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The Real Oregon Trail

The Game Through the Years

The Team

Playing the Game

You can find modern editions of the game for many devices, but, in my opinion, to really play, you have to go old school:

• Online version of the 1975, fully text-based version. This is the closest you can get to the original unless you have an HP 2100 minicomputer, teleprinter and sacred scroll. (Click the power button overlaying the screen to play).

• This online graphical version is similar to what I remember playing in the late 80s in my elementary school computer lab (albeit in full color).

Annoying Your Computer Teacher, Circa 1988

In the episode, I mention a little — and incredibly geeky — act of rebellion my fellow computer nerds and I liked to pull on our computer teachers. Running this three-line program on an Apple II causes it to print consecutive numbers on the screen, infinitely, until the computer is reset or its memory fills up. We’d write it when nobody was looking, set it running and leave at the end of the period.

10 A=A+1

20 PRINT A

30 GOTO 10

Credits

Royalty free music used in this episode from https://www.FesliyanStudios.com

Hello everyone. Before we get into this week’s episode, I’ve got a recommendation. Shortly after I recorded Episode 1 with its overview of the early history of games, I was in a local bookstore and came across something I was surprised I hadn’t run into before. It’s a graphic novel by Jonathan Hennessey and Jack McGowan called The Comic Book Story of Video Games: The Incredible History of the Electronic Gaming Revolution. You can tell what it’s about from the title, and I thought it might be of interest to those of you who enjoyed the part of Episode 1 dealing with the same period.

To clarify: this is a book about game history generally, not learning games. But it has lots of stuff to fill in the gaps where I made decisions to cut and condense in Episode 1. In talking about the earliest digital games in that episode, I chose to focus on the historical developments in non-digital gaming that led up to them. There’s another side of the story, which is the technological developments that led to them. Chapter One of the book covers that, starting off with the development of the CRT – that’s the earliest electrical device we developed to display a moving image and the same technology televisions and monitors used into the early 2000s -- and goes up to right before the first digital games.

Chapter Two picks up there, and has some fun details about the very earliest, tech-demo-y games from the 1940s and 50s, which I mentioned only in passing. The rest of Chapter Two and on into Chapter Five overlap with what I covered in Episode 1, though in greater and significantly more illustrated detail. I like Chapter 5 in particular because it’s got great coverage of the early days of Atari, including the human drama, which I didn’t talk about in Episode 1.

The whole book is fun and worth a read. The comics are full of easter egg references to dozens of games, and the authors have a lot of fun weaving them into the history in clever ways. There might actually be hundreds. I bet some of them went over my head. I’d just note that if you don’t want to spoil the historical narrative I’m going to follow in the podcast, stop at the start of Chapter 5. But I won’t be offended if you don’t.

OK, back to our regularly scheduled program.

Today, we’re starting our tour of digital learning games in earnest with what is generally regarded as the first digital learning game: The Sumerian Game, released in 1964. In addition to getting credit for being the first learning game, The Sumerian Game is also the owner of quite a few other significant firsts in videogame and learning game history: so many, in fact, that it’s easy to lose count.

Just so we don’t lose track, I’ve decided to use a convenient auditory device so you can keep track of them if you’re scoring at home. So, since I mentioned it already, let’s ring the bell for its being the first learning game, in fact, the first educational game, since it was designed explicitly for teaching. [Ding].

Because 1964 is quite a while ago, and what computing looked like at this time is so different from the way it looks today, I thought I’d start by setting the stage, now that I know the bell is working.

The sixties were the early days of America’s space program, and this provides a handy way to put the tech landscape of the time in context. At the same time The Sumerian Game was in development, a team at MIT was working on the computer for the Apollo lunar missions.

Spacecraft in early manned programs like Mercury and Gemini were controlled manually by the astronauts. But even the most ambitious flights never left Earth orbit. The Apollo missions were going to go longer and farther, and involved many complex maneuvers, not the least of which was the landing on the lunar surface. NASA recognized that they needed a computer to do things like orient the craft in space, navigate and control the engines, with the ability to make adjustments along the way. These were numerous and advanced tasks for computers at the time. And they all had to be done by something that could fit on a tiny spacecraft along with all the other systems and the astronauts themselves.

The Apollo Guidance Computer, or AGC, was the answer. The computer itself is about the size of a large briefcase. The “guts” in the briefcase connect to a terminal with a numeric keypad, a few other buttons and some indicator lights that the astronauts used for input and status. The Apollo missions carried two AGCs each: one in the command module that the three-man crew used to get to the moon, and a second in the lunar module that two of them used to get to and from the surface.

What made the AGC’s small size possible was that it relied on a cutting-edge technology: the integrated circuit. You may have heard the integrated circuit referred to by more popular names such as microchip or just chip, and sixty years later, ICs are still the foundation of computing technology. The processors in your computer, your smartphone, your game console and everything else, really, are all based on integrated circuits.

The “integrated” part of “integrated circuit” comes from the fact that the various parts that are used to make up the circuit are integrated onto a single package and made as part of a single manufacturing process. This allows for the components, and for the devices that contain them, to be very small: much smaller than what came before.

ICs were cutting-edge, literal space-age technology at the time of the Apollo program. The prior generation of computers – like the ones NASA used planet-side to do the same calculations as the AGC – were based on older, transistor technology, and took up entire rooms. If you’ve ever seen the film Apollo 13, you might remember Tom Hanks bragging about NASA’s computers of the day only taking up a single room to a tour group. I’m sure that line was designed to get a chuckle out of audiences, even in 1995 when the movie came out, but the joke is kind of on the writers, if you think about it. An astronaut like the one Hanks played, Jim Lovell, would have had a far smaller, and for the time, much more impressive computer to brag about in the AGC. And Lovell’s VIP tour group would almost certainly have been familiar with the room-sized computers of the era that NASA was using: mainframes.

Mainframes were the mainstream computers of the mid-sixties. “Mainstream,” in that 1960s context means something different than it does today, where it means “in every home,” or “in every pocket”: the technology to do that was still just for spaceships. Nobody had a computer in their home, let alone their pocket: the pocket calculator was even invented until the seventies: we see NASA astronauts using slide rules in the film to check Lovell’s math after the whole “Houston, we have a problem…” moment.

To be in the market for a room-sized computer, you had to have a good chunk of change and, well, the room… as well as the computational needs. In the sixties, that meant places like government agencies, research labs, some larger companies like airlines and, most relevant to our story, research universities.

One such university – really the university you wanted to be at if you were into computing at this time – was the one that developed the aforementioned AGC: MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the late 1950s, IBM released the first in its 700 series of mainframe computers. By 1960, MIT had one, a 7090. As you might expect at a university, a lot of people were interested in getting their hands on the machine, but coordinating the scarce compute cycles was a challenge. In 1961, MIT released the first computer time-sharing system to address this problem. Before time sharing, a computer like the 7090 could run only one program at a time, then another. Time sharing allowed a single computer to run many programs for many different users at once through a technique called multitasking, where the computer switches rapidly between running one program, then another, then another, and then back, so it seems like everything is happening simultaneously. It’s the same technique your computer uses today when you have multiple apps open and doing things on a single processor. MIT’s early time-sharing operating system, CTSS, also gave each user a way of storing their programs and data.

Time sharing was a major unlock, and it allowed different computer scientists and software developers to pursue all sorts of varied projects. The innovation spread beyond MIT, and other time-sharing operating systems for the 7090 and related IBM computers began to be used elsewhere. One such place was in Westchester County, New York, just north of New York City, where a government agency called the Board Of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, was working with IBM. These boards, which exist throughout New York State even today, provide support, curricular, management – and notably technology -- services to the public school districts in their area.

Westchester County also happened to be where IBM was headquartered, and in 1962, some folks in the curriculum division at BOCES started talking to their neighbors about potential uses of computers in K-12 education.

I want to push pause right here, because that 1962 date is quite interesting and powerful when you look at it in the broader context of educational technology at that time. 1962 is before there was widespread use, let alone acceptance, of television as an educational technology. While there had been pure entertainment children’s programming from the earliest days of broadcast TV, this was seven years before the debut of Sesame Street. When we think of contemporary video games with their high production values, compelling narratives and voice casts that sometimes feature Hollywood stars, there’s an understandable tendency to view them as derivative of film and TV. But these elements weren’t present in the earliest videogames, and they didn’t play a role in causing the people at BOCES and IBM to think videogames could have educational potential. As we’ll see, something closer to the opposite is true: the makers of The Sumerian Game decided to incorporate mixed media techniques into the game to enrich the player experience, but it’s an afterthought.

What did influence them, particularly the head of the curriculum group at BOCES, weren’t even early computer games, but computer simulations. By this time, universities and businesses were using computers to create simulations of various kinds, including business and economic simulations, and the BOCES-IBM team wondered whether a simulation could be used to teach in K-12 classrooms.

At this point, BOCES did a couple of things that will sound familiar to anyone who’s worked in academia. First, they held a series of workshops with local teachers, some folks at IBM and a curriculum researcher from BOCES, Dr. Richard Wing. Then, encouraged by the workshop results, they applied for, and won, a research grant to explore the question. This lineage makes The Sumerian Game, the first digital learning game, also a research-based one: another first! [Ding].

There are, of course, many great learning and educational games that don’t have a research pedigree, to say nothing of learning and educational games that aren’t even grounded in what you could call solid learning science. I’d argue that there are some downright great educational games that grew out of nothing more than what someone reckoned might be a good way to learn something, and without even considering how to determine whether the players were truly learning anything at all. But I think the fact that the very first learning game was a research project indicates a certain seriousness about designing a game that really is effective at teaching something in a way where any claims of learning stand up to scrutiny.

Some of what went on at those early workshops will also be familiar to game designers, learning and otherwise. The participants spent time brainstorming and discussing ideas, but also paper prototyping their concepts. For those new to game design, paper prototyping is the process of using non-digital means to explore, test and validate what is ultimately intended to be a digital game. It’s a common practice in the game industry, in part because it allows designers to rapidly explore and iterate, and to test their ideas with actual users without incurring the cost of technical development. One of the concepts prototyped – introduced by Bruce Moncrief of IBM – involved fusing ideas from simulations with ideas from boardgames, specifically Monopoly, to teach basic concepts in economics. The conceit that Moncrief developed involved doing this through the lens of an ancient civilization’s economy. Feeling that pre-Greek civilizations were underrepresented in the curricula of the day, he decided to set his game in Sumer.

It's worth reflecting here that while there are, of course, simulation games: not every simulation is a game. Moncrief was drawing on prior examples and research showing computer simulations were promising, if not effective, teaching tools. But it seems like he and other participants – ultimately, the entire project team – had a sense that a simulation alone didn’t have the same potential for education and engagement as a simulation game, that is a simulation not only with rules (as all simulations have), but also goals and challenge. And yes, that makes The Sumerian Game the first simulation game. [Ding].

After being awarded the grant, Dr. Wing at BOCES – in another recognizable academic research move – put out a request for proposals to the participants from the various workshops for the specific game to be made and tested. One of the proposals came from a 4^th grade teacher and workshop participant named Mabel Addis. Addis’ proposal built on Moncrief’s concept, and his emphasis on a non-Greek civilization resonated with her since she had studied ancient Mesopotamia in college. Her proposal was the one that was accepted.

There’s a scene from the television show Mad Men – which, like our story is set in the 1960s -- that involves an elderly secretary passing away at work in the Manhattan office of the ad agency where the series is set. Her boss says of her, “She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper. She's an astronaut.” Mabel Addis wasn’t born until 1912 and lived to see the 21^st Century, but I think the spirit of that quote applies to her.

