This is a note, not the paper. The paper is forthcoming; what follows is only the ground it stands on, so that the page is not empty while it is being written.
Same board, two systems for the same variance — one three centuries old, one thirty years old.
The board
Snakes and Ladders is one of the very few games of pure chance still in wide circulation. There is no decision to make anywhere in it. You roll, you move, and the board does the rest: a ladder carries you up, a snake takes you down, and nothing you did earned either one.
It did not begin that way — or rather, it began by meaning it. The game descends from Moksha Patam, an Indian game whose squares were moral positions. Ladders stood for virtues and snakes for vices, and reaching the final square was liberation. The board was an argument about how a life goes. Stripped of the argument and sold as a children's game, the mechanic survived and the meaning did not.
The extra life
An extra life is a video-game convention: a stored second attempt that lets a player continue from where they failed instead of starting the whole board again. It is the one thing Moksha Patam never offered, and the thing every player of the modern game has silently wanted at the top of the longest snake.
The paper puts the two side by side. This note will be replaced by it.
