Joseph Knecht rises to become Magister Ludi, master of the Glass Bead Game, an elaborate synthesis of all arts and sciences practiced by an intellectual elite in a future utopia. Hesse worked on this novel for over a decade, finishing it as World War II raged around him. The book is a biography of a fictional saint, complete with his poems and stories, and it questions the very intellectualism it celebrates. Knecht's final choice overturns everything. Hesse won the Nobel Prize partly for this, his final novel. The Game has no rules we can learn. The book teaches us why we would want to play.