Mabel Addis began her teaching career in a one-room schoolhouse in Westchester Country in 1937, already having earned a Masters in education from Columbia. Before running into the team at BOCES, she taught in several school districts around the county, ending up in the town of Katonah in 1950, where she’d go on to teach for the next 24 years. A love of history is a theme of her career that weaves through The Sumerian Game, and also various articles and projects on local history she pursued.

The Sumerian Game is what we’d call today a resource management game: the first resource management game, in fact. [Ding]. I like the way the Game Mechanics Wiki describes this genre, so I’ll quote from its summary now:

“Resource management is about collecting, monitoring, and leveraging quantitative resources with incomplete information… In simple English, this means you get money, ore, pylons, or whatever… and [these have] to be used wisely to compete. You never have enough information to make fully informed decisions and must develop the best strategy you can with imperfect information.”

This description implies that resource management can also be a mechanic, or if we want to stick to the game designer-y, verb-y way of talking about mechanics, “managing resources” is. And I think this is true. In this sense, lots of games, maybe even most digital games, have resource management mechanics. A player of an RPG who has to decide what loot to sell versus keep versus upgrade is managing resources. You could argue that any game with a health bar involves resource management, in that you have to decide how much of your health you’re willing to risk by going to a certain area when you don’t know what’s there or by diving into a boss fight where the outcome is uncertain.

But as a genre of games, resource management refers to games that have it as the core mechanic, and often follow similar conventions. Managing resources is at the heart of many simulations, too, largely because the purpose of many simulations, particularly economic ones, is to develop strategies that will tend to maximize gaining or keeping certain desirable resources. One way to think of resource management games as a genre is that a resource management game is an economic simulation with win states that involve a player maximizing certain resources and loss states that involve failing to do so.

Previously, I’ve talked about Gamestar Mechanic, the first educational game I worked on. I mentioned that Gamestar teaches players how to make games and uses a games-as-a-system paradigm to do so. The other side of the coin is that Gamestar’s goal is to teach systems thinking and to help players use it to understand real-world systems. Resource management games are, in essence, models of systems. Playing well involves understanding the dynamics of the system being modeled. And if the system itself is modeled well, then the understanding of the game translates to an understanding of the system.

This was precisely the theory of learning Addis had in mind when she designed The Sumerian Game, and it represents a very strong alignment of game mechanics and learning mechanics. I think it’s worth another tip of the hat to Addis and the people behind The Sumerian Game – and there are going to be more – for coming out of the gate so strong. It shows a visionary understanding of the power of what games can do. Especially given the computing constraints of the time, it would have been understandable if the first educational game was nothing more than a glorified pop-quiz: a design approach that, by the way, many educational games take today. Taking on the challenge of modeling a real-world system like an economy, even in simplified form, and, on top of that, taking on the challenge of making it fun and engaging for kids to interact with that system was a gutsy call. The Sumerian Game was a moonshot, happening at the same time America was getting ready to make her literal one.

Now, I say the game represents an economy in simplified form, but I don’t want to give the wrong impression: the economic simulation here ain’t all that simple. If you read through the report that was produced at the end of the research study for which the game was made, you will find pages upon pages of details about the design of the simulation: the elements of the economy being represented, the math behind the simulation, the different ways those elements do and don’t interact. It’s actually quite rich. A lot richer than a lot of simulation games we play today.

I’ll come back to this issue at the end of the episode because I suspect the complexity of the simulation hurts the game in certain ways and contributed to the mixed findings the study found in the game’s effectiveness as a teaching tool. But for now, I bring it up because: it would take several very tedious hours of podcasting to go into every detail of the design and, as much as I like hearing myself talk, I’m not going to put you through that. If you’re genuinely interested, the paper is linked in the show notes.

Instead, what I’m going to do is sketch out the basic play experience so you can put yourselves in the shoes of a sixth grader who experienced it, then layer in some – but not all – of the details so you can at least get a taste of the game’s richness.

The Sumerian Game is set around 3,500 BCE in the city of Lagash, one of the world’s oldest known city-states that sat at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern-day Iraq. As a player, you take on the role of three successive priest-rulers of the city-state: Luduga I, Luduga II and Luduga III. The Ludugas, to be clear, were not real historical figures. Addis made them up as part of the game’s fiction. I’m guessing that the name “Luduga” is based on the Latin verb ludo, meaning “to play,” which you see as the root of some English words like “ludology,” meaning “the study of games or play”. Hey: that’s what we do here! Welcome, fellow ludologists!

I know I promised a second ago to get into the play experience, but I haven’t used the bell in a while so… the fact that Addis invented the fictional Ludugas makes them the first videogame characters. [Ding]. Ah… that’s better. If you’ve listened to Episode 1, you’ll recall that the very earliest non-learning videogames were titles like Tennis For Two, a sports game and Spacewar!, where the players control starships. But in casting the player as a fictional ruler, The Sumerian Game is the first videogame in which the player assumes the identity of fictional human being.

Early videogames like Tennis For Two and Spacewar! start with the player dumped into the action with no introduction or context. Addis recognized that this probably wouldn’t fly for her intended sixth grade audience, who weren’t expected to know anything about Sumer or basic economics. So rather than dump them right into interaction with the computer, the play experience that Addis crafted begins with a lecture.

The lecture wasn’t just an explanation of how to play – I’m sure the programmers of earlier games would stand next to the machine and gave new players instructions – it was an introduction to the game itself. It introduced the historical and fictional world, the player characters, the structure of the game, the play mechanics as well as the economic concepts players would need at the outset. And this was no mere verbal lecture: this was a multimedia extravaganza, because the opening lecture was accompanied by a slideshow featuring custom artwork to set the stage.

This may be a slight misuse of the bell, but I think it’s fair to say that this makes The Sumerian Game the first game to feature an opening cinematic. [Ding]. And even if you don’t buy that, because Addis designed and scripted the opening lecture (in addition to the in-game text), it also makes her the first videogame writer. [Ding]. The bell is in danger of coming apart, ladies and gentlemen. In fairness, I should point out that this opening lecture took twenty minutes, which would have today’s players pressing F to skip, as I imagine more than a few of those sixth graders in 1964 would have done if they could.

After the introduction, the player enters the first of three turn-based rounds, taking on the role of Luduga I. In this and subsequent turns during the first round, Luduga’s advisors inform him that the harvest has finished, resulting in the city harvesting a certain quantity of grain: 5,000 bushels in the first turn. The player is then asked to decide how much of this grain to save to plant for the next season, taking into account the city’s current population (500 people on the first turn), with the unsaved grain being used to feed the people. The player inputs their choice into the computer and the game’s simulation engine uses this to determine the city’s conditions at the start of the next turn: its standard of living, population, the result of the next harvest, etc. Each turn is meant to represent six months in the life of the city. If the player manages things well, the population expands, which the player must take into account because the growing population creates increased demands for resources, and soon the player gains the ability to invest grain in expanding and irrigating more farmland to feed their growing population. The reign of Luduga I lasts thirty turns and is focused on the management of this agricultural economy.

Before Luduga I shuffles off the mortal coil and his son, Luduga II, takes over, I want to go back to something I glossed over in describing the gameplay. I mentioned that the player inputs their choices about how much grain to save at the end of the turn. How exactly does the player do this? You might assume using a keyboard, and that’s sort of correct. But if you’re picturing that keyboard sitting on a desk in front of a monitor, that’s definitely not. Computer displays didn’t come into use until the 1970s, at least for mainframe use. In 1964, mainframe users – including the children playing The Sumerian Game – used something called a teleprinter as their input and output mechanism.

In the unlikely event you don’t have a teleprinter at home, and aren’t in a position to search for a picture at the moment, I’ve included one in the show notes if you want to check it out later. But I’ll try to paint a picture with words. Imagine a typewriter, but instead of it holding one sheet of paper at a time, it’s fed by a roll of paper… like the receipt paper in a cash register, but as wide as a piece of writing paper. The teleprinter, like a typewriter, could sit on a desk, but it was hooked up to the mainframe: remember, the mainframe is this massive thing off in a room somewhere. When the user pressed keys on the keyboard, these transmitted signals back to the mainframe as input. And the mainframe could send commands back to the teleprinter to print characters on the paper tape and advance to the next line.

When a user played The Sumerian Game, the program “sent” the messages from Luduga’s fictional advisors to the teleprinter to be printed. And when the player issued his commands, he typed on the teleprinter’s keyboard to send them to the mainframe as input to the program. The entire game would unfold on paper, and what was printed on the paper tape would provide a record of the entire gameplay session.

Parenthetically, this way of handling output and, in particular, input to the mainframe was fine for interacting with a program like The Sumerian Game in this back-and-forth way. But using a teleprinter as a way of getting large amounts of data into a computer was horribly inefficient and error-prone. This is where punched cards came in, which could represent larger amounts of data, like entire programs, in a much more durable and consistent way, and punched cards were the dominant mechanism of storing, representing and transferring computer data until they were supplanted by magnetic tape (the same technology used for audio cassettes if you lived through the 80s and 90s; or 8-tracks if you’re a decade or two older), floppy disks and eventually hard drives and other storage formats we still use. But I digress… it’s time for the reign of Luduga II.

In the second round of the game, the simulation becomes more rich. In addition to storing grain for next year’s harvest and for feeding the growing population, Luduga II has the ability to invest grain in developing new technologies and to specialize his labor force to do things other than farming. Investing in technology and specialization improves quality of life, helping the city’s population to grow further and faster.

By the time we get to the end of the reign of the next and final ruler, Luduga III, or Tre, as I like to call him, the game has layered in raiding, trading (and with it concepts of supply and demand), the production of specialized commodities, middlemen who charge markups, the need to maintain resources and quite a number of other components and mechanics. Oh: and there are also random events (like natural disasters) that can harm the city and persistent drains on resources like the fact that stored grain can rot. You get why I said before that this ends up being a lot.

More on that in a second, but first, I want to draw attention to something very cool in the instructional and game design. In starting with a limited set of mechanics at the start of Luduga I’s reign and slowly layering in more and more complexity, the challenge of the game increases. But Addis is obviously conscious of layering the complexity and challenge in in a controlled way: she doesn’t add it all at once, or start the game on hard mode. This is really good game design, and learning design. I mentioned this in passing in Episode 1, but Addis is applying a game and instructional design principle known to Montessorians as isolation of difficulty. The idea behind it is that if you want someone to learn something difficult or complex, it helps to break it down into small chunks that you introduce one at a time.

The Montessori approach to teaching a small child to use scissors is a favorite example of mine. As adults who have mastered using scissors, we tend to think of cutting with them as a single skill. But if you’re just learning to use them, there are a number of challenging things you have to master before you can successfully do something like cut a circular shape out of a piece of paper. If you give a pair of scissors to a child who’s never used them before and just ask her to do that cold, she’s likely to fail and get frustrated.

The Montessori approach breaks down the cutting into its constituent skills and introduces them one at a time. First, you have to master the hand motion to make the blades go up and down. Then you have to master coordinating moving the paper between them at the appropriate time: but just to snip the paper. We’re not trying to cut anything out, or even cut following a straight line. That comes later, and cutting along a straight line is introduced before cutting along a curve because the latter is harder and requires new skills straight line cutting doesn’t that you probably take for granted: for example being able to rotate the paper continuously and by small increments to follow the outline of a circle.

Another group of educators who are really good at this – and I would be remiss if I didn’t shout them out because I come from a family of them – are physical education teachers and coaches. If you’ve worked on your swing with a golf pro, you know they’re adept at isolating the different components of the swing: the weight shift, the club movement, and so forth, and building them up individually. There are tons of what are called developmental games in physed that are intended to isolate and teach different aspects of sports: I remember playing a game in middle school called Box Basketball that was designed to introduce the concept of zone defense.

