The Sumerian Game
| The Sumerian Game | |
|---|---|
| Publisher(s) | IBM |
| Designer(s) | Mabel Addis |
| Genre(s) | Strategy game, text-based game |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
The Sumerian Game is the first in-depth text-based economic simulation game intended for children.
The game
The game was developed from 1964 to 1966 by designer and elementary school teacher Mabel Addis and IBM programmer William McKay. The early mainframe game influenced many later strategy games like Hamurabi and The Sumer Game. The game was developed after the Inter-Nation simulation was introduced in 1958. It used a printer and slide projector. The game was a text-based strategy video game centered on economics in Mesopotamia in 3500BC. In phase 2 of the game the player can use their surplus grain towards the development of arts and crafts.[1][2][3][4][5]
Development
In 1962, the school district of Northern Westchester County, New York began a series of discussions with researchers at IBM about the use of computers in education research. One result of these talks was a pair of grants from the U.S. Office of Education for research on the subject; the second of these began in August 1964, with the aim of producing three "economic games" for sixth-grade students.[6][7] Bruse Moncreiff of IBM proposed the idea for one of the games: "a computer model of the ancient Sumerian civilization" to teach economic principles. Moncreiff chose the Sumerians as a rebuke of what he saw as a trend in school curriculum to ignore pre-Greek civilizations, despite evidence of their importance to early history.[6]
The game itself, The Sumerian Game, was designed and written by Mabel Addis, a fourth-grade teacher at Katonah Elementary School, and was programmed by William McKay of IBM. The game, set in 3500 B.C., has players act as three successive rulers of the city of Lagash—Luduga I, II, and III—over three rounds of increasingly complex economic simulation, with the second round adding the funding of crafts and the third adding trade and expansion. The initial version of the game focused solely on the players' economic choices, but after one session with sixth-grade students, in the summer of 1966 Addis rewrote and expanded the game, adding a stronger narrative flow, reducing the types of questions asked and interspersing the game with taped audio lectures corresponding with images on a slide projector, which have been described as the first cutscenes. The new version of the game was again conducted with sixth-grade students the following school year for the research project.[6][8]
Legacy
The Sumerian Game inspired The Sumer Game for the PDP-8, ported to BASIC as Hamurabi.[8]
References
- ^ Gouscos, D. ECGBL2011-Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Games Based Learning: ECGBL2011. ECGBL. Academic Conferences and Publishing International. p. 270. ISBN 978-1-908272-19-5. Retrieved 2019-09-12.
- ^ Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S.; Smith, J.H.; Tosca, S.P. (2013). Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. Taylor & Francis. p. 11. ISBN 978-1-136-30042-4. Retrieved 2019-09-12.
- ^ Joyce, B.; Calhoun, E.; Hopkins, D. (2008). Models Of Learning, Tools For Teaching. Open University Press. p. 149. ISBN 978-0-335-23419-6. Retrieved 2019-09-12.
- ^ Adams, E.; Dormans, J. (2012). Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design. Voices That Matter. New Riders. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-321-82027-3. Retrieved 2019-09-12.
- ^ ""Critical Kate" Willært 🤘🏻 on Twitter". Twitter (in Latin). 2019-08-12. Retrieved 2019-09-12.
- ^ a b c Wing, Richard L. (June 1967). The Production and Evaluation of Three Computer-based Economics Games for the Sixth Grade: Final Report (Report). Westchester County Board of Cooperative Educational Services. pp. 1, 13–15. ED014227.
- ^ Wing, Richard L. (1966). "Two Computer-Based Economics Games for Sixth Graders". American Behavioral Scientist. 10 (3): 31–35. ISSN 0002-7642.
- ^ a b Willaert, Kate (2019-09-09). "The Sumerian Game: The Most Important Video Game You've Never Heard Of". A Critical Hit. Retrieved 2019-09-10.