Treasure Hunt: Mabel Addis and the Sumerian Game

Nick's journey into David Ahl's collection got me thinking about Hamurabi, which Nick has also presented on in the past. I had never done much research into the game, but a quick search led me to the mentions of the inspiration: Mabel Addis' Sumerian Game, which is... dun, dun, duh! lost to history?

It looks like Andrea Contato has done quite a bit of work to reconstruct Humarabi from outputs that the Strong museum is in possession of. It's also built on the Wing report. But more importantly, he's written an exceptional book on the Sumerian Game, available online. I highly recommend Andrea's bookon the topic, The Sumerian Game, which I've just started reading. Looks like some excellent code archaeology.

Andrea eventually had to create his own version based on documentation, particularly printouts of gameplay. That reminds me a lot of what Team ELIZA had to do, though we at least had code to work with. Actually, there are other overlaps with ELIZA, as The Sumerian Game was developed in the mid 1960s, too.

I've invited Andrea to come discuss and share some of his code from his Steam game. Perhaps we could look at the code of the Herbert James Hallworth's FOCAL version of the game, which as I understand it is the intermediary between The Sumerian Game and the BASIC version of Hamurabi. So the lineage is The Sumerian Game -> FOCAL Looks like FOCAL was more an adaptation than a port, but I'm still reading....

Here's some code.

01.10 T "HAMURABI: I BEG TO REPORT TO YOU,"!
01.20 T "IN YEAR ",Y," ",S," PEOPLE STARVED, ",A," CAME TO THE CITY."!
01.30 T "POPULATION IS NOW ",P,". THE CITY NOW OWNS ",L," ACRES."!
01.40 T "YOU HARVESTED ",H," BUSHELS PER ACRE. RATS ATE ",R," BUSHELS."!
01.50 T "YOU NOW HAVE ",S," BUSHELS IN STORE."!!
01.60 T "LAND IS TRADING AT ",V," BUSHELS PER ACRE."!
01.70 A "HOW MANY ACRES DO YOU WISH TO BUY? ",Q
01.80 I (Q) 1.7, 1.9, 1.9
01.90 S S=S-Q*V; S L=L+Q; D 2.1

Some approaches

• We can compare Contato's recreation later versions.
• This code is directly descended from the Sumerian Game, so we could do a heritage study?
• What do we know about Mabel Addis?
• What does any of this say about our fascination with ancient Sumer or our attempts to create a King Game - Kingdom-management resource sim?

Or we can use this for a discussion of the role of reconstruction projects in code archaeology and critical code studies!