Mabel Addis Was The First Video Games Writer You’ve Never Heard Of
Back when video games had yet to seep into public consciousness in 1964, there was a text-based game called The Sumerian Game, a text-based economic simulator about managing your resources as the rulers of Lagash in Sumer. It was also written and designed by Mabel Addis, a fourth-grade teacher who wanted to impart the basics of economic theory to her class. But it’s a pity that few have heard of her: she’s also widely considered as the first female video game designer, as well as the very first video game narrative designer of any gender, pioneering several features—such including narrative elements, cutscenes and even content patches—that can still be seen in modern titles.
The Sumerian Game has its roots in an initiative by IBM researchers and the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) of Westchester County, New York to discuss the potential of using games for educating students. While it was IBM’s Bruse Moncreiff who proposed using an ancient Sumerian civilisation as a setting for a game, it was Addis who expanded on this idea to turn it into an economic model of a civilisation, having studied about Mesoptamian civilisations back in college. But The Sumerian Game wasn’t a title played by thousands of players on personal computers everywhere; that wasn’t a commercial technology that was accessible to the wider public then. Instead, this could only be experienced on an early IBM mainframe computer, where players—which were essentially sixth-grade students—had to take turns to play.
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How this game was experienced is this: prompts from the mainframe computer had to be printed out on pieces of paper, with the students keying in their
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