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Overlooked No More: Mabel Addis, Who Pioneered Storytelling in Video Gaming
She was a teacher when she participated in an educational experiment with IBM. As a result, she became the first female video game designer.
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Mabel Addis, at the keyboard, in 1964 with a few students. Her Sumerian Game, which taught the basics of economic theory, spawned several offshoots.Credit…R.W. Burghardt/IBM, via Devin Monnens
By Anna Diamond
Aug. 24, 2024
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In the 1960s, Mabel Addis was an elementary-school teacher in a small town in New York State when she was offered a unique opportunity that would make history: Create an educational game with IBM.
What resulted was the Sumerian Game, an early video game that taught the basics of economic theory to sixth graders. In it, a student would act as the ruler of the Mesopotamian city-state of Lagash, in Sumer, in 3500 B.C. In Level One, the primary focus was on growing crops and developing tools; Level Two oversaw a more diversified economy; and in Level Three, Lagash interacted with other city-states. In each round, students responded to prompts issued by Urbaba, the royal steward.
The video game was text-based, but it is believed to be the first to introduce storytelling and characters, and the first in a genre now known as edutainment. It also made Addis the first known female video game designer, according to several game historians.
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The Sumerian Game “is pretty rudimentary by today’s standards, but the thing about being ‘first’ is that just existing at all becomes innovative,” Kate Willaert, the author of the blog “A Critical Hit!,” who has studied the game extensively, said in an email. Addis, she maintained, was the first video game writer ever.
With her passion for history, Addis also brought a level of narrative to video games that had not been seen before.
“How often can you say, ‘This was the first work in this medium to innovate story?’” Willaert asked.
Mabel Lorene Holmes was born on May 21, 1912, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., to James Holmes, who owned a building supply company, and Mabel (Wood) Holmes, who managed the home.
She dreamed of going to Greece and becoming an archaeologist, but her mother wasn’t keen on the idea: It was expensive, and moreover, it was considered impractical for a woman of the time to pursue such a career.
Instead, after graduating as the valedictorian of Brewster High School, Addis boarded a train to Manhattan to study ancient history at Barnard College. Soon after, she began the more traditional profession of teaching (she received a master’s in education from Teachers College at Columbia University). Her career, which began with teaching eight grades in a one-room schoolhouse in 1935, spanned five decades, with a break to raise her daughter, whom she had in 1945, three years after marrying Alexander Addis.
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Addis around 1954 with her fourth grade class at Katonah Elementary School in Katonah, N.Y. Her teaching career spanned five decades.Credit…via Alexandra Johnson
The unusual opportunity to write a video game came about while she was teaching in Katonah, N.Y. At the time, there was a “crisis in small-school-district education,” said Alexander Smith, who wrote about the Sumerian game in his book “They Create Worlds: The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry, Vol. 1: 1971-1982.”
“Rural school districts,” he added in an interview, “were starting to find themselves overextended, in terms of trying to keep up with a modern curriculum.”
Noble Gividen, the superintendent of the Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Westchester County, felt that computers could be a teaching aide. In 1962, he partnered with IBM, which had offices nearby, and invited teachers, including Addis, to explore bringing simulations into elementary school classrooms.
Bruse Moncreiff, who worked in IBM’s theoretical research unit, proposed creating an economic theory teaching game based in Sumer. Addis was intrigued by the idea and asked to expand on it. She wrote the Sumerian Game, which was programmed by an IBM employee named William McKay.
The Sumerian Game was written about in Life and Computerworld magazines, as well as in the teacher-focused publication Instructor. The original game is thought to be lost, but documents from the era, including a report by Richard Wing, the curriculum research coordinator for the board, and printouts from students’ gameplay, give a sense of the experience. A slide projector and a cassette player set the scene as students entered commands on a typewriter-like IBM 1050 linked to an IBM 7090 mainframe computer. (A remake of the game was recently published by the game historian Andrea Contato on the gaming platform Steam.)
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An example of the typewriter-like IBM 1050 that students would have used to play the game Addis wrote.Credit…N.E.A. Photo, via Kate Willaert
The Sumerian Game was developed in the decade before the more popular Oregon Trail, in which players struggled to survive while navigating a wagon along a grueling journey. It was also one of the first games to be narrative driven, said Jon-Paul Dyson, vice president for exhibits at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y., which holds materials from the Sumerian Game in its collections.
