Knucklebones and the origin of system matters

The oldest known 20-sided dice were carved from stone 2000 years ago in Ptolemaic Egypt, thought to have been developed for religious purposes. Egyptian gods or Greek letters were inscribed on their faces, the roll result indicated some oracular answer to a question. 

The use of objects to determine a random result, like drawing straws, is of course even older. The 3000 year old Chinese divination book, the I Ching, calls for a randomized yarrow stalk counting ritual. Reading tea leaves is a way of randomly producing an answer to a question about as old as tea. Often the results of such random techniques are attributed to gods or ancestors answering a question being asked. In addition to religious use, many of these objects were used for gaming.

The predecessor of the Ptolemaic 20-sided die is the mother of all dice, the knucklebone. Knucklebones are a certain ankle bone of sheep and goats, that when tossed will land on one of four sides. This bone is common to many hooved animals which humans have domesticated for thousands of years. Its hard to say when the first ritual or gaming knucklebone was. While many are found with inscriptions on their sides, some think that their use predates written language. 

The 20-sided die was introduced to an established ecosystem of knucklebones and carved dice. In contrast to the bell curve distribution of a handful of smaller dice being cast, it provided a list of 20 outcomes with equal probability. It's not too hard to imagine some negative reaction to the use of a 20-sided, stone icosahedron over the classic knucklebone. The idea didn't catch on and only a handful of these 20-sided dice were found. Perhaps the knucklebones faction won out and convinced everyone of the pointlessness of changing systems. Perhaps the crafting process was just too laborious to be sustainable. 

Bones carry a spiritual heft, having once been part of a living creature. Often times a diviner or gamer will be rolling the bones for an audience, and a good prop helps any performance. Whether it is the rolled bones, a scatter of pebbles, or a ritual performed under the influence of a stimulant, the audience can carefully study it, trying to divine the answers for themselves. 

Perhaps in some neolithic Mesopotamian city, two fortune tellers using different approaches for divination would slander each others methods. One arguing that all those gimmicks weren't necessary and that the gods spoke through drug induced spiritual possession. The other arguing that skillful use of knucklebones techniques produced more accurate and helpful predictions. The feud escalates to a religious fracture, the first blood drawn over system matters.

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The Free Kriegspiel movement in 19th century Prussia was founded on frustrations of the first wargaming community at their hobby becoming codified and complex. A foundational treatise aired its critiques:

1) the rules constrain the umpire, preventing him from applying his expertise; 

2) the rules are too rigid to realistically model all possible outcomes in a battle, because the real world is complex and ever-changing; 

3) the computations for casualties slow down the game and have a minor impact on a player's decisions anyway; 

4) few officers are willing to make the effort to learn the rules.

A system matter shaped the culture of play around wargames. The solution for many was to throw all rules out the window, and simply have a conversation about what they wanted to do on the battlefield. A referee would use their historical and tactical expertise to determine outcomes at the table. The 50 year onslaught of rules bloat was torn down and they started over from scratch.

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A century later, D&D would grow out of wargaming, once again popularizing the 20-sided die. Along with D&D came a few other role-playing games, including its 6-sided dice based science fiction counterpart Traveler. The two games were seen as not only being different genres of fiction, but as different approaches to play. Gary Gygax would write in the first Dungeon Masters Guide demonstrating this attitude: 

Of the two approaches to hobby games today, one is best defined as the realism-simulation school and the other as the game school AD&D is assuredly an adherent of the latter school it does not stress any realism (in the author's opinion an absurd effort at best considering the topic). It does little to attempt to simulate anything either. 

 

Gygax would write 29 pages later that (sic) "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.” It's contradictions all the way down. Similarly, while Traveler is described as being a game about simulating interstellar mercantilism and starship management, the classic adventure modules from that era show a great depth of story and adventure to be had. 

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This all leaves the impression that system matters have been around for as long as people have been asking questions and randomly deciding their answers. Do system matters schisms even have an origin at a certain point in time or in some aspect of games themselves?

Around the turn of the century there was a philosopher named Henri Bergson, who at his peak was called the most famous man in the world. His lectures while visiting the US caused the first traffic jams in New York City. Bergson described the importance of intuition as being the synthesis of our reasoning, tool making brains and our raw animal instincts. Instinct can't be discounted because it evolved to process complex information over millions of years before reason ever came around. 

Bergson had a rival in Bertrand Russel, a logician who objected, arguing that Bergson's instinct would drag humanity back into the dark ages. Between them, the system matter was whether or not pure reason was enough to navigate our world. 

In the following decades, Russel's thought has become canonized in a philosophy of mathematics, while Bergson's celebrity is now mostly forgotten. I agree with Bergson much more than I agree with any side of any of the other system matters I've raised. We have faculties that make us human, and we can never escape reason nor instinct no matter how much we'd like to do away with either.