The Sumerian Game

The Sumerian Game is a largely text-based strategy video game centered on resource management. The game, set around 3500 BC, has players act as three successive rulers of the city of Lagash in Sumer—Luduga I, II, and III—over three segments of increasingly complex economic simulation. Two versions of the game were created, both intended for play by a classroom of students with a single person inputting commands into a teleprinter, which would output responses from the mainframe computer. The second version had a stronger narrative component to the game's text and interspersed the game with taped audio lectures, presented as the discussions of the ruler's court of advisors, corresponding with images on a slide projector. In both versions, the player enters numbers in response to questions posed by the game.

In the first segment of the game, the player plays a series of rounds—limited to 30 in the second version of the game—in which they are given information about the current population, acres of farmland, number of farmers, grain harvested that round, and stored grain. The rounds start in 3500 BC, and are meant to represent seasons. The player then selects how much grain will be used as food, seed for planting, and storage. After making their selections, the game calculates the effect of the player's choices on the population for the next round.

In 1962, the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) of Westchester County, New York, began a series of discussions with researchers at IBM, which was headquartered in Westchester County, about the use of computers in education research. The BOCES system had been established in New York to help rural school districts pool resources, and the Westchester BOCES Superintendent Dr. Noble Gividen believed that computers, along with computer simulation games like the Carnagie Tech Management Game being used in colleges, could be used to improve educational outcomes at small districts in Westchester. The Westchester County BOCES and IBM held a joint workshop, led by Bruse Moncreiff and James Dinneen of IBM along with Dr.

Richard Wing, curriculum research coordinator for BOCES, in June 1962, involving ten teachers from the area to discuss ways of using simulations in classroom curricula. S. Office of Education that December to continue to study the concept for 18 months as a joint project between IBM and the New York State Education Department, receiving almost US$104,000 (equivalent to $1,107,000 in 2025) instead for "Cooperative Research Project 1948".

BOCES copyrighted The Sumerian Game in 1964. The grants for the second version of the game were in part to create a "center of demonstration" at the BOCES Research Center in Yorktown Heights for computer-assisted instruction. To this end, following the creation of the second version of the game, the first segment was reprogrammed by Jimmer Leonard, a graduate student in Social Relations at Johns Hopkins University, for the IBM 1401, to be used at demonstrations at the BOCES Research Center. Further revisions to the other sections of the game were considered, but no further grants for the project were received and no further changes were made.

The project was mentioned in Time and Life magazines in 1966. The game was made available to other schools by "special arrangement" with Westchester County BOCES into at least the early 1970s. In 1969, professor Herbert Hallworth of the University of Calgary reported that the computer science department there had recreated the game for the FOCAL programming language as an educational tool and was in the process of writing an assembly language version.