Addis’s writing made the learning experience immersive, as when Urbaba shared a surprise incident that would affect the students’ play: “Luduga, I fear that the people have angered our god, Ningrisa. He alone could have sent that fire across the fields to destroy half of your crops. This is a very serious loss. I trust that you can cover it from your inventory.”
“If another teacher had written this game, they might’ve approached it like every other management game, where the computer simply acted as a calculator,” Willaert said.
But Alexandra Johnson, Addis’s only child, remembered her mother as a playful educator who made history come alive. A 1966 article in Life described the students’ engagement with the game:
“They love being king and become genuinely involved. When the machine relentlessly types out the deaths resulting from an insufficient ration of food, they have been known to pound the keyboards and cry aloud, ‘No! Don’t let it happen! Please don’t let it happen!’”
The Sumerian Game was a few years too early for its own good. The IBM computers were expensive to run, and funding for the program soon ran out.
The game proved influential, however, when it spawned offshoots.
In the late 1960s, a pared-down version, referred to as both King of Sumeria and the Sumer Game, was created by Doug Dyment, an employee of the computer company Digital Equipment Corporation. In 1973, the author David Ahl adapted it for his book “101 BASIC Computer Games,” which was popular in schools. This version, Hamurabi, was widely played among young computer hobbyists, some of whom went on to design their own games . (It also perpetuated a common misspelling of the Babylonian king’s name, Hammurabi.)
These versions kept the original game alive, Devin Monnens, an instructional designer at Seminole State College of Florida and a game historian who has traced the lineage of the Sumerian Game, said in an interview. “At any point along the way, this chain of events could have broken,” he said.
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Addis in 1991 at a wedding shower before she married her second husband, Gerard Mergardt.Credit…via Alexandra Johnson
Addis retired from teaching in 1976. She frequently traveled abroad, including to the ancient ruins of Pompeii in Italy and the Acropolis in Greece, returning to give slide show presentations to local residents who could not travel. She was involved in historical societies and collected oral histories of octogenarians in the area, contributing chapters to several books about neighborhoods in Westchester County.
Addis’s first husband died in 1981. She married Gerard Mergardt in 1991; he died in 1995.
Addis died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease on Aug. 13, 2004, in Purdys, N.Y. She was 92.
In March 2023, the Game Developers Choice Awards honored Addis with a posthumous Pioneer Award, listing her innovations: “game updates, in-game narrative experiences, and early iterations of what would become known as cutscenes.”
The award announcement also said that she “helped pave the way for game elements that wouldn’t become mainstream for decades.”
ah, proprio na menzione al volo, peccato.
non ti han contattato per nulla o sbaglio?
Ma figurati. Sono anni che quei due ricercatori campano sulle spalle del lavoro di Monnens (che è uno che ne sa davvero di come fare una ricerca).
C’e’ qualche problema di overflow inserendo numeri decimali 
@xEnd3r metticelo un input check che spara fuori questa gif
2 Likes
Il debug di Larios 
Sei l’unico che cerca bug in un gioco del 1964 
2 Likes
mi ci giocherei la palla di larios che sti check nell’originale non esistevano
Magari frega un cazzo (probabile) ma ho due news.
La prima è che il libro “si farà” non solo in italiano (quello era facile) ma anche in inglese
Segue link assolutamente non pubblicitario: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1108065491/video-games-the-people-games-and-companies-part-ii/
La seconda news è che gli altri ricercatori si sono tutti ritirati dalla contesa. Quello che era più avanti di tutti ha avuto il paper rifiutato e ora che ha scoperto che pubblico il libro ha sostanzialmente deciso di non riproporlo più. Italia 1 USA 0
L’eccellenza italiana nel mondo
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E fu così che arrivai anche ad Harvard :)
E a 40 anni suonati, grazie al tweet di questo tizio, scopro che l’università di Harvard è in un posto chiamato Cambridge in Massachusetts, mentre l’università di Cambridge è a Cambridge in Inghilterra. 
Io l’ho scoperto tipo l’anno scorso