Good videogames do this too as they teach you how to play. As I talked about in Episode 1, Level 1-1 of Super Mario Bros.is the most frequently cited example of this. In the very first sequence of the game, four different skills are introduced in progression: lateral movement, jumping in place, jumping while moving laterally (which combines the first two), and jumping laterally to avoid or stomp on an enemy. Addis is doing this in The Sumerian Game in the way that good educators do, and it’s cool to see a real-world learning principle applied in the very first educational game.

Because the game’s challenge increases along with its complexity, Addis is also applying another game design principle: progressive difficulty. Put simply, this means that the game gets harder as you go along. Most well-designed games we encounter today – and indeed going back to the time of Super Mario Bros. and beyond – implement progressive difficulty, some better than others. But videogames before The Sumerian Game didn’t, so we have another first. [Ding]. I know: I missed the bell, too.

But in spite of the isolation and progression of difficulty – or maybe because Addis thought the isolation and progression would keep things manageable -- The Sumerian Game ends up being pretty darn complex. I don’t want to be too hard on her, because to do so would be to judge her by today’s standards and with the context of sixty subsequent years of game design she didn’t have the benefit of. She was literally inventing the field of learning game design as she went. But with the benefit of that knowledge, I think a lot of game designers today would at least be suspicious of whether or not the game was going to work, and especially of whether or not it would succeed in its ultimate educational goal of getting children to understand economic concepts. Very few modern game designers would introduce that complex a system that fast, if at all. I get the impression that the game strained under the weight of its complexity from a couple of places in the research report.

First, in talking about the game’s design and development, the paper mentions that the game underwent a significant revision after its initial round of testing with kids. Some of these revisions weren’t related to gameplay, for example making the introductory presentation clearer and increasing its “production value”; as well as making use of pre-recorded audio for some of the updates from Luduga’s advisors to reduce the amount of text the children had to consume. But the revisions that were about gameplay show a pattern of reducing its complexity. The number of turns per round is reduced. In the second round, all the decisions about planting, harvesting and storing are taken over by the computer, leaving the student free to focus on learning and using the new technology development and resource allocation mechanics. A similar revision that simplified the third round to, again, have the computer take over more stuff to focus the player on the new mechanics, was planned but never implemented.

Before these revisions, the game functioned as an increasingly rich simulation of Lagash’s economy, with more dimensions of it being layered in as the game progresses from round to round. But especially if you pretend that the planned Round 3 changes were implemented, what you end up with is something closer to a game where each of the three rounds is simulating different dimensions of the city’s economy: agriculture in the first, division of labor in the second and trade in the third. It’s less progressive and more isolating, which reduces the burden on the player and would have thrown the individual concepts being taught into sharper relief.

The second piece of evidence I’d point to are the results of the research study itself. Among the hypotheses the researchers were testing was that children introduced to the underlying economic concepts through the game would better understand and formulate those concepts than children who were introduced to them through conventional teaching methods. To test this hypothesis, the researchers created a control group who did receive the conventional instruction and compared their understanding and retention of the concepts to those who played the game using pre-, post- and follow-on assessments, i.e. tests. Again, if you’ve done any kind of learning research, this surely sounds familiar.

The results were mixed. Children in the experimental group – that is, the ones who played the game – did show a statistically-significant greater knowledge gain than the control group, as measured by the pre- and post-assessment; though the experimental students started with more knowledge on average, which somewhat undermines the result. The researchers also admit that the assessments they used here were just so-so, and their conclusion is that you can’t really say that the kids who played the game learned more or did better than the control group, but it’s probably fair to say they didn’t do worse.

But on the retention assessment, the control group meaningfully outperformed the experimental group, meaning the kids who got the conventional instruction held onto what they learned much better than the kids who played the game. The researchers are at a loss to explain this, but I have a hypothesis. The game and the presentation were initially engaging and motivating, as games are, leading the children who played to be invested in what they were doing and retain what they learned decently well in the immediate aftermath. But because the game was so complex, the children held the concepts in sort of a muddy way, which led to things being jumbled when it came time to recall them more time away.

That’s not to say that study findings were all bad. In fact, there are some interesting nuggets, some surprising and some not. First, and not surprisingly, the concepts that were retained best were the ones that were repeated most often in the game. The strong readers got more out of the game than the weaker ones, which is also unsurprising given the game’s emphasis on reading. The researchers realized this in the middle of the study, hence the introduction of the recorded audio segments and lowering of the number of turns per round, which reduce the amount of reading.

More surprising is that the students who spent the least time in front of the computer had the most learning gains. At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive, but the researchers hypothesize that this is because these were also the most capable students (as measured by IQ tests). They were just able to get through the game faster.

If you agree with the researchers “worst case scenario” in which the children who played the game had about the same learning gains as the children who got the conventional instruction, the most interesting finding is that the children who played the game achieved those gains in about half the instructional time on average that it took for the children who learned the old fashioned way. Even if the data don’t support the conclusion that the players learned more or better, they do show that with games, the children learned more efficiently. I think this finding has parallels with some of what we’re seeing as AI plays a greater role in education, where there’s emerging data that shows that children who learn via AI-powered, adaptive learning systems can not only progress much faster, but can also achieve greater learning gains than their peers receiving conventional instruction. This is by no means a settled issue: there’s not enough data of enough quality, but there’s enough for it to be worth tracking.

Even if the researchers didn’t prove everything they set out to, what they certainly demonstrated in this first foray was that educational games were a valid and promising teaching tool, and one worthy of further investment and consideration. Everyone who has made our used a learning game, or worked in the field, owes them a debt of gratitude.

Mabel Addis developed the concept of the Sumerian Game, crafted the player experience and wrote the game, but she didn’t program it. She wasn’t a programmer. That job was done by IBM employee William McKay. We see this kind of specialization in games today, of course. Making a modern commercial game, or even most hobbyist and student projects, requires multiple disciplines from art to writing to programming to design. As I like to say, making games is a team sport. Because of the specific things she did in developing the game, and because she did them as part of a team with a division of labor, Mabel Addis is traditionally cited as the first videogame designer, learning or otherwise. And I think that’s worthy of a resounding [Gadong] on our list of firsts.

Because of her gender, she’s also traditionally cited as the first female game designer. And while that’s true, I find that perspective strange. Mabel Addis was indeed, female, and she was the first game designer. Those things are facts. But to single her out for being the first female game designer seems to me to smuggle in a false assumption that, obviously, the first game designer was, or would have to be male. It’s only appropriate to call someone the first of their gender, or race, or the first person on the block to do something if they’re also not the first to do it, period. And that’s what Mabel Addis was: the first.

As I mentioned before, Mabel passed away in 2004. At the Game Developer’s Conference in 2023, she was honored posthumously with the Game Developers Choice Awards Pioneer Award for her work on The Sumerian Game. An article I read in preparing for the podcast refers to The Sumerian Game as “the most important video game you’ve never heard of.” You’ve heard of it now, of course, but most gamers, and most educators who use games – which is to say most educators – never have. I do think that’s a shame for a game that can claim so many first. It’s not every game that launches a genre, an entire branch of the gaming tree and an entire gamemaking discipline. And you see echoes of its design n many later games, most notably the Civilization franchise.

My favorite thing from the research study comes at the very beginning. The researchers – and I assume they’re speaking for Addis, too – articulate what they believe the aim of education to be. They say:

“Our interest in computer-based instruction… is founded on the hope that a theory of instruction based on broad principles of individualization may provide clues for the improvement of education. This hope comes at a time when new computer technologies offer promiseing of new ways of establishing effective learning.

“An educational system should provide a learning environment in which each individual can learn those skills, concepts and attitudes which are appropriate to his own ability and ambitions and improve his character and personality in ways corresponding to an ideal notion of human worth.”

If that isn’t the perfect start of a manifesto on education, and on games and education, I don’t know what is.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, be sure to check out the Substack at historyoflearning.games, where if you subscribe, you’ll get each episode in your inbox along with show notes that include bonus info not covered in the podcast, including images of games discussed. I also post transcripts of each episode separately.

If you’d like to support the show, the best thing you can do is leave a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you’re so inclined, I would be truly grateful.

Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.

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Notes and Resources

Photos

Links

• The original research study of which The Sumerian Game was a part. It includes a detailed discussion of the game’s design, player experience and the study findings.

• “The Sumerian Game: The Most Important Videogame You’ve Never Heard Of,” a 2019 article on the game.

• A 2024 reconstruction of the game is playable and available free on Steam.

Honoring Mabel Addis

At GDC 2023, Mabel Addis won the Game Developers Choice Awards Pioneer Award for her work on The Sumerian Game. Addis passed away in 2004, but this video from the ceremony includes an acceptance speech by her grandson.

Back In Episode 1, I mentioned that complex board games have been used as learning games to train strategic thinking going back to ancient times. Chess is a good example of a game like this, though its origins are more recent. Chess is a staggeringly rich and complex game, as attested to by the body of thought that’s developed around it over the centuries. And we know that chess, with its narrative of laying siege to capture the king, was used throughout its history as a military training tool.

Despite their complexity and deep strategic elements, chess and games like it lack many characteristics of real military engagements. For one thing, in a chess game, both players have access to the same information about the game at all times. They know where all the pieces are on the board, whose turn it is, and so on. Game designers call that information the game state, by the way, and while the players of a chess match are entitled to perfect knowledge of it at all times, the same isn’t true of actual war. The expression “the fog of war” refers to this phenomenon: commanders often have to make decisions in the absence of information, like having to decide whether or not to attack without having perfect, chess-like knowledge of your opponent’s position or strength. Similarly, in chess, the complete ruleset is known to both players: things like how the different pieces move, what it means to be “in check,” and so on. This also isn’t true in real war: your opponent can do things that break the rules, or at least defy your expectations.

Around the turn of the 19th Century, a Prussian baron named George Leopold von Reisswitz – who was, among other things, what we would today call a board game geek – noticed differences like these and decided to design a military combat game that realistically represented the warfare of the time: think Napoleonic warfare or the American Civil War if you know your military history: infantry with muskets, massed fire, artillery, cavalry acting as scouts or mobile infantry. The work of this noble miniature wargamer and later, his son, would come to define the wargaming genre, and the innovations they developed have become essential parts of many digital and non-digital game genres enjoyed by tens of millions of players today. It’s also possible that the work of these martially-minded learning game designers indirectly contributed to the formation of a unified German state and, rather more darkly, some of the darkest chapters in 20th Century history, because the Reisswitzes created what Marshall Neal, the founder of the international society dedicated to the game calls “the great-grandfather of wargames.” In fact, its name literally translates as “war game”: the game of Kriegsspiel.

This is the second of two episodes focused on non-digital learning games before we get to the main narrative of digital learning games that’s the real focus of the podcast. As I mentioned in Episode 2 where I talked about Snakes and Ladders, I wanted to start with these two examples – and they really are two examples among many I could have chosen from – because they’re fascinating in their own right, but also because, in my experience, starting any discussion of games and game design with non-digital games makes the key concepts easier to grasp than starting with digital games. Plus, in the case of Kriegsspiel, we’re going to see some of the design challenges, and Kriegsspiel’s solutions to them, more than once in the digital learning games to come. And, frankly, this is just a great story. Let’s get back to it.

Baron Reisswitz starts wrestling with the things he sees as deficiencies in the design of the early, or first-generation, tabletop wargames of his time, which eventually leads him to construct a prototype aimed at creating a more authentic war game. Reisswitz’s prototype included a number of innovations compared to games like chess or existing wargames. Instead of using a two-dimensional grid like most earlier – and later – boardgames, Reisswitz’s game featured realistic, sculpted, 3D terrain: first in the form of wet sand and then using modular tiles that could be rearranged to create different battlefields; the latter development coming after he got himself invited to present the game to King Frederick Willhelm III of Prussia and decided wet sand wasn’t regal enough for his majesty. And instead of moving pieces around the spaces of a game board, Reisswitz’s pieces represented military units that could move about the terrain freely in the way the units they represented did on a real battlefield.

