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The Glass Bead Game centers around an aesthetic society of intellectuals in the fictional province of Castilla. In this setting of Castilla the movements of Joseph Knecht (whose name "Knecht" translates to "servant" or "farm hand") are chronicled by the book. Of particular interest is the relationship Knecht holds with a learned monk, Father Jacobus. In his introduction to Demian, Thomas Mann likens his own relationship to Hesse to the relationship of Knecht to Jacobus, going on to say that their knowledge of each other was not possible without a great extent of ceremony. He even extrapolates on Hesse's observence of Oriental customs in the novel. Hesse's communal perspective of East combined with West is apparent even in this last work of his old age.

1 The Glass Bead Game itself

At the epicenter of this society lies the (fictitious) glass bead game. The precise rules of the game are only alluded to, and must be so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Essentially the game is an abstract synthesis of all arts and scholarship. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics. For example, a Bach concerto may be related to a mathematical formula.

The glass bead game derives its name from the fact that it was originally played with tokens, perhaps analogous to those of an abacus or the game goGo is a strategic, two-player board game originating in ancient China between 2000 BC and 200 BC. Go is a popular game in East Asia. The development of Internet play has served to increase notably its popularity throughout the rest of the world, in recent. At the time that the novel takes place, these had become obsolete and the game was played only with abstract, spoken formulas. The audience's appreciation of a good game is reminiscent of both musicMusic often an art/ entertainment, is a total social fact whose definitions vary according to era and culture," according to Jean Molino. 1 It is often contrasted with noise. According to musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez: "The border between music and no appreciation and eleganceElegance is the attribute of being tastefully designed or decorated, with focus on basic features. Frequently, elegance is synonymous with grace''. Many westerners associate elegance with simplicity and consistency of design, focusing on the main features in mathematicsMathematics is commonly defined as the study of patterns of structure, change, and space; more informally, one might say it is the study of "figures and numbers". In the formalist view, it is the investigation of axiomatically defined abstract structures.

Apart from the connection to go, the concept of the glass bead game seems similar to some ideas by Leibniz about a universal calculusFor other uses of the term calculus see calculus (disambiguation Calculus is a branch of mathematics, developed from algebra and geometry, involving two major complementary ideas: The first, called differential calculus is a theory about rates of change, (in the most general sense) or formal systemIn logic, mathematics, and computer science, a formal system is a formal grammar used for modelling purposes. Formalization is the act of creating a formal system, in an attempt to capture the essential features of a real-world or conceptual system in for, such as his dream of a Mathesis universalisMathesis universalis is a hypothetical universal science modelled on mathematics envisaged by Leibniz and Descartes. It would be supported by a Calculus ratiocinator. The desire for a language more perfect than any natural language had been expressed befo.

Although invented after Hesse's death, Conway's Game of Life could be seen as an example of a go-like glass bead game with surprisingly deep properties; since it can encode Turing machines, it contains in some sense everything.