Technology
Jul. 15th, 2005 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unbibiumMost 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-16 04:31 pm (UTC)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.