The Charity of Gamers

An Unsung Founding Member of Gamer Charity

Born in Madrid, Spain, on December 16th, 1863, George Santayana died on September 26th, 1952 at his villa in the Italian capital city of Rome long before even the earliest examples of video games were invented. In addition to two intentional-use game rooms in his villa, one of the most striking features was its gardens, in which there was located a life-sized tiled chessboard upon which, at the frequent parties that he hosted, Santayana and his mates played games using the bodies of actors hired for the purpose, as well as party guests. (5)

The pair of game rooms inside the villa consisted of a large room that we would call a "Pool Room" today, and in which the most predominant feature was a pair of regulation-sized Brunswick and Balke billiard tables of Victorian design, built from Rosewood and measuring a whopping 4.5' x 9' in size each. This room and its accoutrements serves as the perfect illustration of how serious a gamer Santayana was -- in modern terms it would translate to a gamer with a dedicated man cave who owned one of each major console and perhaps a few limited edition versions, and all of the accessories that go along with them!

The tables were both common gaming devices and works of art, boasting inverted corner turnings, leather and net pockets, and ivory and ebony inlays as well as brass fittings that were mirrored on the matching armoire that he had custom built for the room. Inside of the armoire were racks for storing the cues, and drawers for his ball collection -- which famously included two complete sets of antique Burt Double Stripe ivory pool balls, a set of clay "zig-zag" balls from the 1880's, as well as more modern sets of clay and ivory billiard balls, and several sets of now very rare Zanzibar ivory tournament balls. (6)

Mounted on the walls at each end of the room were original brass Brunswick and Balke Top Score Keeper model scoring devices, which are just one example of the large collection of related vintage accessories that he accumulated after originally acquiring the villa to be used as just his Winter home before finally making it his permanent residence in his later years.

Included among the items that were part of the inventory made after his death was a set of the original "Archie Gunn Girls" (7) water color paintings that were created for Brunswick and Balke by the artist in 1910 to be made into prints, a Brunswick Balke Collender Company billiard cue tipper from the 1880's, and a Brunswick and Balke billiard time register from the same era. Installed above each of the two tables were identical brass and bronze Lion Heads billiard chandeliers with hand-blown Italian green glass shades, which must have made for an impressive display.

The room, with its collection of vintage pool kit, would have been like stepping back in time to the 1880's, so it is no wonder that it is one of the more referenced parts of the house in interviews and memoirs of the people who made up Santayana's social circle in the last two decades of his life.

While his basic attraction for gaming is thought to have been birthed during his time at Harvard, where he graduating with honors in 1886 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa (8), according to his own recollections it was during the two years in which he resided in Berlin, Germany, where he researched and wrote his dissertation on Hermann Lotze before returning to Harvard to teach philosophy, that he discovered both his love for gaming and, not surprisingly, his fascination for the emotional attraction of competition in gaming. Charley Sheen is clearly not the first person to become engrossed in the concept of "Winning."

Upon his return to Boston and to Harvard, Santayana became one of the founding members of what is now considered the Golden Age of the Harvard Philosophy Department, and according to his personal journals helped to establish a gaming social group on campus whose principal interest was pool and card games. It was also at Harvard that Santayana developed his personal belief in charity and the notion that as individuals each man had an obligation to help their community and the less fortunate within it when they are able to. A humble man not prone to self-promotion at least where his charitable activities were concerned, most of his efforts in that regard were made anonymously, but his efforts to encourage his students to adopt a hand's-on approach to charity by donating time when they could not donate money are well documented aspects of his personal views on the subject.

"Charity is nothing but a radical and imaginative justice. So the Buddhist stretches his sympathy to all real beings and to many imaginary monsters; so the Christian chooses for his love the diseased, the sinful, the unlovely. His own salvation does not seem to either complete unless every other creature is redeemed and forgiven," he wrote. (9)

The idea of charity by gamers, of helping the less fortunate by offering whatever aid you can, either monetary or in donating time, such as volunteering as an individual or a group to serve meals in a homeless shelter, or man the phones at a Good Samaritan Help Line and any and every other worthy effort that you can think of may not be original, but as a gamer, when you do those things, you can consider yourself in good company, because gamers have been looking towards ways in which they can help make the world a better place for a long time now.