This gave the book an interesting angle for me. You may be drawing a connection to roleplaying games here - for other than having roots in music instead of literature, I certainly saw a great deal of similarity. It seems to be a purely intellectual pursuit, with little practical application, though of course its masters are considered to be geniuses. It is also somehow related to magic theatre, which may have been an old name for it. The game involves the making of unexpected connections, and has a spontaneous aspect. It is something that has descended from the highest intellectual arts: mathematics and music. The nature of the glass bead game is only ever hinted at in the novel. The Glass Bead Game is set somewhere in the province of Castalia in Europe in the undefined future (25th C., as Hesse comments later) and is the biography of Joseph Knecht, a renowned player of the 'glass bead game' who eventually rose to become the Magister Ludi, or master of the game. The Glass Bead Game is my second Hesse novel, and I picked this one because it can loosely be called a science-fiction novel, and because it led to Hesse's winning of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946.
I was introduced to Herman Hesse by my Swabian friend, Thomas, who bought a copy of an English translation of his novel Narcissus and Goldmund during a visit to the medieval monastery of Maulbronn, where Hesse had studied as a youth and which was the setting for much of that novel (under the name Mariabronn). "The lesser man sees in the greater man as much as he can see." TLDR: 4 of 5 for a thought provoking book, though perhaps not the most riveting read.
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