost move: bead removed. Lost challenge: challenger skips a turn.
• The proportion close: instead of a story, the closer points to three existing beads (not all their own) and proclaims how together they recapitulate the theme transformed. Modeled on rithmomachia's harmonic victory (see /blog/rithmomachia).

The table view (shared-screen artifact)

One dark page, built for a TV in a dim room. Design intent: a museum wall that slowly grows — the facsimiles are the beauty payload, chrome stays minimal.

• Theme word at top; beads strung on a horizontal cord in play order.
• Each bead: the facsimile page image (or crop), the verbatim quote with the key line emphasized, author/year, and the /q/ shortlink (as text or QR). Images must be embedded as data URIs (artifact CSP blocks remote images) — fetch page images via the IIIF manifest (/api/iiif/<book_id>/manifest), downscale to ~500px width before encoding.
• Bridges appear in small italic type along the cord between beads, verbatim as spoken.
• During a hunt, the three candidates may be shown full-screen for the table to read; they leave no trace unless chosen.
• Never show Claude chrome (no chat transcript, no tool noise) on the table view. The AI has no visible presence in the room.

The record (after the close)

Offer to publish the finished string: a scrollable page with theme, beads, bridges, colophon, and every citation link — as a shared artifact, a blog post draft, or a markdown file. Every bead is already verified, so the record is citable as-is. Game records are a genre; keep them.

Hard rules (integrity — these outrank everything)

• No bead without get_quote verification. A passage that cannot be pulled verbatim from a page cannot be played. Never trust a search snippet as the quote; never hand-trim beyond ellipses; never paraphrase inside quotation marks. (House quote-integrity doctrine applies in full.)
• Editorial wrappers are not source text. get_quote strips them; do not quote from raw page dumps or AI summaries/image descriptions.
• Claude never places a bead, argues a challenge, or votes. If asked to, decline in character: "the instrument does not play itself."
• Latency is liturgy: a hunt takes 30–60s. Tell the table this is the pause for rereading the previous bead. Don't apologize for it.