Reisswitz’s game was a hit with the royal family, but it was expensive to produce and never caught on. The fact that its ideal audience – military officers and trainees – were busy fighting in the aforementioned and very real Napoleonic Wars probably had something to do with it. If the Horatio Hornblower novels are to be believed, they all preferred a friendly game of Whist between engagements. At any rate, Reisswitz lost interest around the time Old Boney got what was coming to him at Waterloo and further development of the game stalled until the 1820s when Reisswitz’s son – with the equally fantastically martial name of Georg Heinrick Rudolf Johan von Reisswitz -- picked up where his dad left off, working with a small circle of other junior officers in the Prussian army.

As a game maker, I have to say: I love this story because what Reisswitz Junior and his co-developers do in the 1820s has so many parallels with game development 200 years later. I like to imagine Reisswitz and his buddies sitting around the barracks, eating pizza and chugging energy drinks as they have impassioned arguments about this or that minor design point. But in all seriousness, what Reisswitz and his buddies engage in is what we would call today an iterative development process. They’re trying and testing new ideas, seeing what works, getting rid of what doesn’t and doing it over and over again, all in pursuit of the goal of making the game’s representation of combat as realistic as possible. They’re creating an incredibly rich simulation game, and coming up with one brilliant idea after another, a fair number of which we still use – and take for granted – in games today. The result is Kriegsspiel.

In previous strategy games, including earlier wargames, game pieces represented combatants or whole units, as in Reisswitz Senior’s prototype. But in earlier games, a game piece’s victory or defeat was an all-or-nothing proposition. If your piece is taken in chess, it goes off the board completely. Kriegsspiel introduced the idea that in-game units could be partially defeated but stay on the field, in the way real military units take casualties. It became possible for a unit to survive multiple rounds of enemy attack, taking damage each round, before ultimately being overwhelmed and taken off the map. In other words, Reisswitz Junior and his colleagues invented hit points.

Like the prototype, units in Kriegsspiel move about the game board freely. However instead of using 3D terrain, Kriegsspiel uses real, detailed topographical maps (traditionally at a 1:8,000 scale). This made it possible to simulate any historical or anticipated battlefield. Now, OK, the idea of using a real map seems clever, but also a little obvious. You might ask, well, why didn’t earlier wargame designers like Reisswitz Senior use them? This is another answer I absolutely love, because it again has direct parallels with modern game development. The answer is that topographical maps with the necessary detail and scale didn’t become widely available until the 1820s. So Reisswitz Junior and his buddies were taking advantage of – and probably geeking out at least a little over – the cutting-edge technology of the day, just like modern game devs do when new hardware and software technologies become available.

But Kriegsspiel’s most significant contribution to game design comes in its solution to the problem of simulating the fog of war. Remember, the fog of war concept was absent from earlier war and strategy games: players tended to have a shared and perfect knowledge of the game’s state, which in no way resembles real combat. Reisswitz Junior solved this by introducing – and let’s make use of some of that games-as-a-system terminology we introduced in Episode 2 and call it what is – a new component: the umpire.

In Kriegsspiel, two players control the opposing forces. You can – and people frequently do – play with more than one player on a side to represent the levels in the command structure of the army, like each side having an overall army commander, then division commanders who report to him, brigade commanders who report to them, and so forth. But we’ll stick with talking about just two opposing players to keep it simple. Instead of taking turns moving their units around a shared game board, each player submits his orders for each turn, in secret, to the umpire. And these are authentic, military-sounding orders like “dig in on this hill” or “attack the enemy’s right with this brigade and attempt to turn his flank,” not abstract game moves like “Queen to King’s Rook 5.”

The umpire collects the orders from both players and then interprets them based on a combination of the game’s formal rules and his – the umpire’s – real-world military knowledge: early Kriegsspiel umpires were military officers with extensive experience who knew how things tended to go. If opposing units came into contact, the umpire would roll a set of specialized dice and apply the game’s rules to the result to determine the outcome of the engagement. The umpire pulls all of this together over the course of a turn and then updates the game state.

One of the most powerful things about the game-as-a-system way of thinking is that it helps you appreciate the interconnectedness of a game’s elements. The addition of the umpire component enabled or required changes to other elements of Kriegsspiel, all of which wound up contributing to making the game’s military simulation more realistic and useful as a training tool.

Instead of Kriegspiel’s space being a shared gameboard, the addition of the umpire enabled that space to be reconfigured, which was key to solving the fog of war problem. Kriegsspiel’s space is made up of not one but three copies of the game map (or potentially more if multiple players are on each side). The umpire’s map contains a perfect picture of the entire game state: where every one of both player’s units is and what each unit’s strength is. But each player’s map reflects only the state his own units, plus those of his opponent that he’s come in contact with. The rest of the game state is hidden from him. It's a bit like the position players find themselves in in Battleship: you know the number and types of your opponent’s ships, but only get a sense of where they are when you score a hit. The result is that in Kriegsspiel, as in real war, a commander makes decisions using only the knowledge he has, not from the omniscient and artificial perspective of the umpire.

The addition of the umpire also allowed for simulating other realistic war challenges. Remember, Kriegspiel is a simulation of 19th Century warfare, and in the 19th Century, nothing on the battlefield beyond visual range moved faster than the fastest horse… well, nothing other than a bullet, I suppose. And that includes orders and information. To simulate the challenge this posed, one of the umpire’s jobs is to simulate the speed information moves at. The game includes rules for this so that, for example, an order a commander gives from his simulated position on one side of the map might sit with the umpire for several turns before he carries it out with the unit it has to do with on the other side of the map. By that time, the state of the game may have changed in a way that makes it more or less likely the order will succeed, or even be relevant. It’s even possible for an order to be given and never carried out by the umpire because in real war, sometimes messengers get shot (in spite of us all being told not to do that).

Similarly, as in real warfare, orders themselves can sometimes be unclear or based on false information and assumptions. One of the umpire’s jobs is to interpret the players’ orders, but he’s not supposed to interpret them in the most advantageous light for the player who gave them, nor from his perspective of omniscience. He’s supposed to interpret them fairly, but in a way that would be reasonable for the receiving unit to interpret them on the battlefield, and that includes in ways that are different than the commander meant. And, since he’s human, it’s also possible for the umpire himself to make mistakes, either in implementing orders or even in applying the game’s rules. And while Kriegsspiel allows for do-overs in limited cases, the general rule is that players play through the umpire’s mistakes. That’s kind of the game’s way of representing the whims of the gods of war.

Suffice it to say that the addition of the umpire component – and the changes it brought to other game elements – was a major unlock that allowed the game to fully realize its potential as a realistic and useful training tool. It’s so useful a component that it’s evolved and survived to the present day. It’s a feature of many modern wargames, both tabletop wargames and the kind of wargames that military organizations conduct out in the field with real equipment and personnel. And it’s the progenitor of the gamemaster concept that’s commonly found in tabletop role playing games: like the dungeon master in Dungeons and Dragons, who, in addition to serving a rules enforcement and interpretation role, also frames and leads the players in advancing the game’s narrative.

To wrap up the story of Kriegsspiel’s development, by 1824 Reisswitz Junior and his team have a working version of the game and present it to the King and his generals, who immediately recognize its potential as a training tool, ordering a copy for every regiment in the Prussian army. It doesn’t catch on with the military right away, though, and Reisswitz falls out of favor with the military establishment for unrelated reasons and gets himself exiled from Berlin to a remote post, where he commits suicide in 1827.

But the game survives outside the military in private German wargaming clubs, and the rules undergo a series of updates by enthusiasts in the 1840s and 50s. By the 1860s, the revised game is finally used widely as a training tool throughout the Prussian military.

The period following the end of the Napoleonic Wars 1815 is one of relative peace in Europe, and you get several generations of soldiers and military leaders across the continent who lack significant combat and, in particular, largescale field command experience. That includes the Prussians, but they’ve been playing Kriegsspiel. When Prussia finally does go to war in the latter half of the century – first against Austria in 1866 and then against France in 1870 – it absolutely dominates its opponents, defeating Austria in a month and defeating France in six months, the latter resulting in the capture of Paris. There are many factors that led to Prussia’s victory, but on a purely military level, it prevailed both times over evenly matched or maybe even slightly superior foes in certain respects. It would be ridiculous to attribute the Prussian victories solely to Kriegsspiel, but Prussia’s is the only military in the world with a wargaming tradition, and some contemporary commentators see a connection. This is what Matthew Caffrey, a modern scholar of wargaming at the Naval Warfare College in Newport, Rhode Island, has to say about this in his 2019 book:

“Prussian forces were more often than not outnumbered, weapon advantages were mixed, and training methods were similar... At this time, though, the Prussian military had a monopoly on second-generation wargaming and had integrated it into its staff education and its staff planning methods, especially at the higher levels."

In the wake of these Prussian victories, other countries start to take notice, and by the 1880s, most of the world’s major militaries are using wargames, and Kriegssspiel in particular, for training and planning purposes.

I’m not a historian – of wargaming or otherwise – but if you buy that Kriegsspiel played a role in those Prussian victories, it’s probably worth taking a moment to connect a few political and historical dots, because there’s an ominous side to all this. The Prussian conflicts with Austria and France are collectively known as the Wars of German Unification. For all its history up to this point, what we now know as Germany was a collection of independent states, of which Prussia was one. Prussia’s victory over Austria led to its dominance over the other northern German states. And its victory over France led to Prussia becoming the dominant force in unifying all the German-speaking states (with the exception of Austria and Switzerland) into the modern state of Germany, under the emperor – or kaiser – Wilhelm I. Prussia rode to victory, and into the leading position in the new German state, on a wave of militaristic nationalism, which was bolstered by its victories and became a feature of early German national identity as a whole. This nationalism continued to grow during Wilhelm’s reign and ultimately contributed to World War I and Germany’s role in it under his grandson, Wilhelm II. Germany’s subsequent defeat in World War I and its aftermath led directly to the rise of another form of political and economic nationalism: National Socialism, or Nazism, and, ultimately, World War II. So, rather darkly, you can indirectly connect an extremely well-designed educational game with the 20th Century’s most destructive conflicts.

That’s a bit of a downer, so to end the story of Kriegsspiel on a positive note, the game has been continuously played in military contexts and by regular old enthusiasts ever since. It’s enjoyed an uptick in popularity in recent years both through in-person groups and, in particular, online play. The aforementioned International Kriegsspiel Society constantly hosts online games on its Discord, because it turns out that sequestering individual players in their own chat threads is an effective way of achieving the same thing as having players use their own map tables back in the day. Check them out if you want to learn more about the game or think you might have made an excellent 19th Century general.

Today, wargaming is still going strong as an entertainment genre. Miniature wargaming survives as a real-world, tabletop game type with a diverse set of games that run the gamut from historical warfare to modern warfare to science fiction and fantasy in their conceits. The Warhammer franchise is probably the most well known, but there are others, including ones that tie into franchises like Star Wars and Game of Thrones. A significant element of the experience for many tabletop wargamers is decorating the tiny gamepieces that represent their units, a task that I entirely lack the artistic ability and fine motor skills for. And if you play digital games in the tactical wargames or turn-based strategy genres or their little brothers like tower defense – things like the XCOM franchise – you’re familiar with videogames that descend from the same branch of the gaming tree.

