In modeling the game Chutes and Ladders on a computer, we gain insight into the nature of both games and computation. The computer version, unlike the rule bound cardboard version, is unfixed, thus allowing for the displacement of a moral overlay by a free play of algorithmic patterning. The abstraction of the model preserves a structure but unleashes a principal of variation: the computer makes every constant a variable (as Marcos Novak observes as he describes the liquefaction of architecture). The arbitrariness of particular rules becomes evident.
To play this game of games, one engages in aesthetic experiment with the collaboration of chance rather than subject to it and the rule of law. The promulgation of rule must necessarily entail aesthetic judgment. The perception of and pleasure in pattern is implicated in a desire for law - a desire to be ruled.
(The software was ported to PHP from JSP on 12/1/08.)