Technology

[unbibium]

Most of the things we take for granted today, especially geeky things, are things invented in the 20th century.

But there are quite a few things, mostly cultural, that could have been invented hundreds of years ago.

Games, in particular, could have been invented two hundred years ago. Benjamin Franklin played chess, a game that was already ancient.

Why could he not also have played Scrabble? The key obstacle to Scrabble's invention are probably the tiles -- to create so many uniform wooden tiles before the Industrial Revolution was probably prohibitively expensive.

A brief search turned up this historic games site, which sells cloth boards and replica pieces for games with long histories.

All these games are symbolic in nature; I wonder if any game existed that tried to tell a story, in the vein of modern role playing games, or games with descriptive cards and spaces like Monopoly or Life.

Comments

[waystar.livejournal.com]

I remember reading about word tile games predating Scrabble, but Scrabble evidently came about and hung in there long enough to catch on. While it does have quite a following, it probably won't survive the ages like chess because Scrabble is owned by two companies. (Hasbro in North America, Mattel throughout the rest of the world.)


Of course, every galactic hitchhiker worth their towel knows that Scrabble is both pre-historic and post-historic. :)

WHAT DO YOU GET

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

WHEN YOU MULTIPLY SELCHOW BY RICHTER

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think there are some cultural contingencies involved, too.

Scrabble was invented in the US in 1938. Two fads that had swept America in the 1920s, with the crazes still very much in living memory, were crossword puzzles and mah jong (themselves early-20th and mid-19th century inventions, respectively). Scrabble consists of elements of those two things nailed together.

[kirkjerk.livejournal.com]

I never liked Scrabble...there's something disrespectful about treating words as mere arbitrary collections of letters, robbing them of their meaning or context.

I do tend to have a general disdain for abstract-ish strategy games where I'm pretty sure some clever 80s or 90s programmer could have written a program to play it better than I am now. I prefer "creativity" games, like Pictionary or Cranium. Or even Trivial Pursuit (which a programmer couldn't write a good player for, at least not 'til Google...) Unfortunately, these games tend to be very culturally biased, putting my Russian girlfriend at a serious disadvantage.