In Episode 1, I mentioned that one of the ways in which games are a uniquely effective learning tool is that they let players try and fail in a safe environment: in ways that aren’t possible in the real world. Kriegsspiel is a perfect example of this, not just in the game’s design, but insofar as making a realistic war game that allowed for precisely that was the guiding principle of that design. You can see the legacy of this in the way we use the phrase “war gaming” today. Outside of playing literal war games, we use that phrase to capture the idea of playing something out in a realistic, safe, simulated environment for the express purpose of trying to figure out what to do in the real world. People and organizations war game conversations, negotiations, business strategies, political maneuvers and, of course, literal wars. All that is the legacy of Kriegsspiel.

We’ll see some of these same ideas at play when we pick up the story of digital learning games where it all began in the next episode with another simulation game. We’ll take a look at a game that can claim a number of firsts: first in its genre, first videogame created by a female designer, first research-based game and, yes, the first educational videogame: 1964’s The Sumerian Game.

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Notes & Resources

International Kriegsspiel Society

The International Kriegsspiel Society is the modern home of the game. Their website features many resources, including overviews, rules and links to join their Discord server for online play. They’ve even got a podcast of their own. This video overview comes from the site as well.

Descendents of Kriegsspiel

Tabletop Wargames

Modern miniauture tabletop wargames owe a lot to Kriegsspiel. Warhammer: Age of Sigmar is one current iteration in the popular Warhammer franchise, which also includes titles with other conceits like sci-fi in addition to high fantasy. There’s even one based on Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

If franchise tie-ins are your thing, you can find tabletop wargames from places like the Star Wars, Marvel, Star Trek and Game of Thrones universes.

Videogames with Wargame Influences

Tactical combat games — of which the XCOM franchise is probably the best known — feature mechanics rooted in turn-based tabletop wargames like Kriegsspiel. The Warhammer franchise’s digital games are also widely played.

The first learning game I worked on professionally back in 2008 was called Gamestar Mechanic. Gamestar is designed to teach elementary- and middle school-aged kids about games and game design. It originally grew out of work by some of the leading games and learning researchers of the time – folks like Jim Gee, Alex Games, Robert Torres and, in particular, Katie Salen for those of you who know the field – and the core pedagogy of the game involved thinking about a game as a system. I was fortunate to get to work on Gamestar as my first commercial game project for many reasons, but especially because the idea of thinking about a game as a system – and the particular framework Gamestar uses for doing so – turned out to be a really useful lens for someone new to the industry.

This podcast is about digital learning games, but over this episode and the next one, I’m going to cover two non-digital learning games… in fact two non-digital educational games in the sense of being designed for educational purposes, as I discussed in Episode 1. I want to do this because I think as learning games, each of these games is interesting in its own right, as is the contrast between them. But I also want to use these two games as a way of introducing the games-as-a-system perspective: plus a few other concepts I’ll be referring to throughout the series as we deconstruct and analyze digital learning games. In my experience teaching game design, I found that introducing these concepts in real-world games, rather than videogames, made things clearer, so I figured that’s what I’d do on the podcast, too.

By the way, I had originally planned on covering these two games in single episode, and I even mentioned that in Episode 1. But I decided it was better to stick with the “one game per episode” approach I have planned for the rest of the series. Plus the podcast gods tell me shorter episodes are better. On deck this time is a game I mentioned in passing in Episode 1: Snakes and Ladders.

Snakes and Ladders, or, as it’s more commonly known in America from the version Milton Bradley first released in 1943, Chutes and Ladders (I guess we’re not as keen on snakes here in the States as our friends across the pond). I’m betting most of you know this game, but in case you don’t, I’ll provide a quick overview:

Snakes and Ladders is board game for two to four players. The game board consists of a fixed track of 100 spaces with the starting space at the bottom of the board and the finish at the top. When her turn comes around, a player rolls a six-sided die and then moves her piece that many spaces forward along the fixed path towards the goal. But the gameboard also features the snakes (or chutes) and ladders that give the game its name. The chutes and ladders provide “shortcuts” along the path, allowing the player to skip over some number of spaces depending on the length of the chute or ladder. If a player finishes her turn on the bottom end of a ladder, she automatically advances to the top, skipping over the spaces in between and getting that much closer to the goal. If she finishes her turn at the top of a chute, she automatically slides backward to an earlier point along the path, skipping over the spaces in between and getting farther from the goal. Under ordinary rules, if a player rolls a six, she completes her turn and rolls again. At the end of a turn, play passes to the next player, and the first player to reach the final space on the path wins.

Even if you know Snakes and Ladders, you might have been surprised to hear that it’s and educational game. But it turns out that Snakes and Ladders originated as an educational game in India, where it was known as Moksha Patam. We’re not quite sure how old Moksha Patam is because the game boards were traditionally made of decorated cloth, so we only have surviving examples from the 17th Century onward. What we do know is that Moksha Patam developed as a sort of educational allegory rooted in Hindu philosophy. The fixed path players move along is meant to represent the karmic journey. The ladders represent traditional virtues like humility and generosity, while the snakes or chutes represent vices like anger and lust. The number of ladders is traditionally a little less than the number of chutes (9 versus 10 in the modern commercial version), which serves as a reminder that the way of virtue is less common than the way of vice. The game is meant to teach an object lesson: acting virtuously moves one forward on the path to attaining spiritual liberation – or moksha – while acting viciously will lead one towards spiritual imprisonment and a lower form of existence: like living as a snake.

This is all probably news to you if you’ve only ever played the modern, sanitized version of the game featuring images of cheerful children on a playground. But even the earliest Westernized versions of the game from when it was brought to England in the 1890s replaced the Hindu virtues and vices with Victorian virtues like Thrift, Penitence and Industry and vices like Indulgence, Disobedience and Indolence. In short, Snakes and Ladders was designed as a moral and philosophical education game. More on that later, but first, let’s break the game down. Here comes the systems thinking way of dissecting a game I mentioned at the top of the episode.

Whether educational or not, we can think about Snakes and Ladders and other games as a kind of system. Like all man-made systems, games are made up of elements that work together to achieve a purpose. In the case of games, that purpose is to provide a fun experience to the player, and in the case of learning games, a fun and educational one.

I think about game systems as having six elements. I mentioned of them in Episode 1.

Rules are the specifications or restrictions that define what is and is not part of the game and what is and is not permitted of players. This includes the game’s formal ruleset: things like rolling a six in Snakes and Ladders granting you a bonus roll. But it also often includes things beyond the formal ruleset. For instance, gravity is a rule that governs many real-world sports, as well as videogames that include physics simulations.

We’ve also encountered goals: the outcomes a player is trying to achieve. Goals can involve achieving a single, well-defined win condition, like being the first to reach the finish in Snakes and Ladders. Sometimes they involve some other sort of achievement, for example collecting a certain number of points. And other times, the goal of a game might just be not to lose. Game designers love to talk about Tetris in this respect because it doesn’t have a win condition. No player has ever won Tetris: every Tetris game ever played has resulted either in a loss or the player abandoning the game.

Part of what makes games enjoyable is that achieving the goals is non-trivial: games involve challenge, our third element, which, in this context, refers to the things that make it difficult for the player to achieve the goals, or that at least contribute to the possible that he might lose. Challenge may come from the game’s inherent design – like the challenge posed by the risk of landing on a snake in Snakes and Ladders – or, in multiplayer games, may come from the difficulty introduced by competing against other players.

This one element is sometimes taken for granted, but games also have space. A game’s space is the portion of the world – the real world or a virtual one in the case of videogames – where the game takes place and where its rules apply. For Snakes and Ladders, this is the physical game board, as well as, say, the table it’s placed on and the chairs the players are sitting on around it. In a digital game, this might the Mushroom Kingdom or the fictional continent of Tamriel.

That brings us to our final two elements: components and mechanics. Components are the entities, or “nouns” of the game. The stuff that populates the game’s world. The grid squares on the board, the snakes, the ladders, the game pieces, the die and the players themselves are all components of Snakes and Ladders.

If components are the nouns of the game, then mechanics are the verbs. They’re the things you, as a player, do when you play the game. If you’re wondering if something is a game mechanic, a useful test is to see if you can find a literal verb expressing the mechanic that completes the sentence “the player [blank]s,” as in “the player runs,” “the player jumps,” “the player solves a puzzle.” If you can, it’s probably a mechanic, and you can go ahead and convert it to the gerund form – like “running” or “jumping” – if you want to express it in game designer lingo. “Moving,” “rolling a die,” “climbing a ladder,” and “descending a chute” are all mechanics of Snakes and Ladders.

Of these six elements, most game designers would agree that mechanics hold a special place. I’d go as far as to call them the “crown of the elements.” One of the things that sets games apart from other forms of art and entertainment is that games are an in active medium. You can be engaged very deeply and actively – intellectually and emotionally -- while reading a novel or listening to a symphony, but you don’t have agency in how the work itself unfolds. That’s not true of games. With games, you, the player cause the experience to unfold as it does by doing stuff. What you do is central to the experience, and so it makes sense that what the game’s designer expects and requires you to do would be central to the game’s identity.

Another way in which the centrality of mechanics is reflected in the way we think about games is the term core mechanic. Not only are mechanics essential to what makes games games, but there’s usually one (or a very small set) of mechanics that are so central to a particular game that that mechanic defines the game’s identity. That mechanic is what we call the “core mechanic.” Sometimes core mechanics go on to define whole genres: the core mechanic of jumping from platform to platform in games like Super Mario Bros. gave us the platformer genre.

I mentioned the mechanics of Snakes and Ladders a moment ago: moving, dice rolling, climbing and sliding. So which one is core? I think they’re all plausible candidates. As a player, your “mission” is to move your piece to the finish, so moving seems like a strong contender. Climbing and sliding are directly related to the game’s signature features: the ladders and snakes. Those things are right in the name! So maybe they’re it.

But I’d argue for dice rolling as the core mechanic. Why do I say that? Well, at least when I think about the play experience of Snakes and Ladders, the thing that stands out for me is that it’s just about as pure a game of chance as you could possibly have. The players’ actions – and the game’s outcome -- are completely determined by the ruleset, the fixed, linear layout of the gameboard and the random outcomes of the dice rolls. There is zero opportunity whatsoever for player choice. The dice roll is the embodiment of that lack of choice, and that’s why rolling strikes me as the core mechanic.

Some additional support for the dice roll interpretation comes from the philosophy behind the game itself. Remember when I was talking about Snakes and Ladders as a sort of allegorical learning game? Well, it turns out the elements of Hindu philosophy the allegory is getting at are very much tied to the dice rolling mechanic. Unfortunately, the allegory’s lesson and meaning are a little hard to grasp, especially if, like me, you’re used to the Western way of thinking about virtue.

Western attitudes towards virtue tend to emphasize choice. People are seen as agents with the option of making good or bad choices in the face of moral dilemmas. To the extent you make the good choices, you’re virtuous or moral; to the extent you make the bad ones, you’re vicious or immoral.

If this is how you’re used to thinking about moral issues, I’m with you. But set that all aside for a second. Ignore the choice dimension and think just about the consequences. Another way conceptualize virtuous actions is that they are the ones that will tend to get you closer to some desirable end, like living in harmony with God’s plan or achieving eternal salvation in Christianity. Vicious actions do the opposite.

This is the perspective Snakes and Ladders is taking. It’s trying to embody the lesson that virtuous conduct brings you closer to moksha – spiritual liberation. Viscous conduct sets you backward on the path towards moksha, keeping you trapped in the karmic cycle of rebirth and incomplete self-actualization. The game isn’t intended as a lesson on how to be virtuous: it’s a lesson on the nature of virtue.

When you look at the game through this lens, you start to see many of the design choices in a new light. For instance, most Snakes and Ladders boards feature a snake that starts only a few spaces away from the final square. This reminds us that even at an advanced stage of our moral development, we are at the risk of sliding backwards. Even the fact that the numbers of snakes and ladders are nearly evenly matched has an allegorical purpose. Author Salman Rushdie put it this way:

“All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil.”

All of this is why I think the pure chance mechanic of dice rolling suits the game well: well enough to be the core mechanic. If the game included any player choice at all, it would risk undermining the game’s focus on the nature of virtue and spiritual freedom. And it would probably risk players interpreting the game as an object lesson in how to be a good little girl or boy.

By the way, none of that is to say that the game, or Hindu philosophy, is denying or trying to minimize the role of personal responsibility in morality. There wouldn’t be much point in educating people about the relationship of virtue and vice to spiritual liberation if you weren’t ultimately faced with choices between good and bad paths. It’s just that this particular game is about imparting a different moral lesson.

This brings us to the last thing I want draw out of Snakes and Ladders: just as games have mechanics, so too does learning. And I don’t mean this just in the sense of learning games having mechanics, though that’s also true. I mean that all learning has mechanics. There are verbs to what teachers and learners do. Lecturing is a mechanic. Giving or taking a quiz is a mechanic. Telling an allegorical story is a mechanic, and, as we have seen, that’s the core learning mechanic of Snakes and Ladders.

As we look at different learning games during the series, I’m going to talk about game mechanics, learning mechanics and the relationship between the two. When you talk about game mechanics, you can have opinions about whether the mechanic itself is fun or engaging; or whether it is well executed in a particular game. If I put on my critic’s hat, I’d argue that the major weakness of Snakes and Ladders is that the mechanics of dice rolling and moving in the complete absence of player choice don’t make for a particularly engaging gameplay experience. History and philosophy content aside, this is among the reasons why the Westernized version of Snakes and Ladders is marketed as a game for young children: as a sort of developmental game that’s a fun enough training ground to introduce kids to the world of board games but that’s unsatisfying for people above the age of five or six.

All this also applies to learning mechanics. Allegorical storytelling is a venerable learning mechanic: teachers from Plato to Jesus have famously used it and so have lots of learning games. Sometimes that mechanic is used effectively and is a good choice for the circumstances. Sometimes not so much: in the Bible, Jesus gets frustrated that his disciples aren’t getting the point of one of his parables. Jesus scolds the disciples for being dense, but as the comedian Julia Sweeney observed, maybe don’t teach in parables then…

With learning games, we can also look at the relationship of game mechanics and learning mechanics. One lesson that’s stuck with from making learning games is that the best learning games often have a strong alignment between their game mechanics and their learning mechanics. And the opposite is usually also true: the less the learning mechanics have to do with the game mechanics, the weaker the game – and the learning experience – usually are. I think Snakes and Ladders, considered as a learning game, does a pretty good job of aligning the two: it’s just that the game mechanics, qua game mechanics, are kind of meh.

For the time being, I’d say hold that theory about aligning game and learning mechanics as a provisional hypothesis. It’s a theme I’m going to return to throughout the series, so you can decide if you agree or not.

That wraps it up for this episode. Next time, we’ll take a look at an educational game that contrasts with Snakes and Ladders in almost every respect: one with lots of mechanics, tons of player choices, and, unlike the allegorical Snakes and Ladders, one that aims to deeply and realistically reflect its subject. Its development is not only deeply intertwined with 19th Century European politics, but is also the source of some of the most significant innovations in game design: innovations without which entire popular videogame genres wouldn’t be possible. It’s the “great-grandfather of wargames,” Kriegsspiel.

Welcome to the History of Learning Games podcast. Together, we’ll explore how digital games have shaped the ways we learn inside and outside of classrooms; have led to some of the game industry’s most fascinating successes and failures; and the lessons they have for us about teaching and learning. Let’s play.

Let me start with an introduction. My name is Brian Alspach. I’ve spent most of my career in what people sometimes call the ‘AltEd’ space, and most of my time there making learning games. I was a member of the founding team at E-Line Media, an indie game developer and publisher where I spent fifteen years making, marketing and distributing learning games. I’m also a lifelong gamer, and, conveniently, my lifespan as a gamer overlaps with the development of learning videogames as an industry and cultural force.

As a child of the 1980s, my education started just as computer labs were going mainstream in American public schools. My friends and I looked forward to the days when we’d line up in the hall and march down to a room with rows and rows of Apple IIs and early Macs. We sometimes did (quote – unquote) productive things with our time, like program in BASIC or later make presentations in Hypercard (this was before the Internet, so no using the web for research – or goofing around – for us). But usually we played games. Classic learning games like Odell Lake and Oregon Trail.

Later, when my family got our first real computer – a Packard Bell 286 with a forty megabyte hard drive that ran at a staggering twelve megahertz – I spent hours and hours as an international detective playing Carmen Sandiego or simulating everything from cities to ant colonies with Maxis’ classic titles. My mother – an excellent typist from the old-school typewriter days – tried to get me to learn typing along with Mavis Beacon (sorry, Mom, I’ve still never learned proper touch-typing technique, but I’d like to think Mavis’ approach influenced my glorified multi-finger hunt and peck).

As a teenager, I sat alongside my younger brother while he played some of the most commercially successful and influential “edutainment” titles of all time: games from the Mathblaster! And Reader Rabbit franchises.

Of course, all through this time I was playing non-educational games, too, starting in the 8-bit era with the NES, but also on my friend’s Apples, Macs and C64s; and, eventually, on my own PC. Some of these games were great, some not so much. And even though you wouldn’t necessarily call any of them “learning games,” there often was interesting, sometimes deep, learning going on. I learned more about how an economy works by playing an Electronic Bulletin Board game – sort of an early version of an MMO for those of you born in this millennium – called Tradewars 2000 than I ever did from a textbook or class.

I started working in the learning games industry in the late 2000s. Not only had that industry – and the game industry more broadly – evolved significantly, but by this time, there had also been a couple decades worth of scholarship about games and learning. Inside academia, people were asking interesting questions. What makes for a good educational game? How can games be used most effectively in different learning environments and with different types of learning content? And maybe most interestingly (at least to me): what lessons do good learning games, and playful learning, have for us that apply to teaching and learning outside games? I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the amazing people exploring these questions. And to see the emergence of – and even work on – games that have put their ideas into practice.

Today, researchers, game makers, entrepreneurs and established companies continue to build on the legacy of this work. As the saying goes, we stand on the shoulders of giants. In particular, as AI becomes more of a fixture in education -- enabling learning to become more individualized, adaptive and self-directed -- I think there are important lessons for us in the history of learning games, going back to the days of Oregon Trail and beyond.

But for that to happen, you have to know the history. There’s been excellent work done on many aspects of this: work focusing on specific titles and genres; work analyzing the development and trends of the learning games industry; work discussing learning games in the context of educational theory and pedagogy; and so on. But what I don’t think there’s been is a soup-to-nuts historical overview of learning games: something that lays it all out in a way that captures the thru-line and, I hope, will be fun for a general audience of game enthusiasts.

My goal for the series is to keep it focused on the games themselves. My plan is to take a chronological approach, with most episodes focused on a single game or, sometimes, a genre of games, especially if that genre had its heyday over a relatively short period of time and can be covered in a way that doesn’t interrupt the historical flow. Where an important topic in the history of learning games doesn’t fit well into that structure, I’ll probably handle it in a special episode. I’m thinking especially here of abstract and recurring topics where it makes sense to take a broader perspective: concepts like “edutainment” or “gamification,” for example.

In saying I’ll talk about the games themselves, I mean things like a game’s development; the play experience; the learning involved (the intended or claimed learning as well as the reality); the market context in which the game emerged and performed and its place in the history of games and learning. I’ll sometimes make reference to scholarly work or educational ideas outside of games, but the podcast isn’t about games and learning scholarship or educational theory: it’s about the games.

With that introduction out of the way, let’s move into today’s episode. I’ve got two items on the agenda for today. The main event is what I call a “nickle tour” of the history of games – not just learning games – up to the time of the first computer games. While this isn’t a general games history podcast, I do think a little orientation to how games develop and some of the ways they’ve played a role in learning, and across history and cultural, is an important backdrop for the story to come. But first, I want to talk a little about what the podcast is and isn’t: what’s in and out scope.

The podcast is called The History of Learning Games, but it would be more accurate to say it’s the history of digital learning games. By “digital” I mean games that are played exclusively (or more or less exclusively) using a computer, where “computer” includes PCs, consoles, smartphones, tablets: things like that.

Of course, people were making and playing non-digital learning games for a long time before there were computers. We know games were played for learning purposes going back to ancient times. I’m going to make reference to non-digital learning games – both historical and contemporary ones – throughout the podcast. As I said, I’m going to do that later in this episode, and again in the next one. But in terms of what I’m going to cover the history of during the series, it's digital games. That limits our timeline to the post-World War II era and, practically speaking, only back to the 1960s.

Within that time period, as I also mentioned, my focus really is on the history of learning games specifically, not of games or the game industry as a whole. There are lots of great books and podcasts on the history of videogames, so other than today’s nickle tour, I won’t be spending time going over territory that others have already covered.

That being said, you can’t talk about the history of learning games completely divorced from the history of games as a whole. The former is a part of the latter. Ideas, people and trends from non-learning games influence learning games, and vice versa. But maybe most fundamentally, the line between a learning game and a non-learning game isn’t always clear, as I’ll talk about in a moment. So even though game history broadly isn’t what this podcast is about, I’ll frequently make reference to events, trends and developments in the broader industry where that provides important context to what’s happening with learning games.

One more note about the historical approach. Even though the roughly six decades of history I’ll cover is a blink of the eye for humanity, it’s literally the entire history of digital games and the game industry, so a ton of evolution and change has taken place. The game industry, gaming hardware and even education itself looked very different when I was playing games in my elementary school computer lab in 1987 than any of those things do today. I also expect that some (maybe most?) of the listeners of this podcast weren’t alive in 1987, or at least if they were, weren’t old enough to experience sitting in front of a non-Internet connected beige box with a two-color display, swapping out floppy disks to load the next level.

In recognition of this, I’m going to devote more time setting the stage and providing that sort of historical context for older games than I do for more recent ones. I’m not going to assume, for example, that a listener knows what a mainframe is in the way I am going to assume that a listener knows what a smartphone is. If you are old enough to get the references, I hope you’ll indulge me in bringing the younger folks up to speed. Maybe you’ll even find it pleasantly nostalgic.

For these purposes, I’m going to pick a somewhat arbitrary cutoff of 2008 for a few reasons. First, that happens to be the year I got involved with learning games professionally, so I naturally start having a different perspective on games more as an industry insider than just as a player. But more importantly, I think it’s a good approximation of the point where the learning games industry – and the game industry more broadly – develop into more or less the forms we still have today. Without going into detail, I think there are six characteristics that make the industry essentially modern, all of which had either already emerged or were actively emerging by 2008:

1. We had the Internet, so games could be played and distributed online, including online multiplayer games;

2. By this point, most graphical games were made with 3D graphics in much the same way they still are (improvements in quality and performance notwithstanding), in contrast to earlier 2D, sprite-based games (or even earlier non-graphical, text-based games);

3. Commercial games, including learning games, were being sold and distributed through online marketplaces like Steam, the App Store, and game console storefronts, rather than just on physical media like cartridges and discs;

4. Smartphones were emerging as a gaming platform (with tablets coming just a little later);

5. With digital distribution and mobile devices, we saw the emergence of games-as-a-service business models for both learning and non-learning games: things like subscription-based games or freemium games with in-app purchases and DLC. This contrasts with the entire history of games before this point, when the overwhelming majority of games were games-as-a-product: something static that a publisher put in a box that the customer bought through a one-time purchase.

6. Schools – particularly American schools – were in the process of transitioning from earlier computer lab and classroom computer technology models to one-to-one computing models where each student has their own device.

In 2025 when this podcast is being recorded, all of this is still basically true. So, again, before my admittedly arbitrary 2008 cutoff, I’ll spend more time on context and table setting for the games I’ll talk about. After the cutoff, I’ll assume the listener has that context already.

That bring us to an issue I’ve been dancing around so far, which is what exactly I mean by “learning game.” I thought a lot about what term to use here when I was conceiving of the podcast, and I think it’s about more than semantics. For me, it’s about drawing the right circle around what we should properly consider if our goal is to understand the history of the intersection of digital games and learning. OK, that was pretty abstract, so let me try to explain by going over some of the terminology I rejected before deciding on “learning games”:

First, there are a number of terms that I just think are ill-defined, understood differently by different people and often have unhelpful connotations. The most glaring example is “edutainment.” For some people, this is a broad term they use to describe any game that is trying first and foremost to entertain but is also trying to educate. For others, it refers to a specific set of games like that, all released around the same time and featuring certain common design elements (and maybe some later games that are very similar to those games). For some people, “edutainment” is a neutral, descriptive term. For others, it carries connotations, usually negative ones. At any rate, it’s too ambiguous and loaded to be useful here.

Then we have a term like “educational games.” But at least as I understand the term, I think it’s too limiting. When I use the term “educational game,” among the things that I’m trying to capture is that the game was designed with education as a goal. There are many great educational games in this sense. We’ll talk about lots of them on the episodes to come.

But I think it would be doing both games and education a disservice to restrict the history to only games where education was an explicit goal. The reality is there are tons of games that are great for learning where the idea of the game supporting learning never crossed the minds of the people who made them. I’d argue that Minecraft is one of the best and most significant learning games of all time; and that by almost any standard the learning that Minecraft has enabled is far greater than even the most impactful “educational games.” And while Minecraft, from an early point in its history, was and is routinely and widely used and monetized in classrooms for explicitly educational purposes, the people who designed and built Minecraft didn’t do so with education in mind. They were just trying to make a fun game.

Both “learning game” and “educational game” are useful concepts to have if you want to understand the history, but “learning games” is a broader category than “educational games.” What I’m interested in, and what I’d argue is worth considering is you want to draw lessons from the history, is all the ways in which games facilitate learning, whether the people who made the game set out to facilitate learning or not. Games where education was a goal are an important part of this picture, but so are other types of games that facilitate learning: for example what folks refer to as “classroom games,” “serious games” and “games for impact;” but also games where education wasn’t part of the vision but that support meaningful learning nonetheless. Our understanding of the history of learning games – and the lessons we can draw from it – would be woefully incomplete if we didn’t consider Minecraft.

If you want a definition of “learning game” as I’m using it – and will throughout the podcast – it would be something like any game that is used by someone (including the player themselves) to educate a player about something outside the game.

I say “outside the game” to highlight one more important element that sets learning games apart from games generally. Most digital games teach the player at least something: namely how to play the game. This is obviously true when a game includes a tutorial, but even without a tutorial, most well-designed games are designed in a way that teaches the player how to play through the gameplay itself.

I, along with countless others, have written about how the opening level of Super Mario Bros. is a masterclass in game design, in part because of the ingenious way it introduces and teaches almost all the skills a player will need to succeed at Super Mario Bros., and does so through play alone. In fact, the techniques that Super Mario Bros. uses to accomplish this have strong parallels in educational theory, bearing a striking resemblance to something that the educational innovator Maria Montessori called “isolation of difficulty.” We’ll see parallels and even influences like this from outside learning games along the way, but our story is focused on games that educate about something beyond the game itself.

Alright, that’s the setup. Now let’s start the nickel tour.

As far as we know, play and playful learning have been part of what it means to be human from the very beginning. In fact, learning playfully isn’t an exclusively human thing. It’s one of the main ways in which many non-human animals learn: think about a kitten playfully stalking and pouncing on one of his littermates. Not only is that behavior adorable, it’s also deeply ingrained. And – here’s the first point I want to make about games and learning from the history – play has an important and unique role in preparing the kitten to hunt as an adult cat.

One of the most valuable things that games do for human learners is that they allow us to try, fail and learn in a safe environment. You can get absolutely owned in a Call of Duty multiplayer match an unlimited number of times and the only things that are going to get hurt are your ego and maybe your reputation. But you can only get fragged on a real battlefield one time. Play lets the kitten hone his hunting skills without any real consequences if he messes up. But the adult cat who fails to hunt successfully for too long starves.

At this point, we should distinguish play and playful learning in humans from games and gameplay. Not all play is gameplay: the imaginary play of child is a good example of this. Merely being playful isn’t enough to make a game. In addition to being playful, we generally only recognize something as a game if it has two other characteristics.

First, there has to be some structure, and that comes in the form of rules. The player or players have to be operating within some framework that says what is OK and not OK for them to do. If there’s more than one player, it also helps if they agree about what those rules are. Again, think about how this differs from children’s unstructured imaginary play, or other playful things we do as adults like good naturedly teasing a friend.

Second, there usually has to be a way for the player or players to win or lose the game. Another way to express this – and this is a very game-designery way to put it – is to say that the game has win and loss conditions or states; that is to say that the rules define certain conditions in which a player or players can be said to have won or lost the game. Yet a third way to express this is to say that for the players, games have goals. The players are trying to achieve a win condition, or at least avoid the loss conditions. Again, this contrasts with the imaginary play of children, which tends to lack goals, or have goals that change and shift. It’s also very different from the play of animals: we don’t really think of the kitten as having “won” when he successfully stalks his littermate. Often, the littermate doesn’t even know she’s being stalked and so doesn’t have a goal of her own like avoiding it.

So when did games with rules and goals first develop? We get some disputed evidence from around 5-7000 BCE of things that might be parts of board games. But the earliest undisputed archeological evidence we have of games is from around 3000 BCE where we have bone objects from multiple parts of the world that we believe were used as dice.

This is apropos of nothing, I just think it’s cool: many of these early dice were made from one specific bone, and this is one of those happy accidents that benefited early game designers. Humans and most other land vertebrates have a bone called the talus, which forms part of the ankle joint. In mammals, the bone is roughly tetrahedral in shape: sort of like a three-sided pyramid, so having four faces. Apparently if you toss the talus bone of a hoofed animal, it has roughly the same chance of falling with any of the four faces up. If you put a distinct mark on each face, you’ve got yourself a primitive four-sided die.

As I said, the evidence for these early dice games dates from around 3000 BCE, which is an interesting point in human history because it’s around the time the first societies were transitioning from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age. It’s also around the time we get the first writing systems, and the first schools. For some more historical context, by this point you had agriculture; you had domestic animals like the cat, dog, horses and cattle (the last being fortuitous for early gamblers, as we’ve seen); people were starting to live in cities; and you had societies building early megastructures like Stonehenge.

You also had the beginnings of mathematics, with math used for things like dividing up land, trade and astronomy. I bring up math because math is pretty important to the development of games, and learning games, and you can see that in the dice example.

In order for it to occur to you to make dice, or to design a game involving dice, you have to have some understanding of chance and probability. If you’re going to invent a game that involves more than one die (which we see evidence for a little later in Ancient Greece), you have to have a more advanced understanding involving compound probability. People don’t start to develop formal, mathematical understanding of probability until much later -- the 16th Century CE -- but it’s interesting that at basically the same time as we first see evidence of formal mathematics, we see evidence of people using a rudimentary knowledge of probability to create games.

There are a couple other things I find interesting about dice being used in the first games. First, it means that the first games were what we call games of chance: games in which the success of the player is based exclusively or primarily on luck. The opposite of a game of chance, as you probably know, is a game of skill where success involves the player being good at something. Of course, many games involve both chance and skill elements, but outside of some childhood games and I guess some gambling games, we tend to find games that involve mostly chance and very little or no skill unrewarding. This is true of learning games, too, maybe even more so, and I don’t think it’s hard to see why. On a fundamental level, learning involves or is for the purpose of doing something well or better: getting knowledge, acquiring skill, cultivating virtue, and so on. Even though learning games can and do incorporate chance elements, it would be weird if a game was trying to help someone get better in a way that didn’t require the player to have or develop skill. So in part, I’m bookmarking this issue of skill and chance because we’ll come back to it throughout the series as we break down learning games.

Another interesting thing here is that just as designing dice games involves an understanding of probability, the games themselves are often great ways to show probability in action. Playing even a simple game of chance like Candyland makes certain fundamental concepts in probability very real in a way that an abstract discussion can’t, and certainly can’t for young children who aren’t ready to wrestle with those concepts in the abstract. So, even though we don’t have any evidence of this, I like to think that even the first dice games were effective probability learning games.

Back to the story. We first see evidence of board games – all of which were also dice games – from Egypt and the Near East from 2000 – 3000 BCE. Unlike the very earliest dice games, we even know how some of these games were played, sometimes because we can reconstruct the rules from artifacts, sometimes because we can infer them from games descended from them that we still play or know the rules of from later texts. For example, in China around 2500 BCE, we see the origin of the game Go, which is the oldest game we know of that has been continuously played up to the present day.

Many of the early boardgames we know of like Go, Senet, Hounds and Jackals and The Game of Ur would fall under the genre we call strategy games. Even though these games involve chance elements, the rulesets are complex and usually math-based. Like their modern descendants, these games are sophisticated enough that they require strategic thinking to play well, and different players can use different strategies to win and counteract their opponents’ strategies. So while we think these games originally developed for entertainment, we start to see evidence in surviving texts of people discussing strategy in much the same way modern chess theorists discuss openings. And, more importantly for our discussion, we see evidence of these games being used as learning games to train strategic thinking.

By around 2000 BCE, we have evidence of competitive sports like running, wrestling and archery. From around 1400 BCE, there’s evidence of sports involving a ball being played in the New World, giving rise to the genre of games my non-sportsfan friends refer to as “sportsball.” Now, there’s evidence of people engaging in some of these activities much earlier: we have cave paintings from 15,000 years ago that show people running, swimming and wrestling. But we think these activities served either ritualistic functions or as what we would call athletic or military training. But from around 2000 BCE, we see athletic activities happening competitively (often in addition to ceremonially) and I think that’s significant in the development of learning games.

Once you have competitive sports, you have the minimum set of characteristics I mentioned before that make something an educational game. You’ve got rules, like “everybody has to stand this far from the archery target” or “everybody in the race starts at the same time and runs the same distance.” And since you’re competitive, you’ve got win conditions like “closest to the bullseye wins” or “first across the finish line wins.” And to the extent these games were designed to serve an educational or training purpose – like preparing archers for actual combat – well, you’ve got the first thing I would say qualifies as an educational game: a game that’s explicitly for learning or training, rather than a game that developed for entertainment and later was repurposed for educational use.

Moving on, starting in the first millennium BCE, the Greeks and Romans played games that we would recognize today like Tic-Tac-Toe, and in Greece in the 700s BCE we have the earliest Olympic Games. The earliest forms of chess originate in India around 600 CE. Early tile-based games develop in China around the same time. Modern checkers develops in France in the 1100s and the first paper playing cards, which develop from the earlier game tiles, appear in China in the late 1200s. They make it to Europe later, and by the 1500s we have more or less the modern suits. Backgammon emerges from earlier games in England and Scotland in the 1600s. Miniature war gaming develops in the late 1700s, and throughout the 18th and 19th centuries we get many card games we still play, or play the direct descendants of.

In the mid-19th Century, we see the launch of the modern commercial game industry through board games like Parchisi and Snakes and Ladders, which are Westernized versions of earlier games from the Indian subcontinent. The Nintendo company we know today famously starts as a manufacturer of traditional Japanese playing cards in the late 19th Century. The 19th Century is also when we see many Western sports – for example the many forms of football – take on their modern forms, usually as a result of people developing and agreeing on a standard, official set of rules for what were originally folk games. What we call roleplaying games – like Dungeons and Dragons -- are a mid-20th Century development coming out of miniature wargaming.

I’ll say more about the early days of computer games starting in Episode 3 when I talk about the first digital learning games, but to round out the general games history timeline, I want to mention a few early milestones in the evolution of digital games, just so we’ve got some markers on the timeline as a reference point when we come to those early digital learning games.

Though there are examples of videogames going back to the early 1950s, these are essentially tech demos for early human-computer interaction, not something anyone would play for fun. The first computer game developed purely for entertainment purpose is generally thought to be 1958’s Tennis for Two. “Tennis for Two” might not be the catchiest title, but its admirably descriptive: Tennis for Two is a two-player tennis simulation. It was developed by a physicist named William Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York, and you played it on an oscilloscope, so not only was Tennis for Two the first video game, it also established several long-running trends in the game industry, like the sports genre and nerds acting as amateur game developers in their spare time.

Since an oscilloscope is a kind of analog computer, Tennis for Two doesn’t technically qualify as the first digital game, even if it is the first videogame. You have to wait a few more years until 1962 and a game called Spacewar! – that’s “spacewar” followed by an exclamation mark -- for that. Spacewar! is pretty remarkable for something so early in the history of videogames. It’s a two-player spaceship combat game that takes place in the gravity well of a star and it includes an early version of what we would now call a physics engine, so you can do things like use the star’s gravity to slingshot your ship around the screen at high speed. And since it’s not just a rehash of a real-world game in digital form, it’s also the first original videogame.

Spacewar! was developed by students at MIT for the PDP-1 microcomputer, an early general-purpose computer that was “micro” in the sense that it was only about the size of a bookshelf, rather than an entire room. The PDP-1 wasn’t widely available outside universities and only a few dozen were ever made. But this was a huge advancement over earlier computers, which were mostly one-off designs. Because the PDP-1 was a standard design, and was used in multiple places, it became possible to create software that could be shared. This makes Spacewar! the first videogame to gain wide distribution, and eventually the first videogame to be ported to multiple platforms. In fact, you can play implementations of Spacewar! online today.

Both Tennis for Two and Spacewar! are what we would today call amateur games or hobbyist games: games made by people for the fun of it and shared informally with other enthusiasts. These and other early titles weren’t commercial games, or games that someone pays to play. You have to wait almost ten more years for that and a game called Galaxy Game. Galaxy Game came onto the scene in 1971 and, gameplay-wise, it’s a lightly modified version of Spacewar! running on a newer version of the PDP computer. What made Galaxy Game unique was that its creators hooked the PDP up to a monitor and controller, put them in a wooden cabinet, added seats, put in a coin slot and charged people ten cents per game. This makes Galaxy Game the first coin-operated game and the game that, along with a 1971 singleplayer Spacewar!-derived game called Computer Space, launched the commercial videogame industry. Computer Space, by the way, was developed by two guys named Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney who would go on to found a little game company called Atari. And I can’t resist noting that this early parade of Spacewar! clones and derivatives lends some support to the criticism that there aren’t a lot of new ideas in the videogame industry.

After this, you don’t have to wait too long for another milestone: the first in-home video games. Remember, this is a time before having a general-purpose computer in your office, let alone your home, was commonplace, or even really possible. So the earliest in-home video gaming devices were consoles, beginning with 1972’s Magnavox Odyssey.

The Odyssey is a fascinating device. Like the consoles of today, it connected to a TV. But it had an incredibly limited set of capabilities, even relative to the early videogames we’ve already heard about that ran on microcomputers. This is a little hard to describe verbally, but I’ll try to paint a picture:

The Odyssey could display only four monochromatic graphical objects. To be clear, that’s four specific objects, not four different types of objects: three squares (two controlled by the players, one by the system) and one line. That was the entire universe of graphical building blocks you could make a game from. So what could you do? Well, you could, for example, have two dots represent the players, one dot represent the ball, the line represent the net and have yourself a game of tennis. And, in fact, one of the Odyssey’s bundled titles was Table Tennis. [Sigh] We’re recycling the same ideas already yet again.

As you can imagine, this doesn’t make for an especially compelling graphical experience. Magnavox knew this, so they came up with an innovative solution. Many games came bundled with a transparent plastic overlay that you literally attached to your TV screen. The overlays were illustrated with static images that provided a backdrop – or I guess technically a foredrop -- for the dots and line to be moving on, so in a football game the overlay might have an image of the field, or in a geography quiz – hey, that’s a learning game!, of which the Odyssey had several – it might have a map.

Another limitation was that other than the ability to respond to user input and move the one system-controlled rectangle around, the console could do absolutely nothing else computationally, including, notably, implement game logic. So, for instance, there was no way for a game to have a timer, or to keep sco re, or to give the user information, or to implement win and loss conditions, for that matter. All of that was handled by the players outside of the game. So in Odyssey Table Tennis, it was up to the players to keep track of points and determine when one of them got enough to win, which isn’t any different from real-world table tennis if you think about it. To get around these limitations, most games came with bundled physical objects like dice and cards. For any instructional designers listening, that means the Odyssey play experience blended the use of digital and physical manipulatives.

In spite of all the weirdness, the Odyssey had a surprising number of things in common with later consoles, including things we still see today. There were controllers, albeit really funky ones by later standards where you controlled the x- and y-axis movement of the players with dials. Games came on cartridges, though they worked differently than the ROM cartridges of later consoles. There was even a light gun accessory, a la the later Nintendo Zapper. If I squint, the design even gives me some vaguely PS3-in-horizontal-orientation vibes.

The Odyssey ultimately had a 28-game library, with a ton of those titles bundled with the console, and sold for a hundred bucks, which doesn’t seem too bad until you adjust for inflation, making the cost about $750 in 2025 dollars, or $187.50 per graphical object. Perhaps because of this not-so-great price-to-value ratio, the Odyssey isn’t considered a commercial success. Still, it sold about 350,000 units and got a couple of sequels (the Odyssey 100 and Odyssey 2) before being discontinued in 1974. And it’s worth noting that some of the Odyssey’s innovations – especially the removable cartridges and games you could buy separately from the console – weren’t shared by other devices that came out around the same time or even years later: Atari’s first home console, which didn’t come out for three more years, played only the one built-in game that gave it its name: Home Pong. It’s not until the second generation of home consoles at the end of the 70s that those features become mainstream. The second generation is when we see the first commercially successful home consoles, but that’s a story for another time. Anyway, pour one out for the Odyssey, launcher of the home videogame industry.

So, to quickly review the whole timeline: people have been playing as long as there have been people. We’ve been playing games for at least 5,000 years and have been playing games to learn for probably just as long. The first educational games – in the sense of games developed explicitly for educational purposes -- were probably sports that derived from earlier athletic rituals and served a military training function, and we have evidence of those from about 4,000 years ago. What we would think of as commercial games debut in the mid-19th Century in the form of board games. Videogames come around in the late 1950s and the first commercial video games, in the form of arcade games, appear in the early 1970s, followed very shortly thereafter by the first generation of home video games.

That’s it for our nickle tour, and for the first episode. Next time, we’ll talk about two non-digital learning games, both because they’re interesting in their own right, but also because I think discussing non-digital games is a great way to introduce the concepts we’ll be using to deconstruct and analyze digital learning games throughout the series. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.

You can find show notes for this episode here.

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Notes & Resources

Snakes and Ladders Boards

Games as a System

In this episode, I mention my approach to thinking about games as a system of interconnected elements, all of which work together to create a fun, challenging experience for the player. I think of game systems as having six elements:

1. Goals — The positive outcome(s) a player is trying to achieve. Usually defined in terms of a ‘win condition,’ but sometimes it just means avoiding a loss (as in Tetris).

2. Rules — The things that are and are not permitted of players that structure the play experience. Includes a game’s “official” rules (like rolling a six grants a bonus roll in Snakes and Ladders), but also underlying rules like gravity in real-world sports or videogames involving physics. Can also include behavioral norms, for example sportsmanship in athletic competitions.

3. Challenge — The things that make it non-trivial (and therefore enjoyable) for the player to achieve the goals.

4. Space — The area of the real world — or a virtual space — where the game’s rules apply.

5. Components — The things that are part of the game, like the game board, dice, game pieces and the players themselves in Snakes and Ladders. The “nouns” of the game.

6. Mechanics — The things a player does in a game. If something is a mechanic, you should be able to represent it with an active verb, as in “running,” “jumping,” “sneaking” or “solving a puzzle.” I (and many game designers) consider mechanics to the “crown of the elements,” since games are an interactive medium and it’s actions that define the player’s experience. Most games have one (or a small number) of key mechanic(s) that give the game its identity, known as the core mechanic(s).

Gamestar Mechanic

Gamestar Mechanic was the first commercial (and educational) game I worked on. Coming out of academic research, it was designed to teach kids how to design games using a system’s thinking approach. The game features a narrative-driven learning quest, an embeded creation tool and a YouTube-like community where players could share, play and give feedback on user-created games. It was even the subject of two PhD dissertations during its R&D phase.

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Notes & Resources

Talus Bone Dice

The earliest clear evidence of games we have are ancient dice, made from the talus bone (part of the ankle joint) of cattle from around 3000 BCE. This article from Smithsonian Magazine discusses an archelogical find from Israel of many talus bones, and another one of their uses: divination, where they’re known as astragali.

Other Ancient Games

We have many surviving examples of board games from the ancient world, including Hounds and Jackals (pictured above), The Game of Ur (playable online version), Senet (playable online version) and the Chinese game of Go (playable online version), the oldest surviving game we know that’s been continuously played through to the present day. Though they likely started as pure entertainment games, these games had complex rulesets and were repurposed as learning games to train strategic thinking.

The First Educational Games

Though we have evidence of people engaged in what we would today call athletic activities from cave paintings dating to 15000 BCE, around 2000 BCE is when we see the first competitive sports. Since these early competitive sports served a training role — like an archery competition helping prepare archers for combat — they probably qualify as the first educational games in the sense of being developed for explicitly educational purposes.

The drinking cup pictured below, crica 500 BCE, is thought to depict the Pankration, a Greek sport that might be considered a distant ancestor of Ultimate Fighting, combining elements of kickboxing and wrestling. Here, the athletes compete under the eyes of a trainer and spectator.

Early Videogames

While these (mostly) aren’t learning games, it’s useful to know a few key milestones in the history of digital gaming as a backdrop for what’s to come:

• 1958 - Tennis for Two, the first videogame, played on an ociliscope and developed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which has a fantastic page on the game and its creation.

• 1962 - Spacewar!, the first digital game. Built for the PDP-1 microcomputer, it was developed at MIT and shared by enthusiastic university students, making it the first game to achieve distribution as well. It’s a surprisingly sophisticated game for its time, featuring two-player spaceship combat in a star’s gravity well, powered by an early physics engine. You can play versions online today.

• 1971 - Galaxy Game, a coin-operated version of Spacewar!, and thus the first arcade game and first commercial game. Also, early evidence of the game industry recyling ideas. It survived in the student union at Stanford until 1979 (the photos in the link are from an exhibition of the game, which is now housed at the Computer History Museum, at Stanford in 1997).

• 1972 - The Magnavox Odyssey (pictured below), the first in-home videogame and first game console. The Odyssey established many trends we still see in consoles today: sleek industrial design, controllers and removable cartridges for games that could be purchased separately from the system. Unfortunately, it was capable of displaying only four graphical objects and had no ability to handle game logic, though the designers found clever ways of getting around these limitations. The Odyssey’s game library even included a few educational titles.