The First Educational Computer Game Was Written by a Woman

In 1964 30 sixth grade students from Westchester County did something nobody else had ever done before: they learned from a computer game.

Today the computer’s usefulness as an educational tool has been well-established for decades, and traditional games have been used to pass down knowledge and lessons for about as long as we have a history. Computers were still new and unknowable to most people in the 1960s, though, like a piece of the future that had somehow slipped through a portal into the past, and so the idea of the educational computer game had to be invented. And the first such example, called The Sumerian Game and played by those Westchester kids on an IBM 7090 mainframe computer over 60 years ago, was invented by a woman: Mabel Addis. 

Then in her early 50s, Addis was a fourth-grade teacher with a masters in education from Columbia working for the Katonah-Lewisboro School District in Westchester. She was tapped by IBM and New York’s Boards of Cooperative Educational Services to write a program that would use history to teach middle schoolers basic concepts about running a settlement with a small population, and chose Sumer in the fourth century BCE (or BC, as it would’ve been called in Addis’s day) as the setting. As described in its Wikipedia entry, it sounds like a rudimentary strategy game where you’d have to make sure you had enough food to keep your people alive and thriving while also dealing with unexpected natural disasters, spread out across three generations so players could get a sense of technological and societal changes. When that first class played it in 1964, The Sumerian Game was entirely text, although separate audio and visual aids were later added to be used alongside the game in a second 1966 experiment. And when I say “text” I don’t mean letters on a computer monitor: the game’s scenario was printed out on paper, and players would enter their action into the mainframe, which would then print out another page for the next turn. 

Although Addis had help from programmer William McKay, she was solely responsible for designing the game itself. In creating The Sumerian Game she laid the groundwork for all strategy and resource-management games to come. Unfortunately it would take decades for her to receive the recognition she deserved. 

The project the game was created for was short-lived. That one class played The Sumerian Game in 1964, and then a second class played a tweaked version two years later. It was lost for decades, although a copy of the game’s text has existed on the Internet Archive inside a 1967 report on the project since 2015. The last two years have seen a new wave of interest in and awareness of Addis; she won the Pioneer Award at GDC in 2023, and in 2024 HareSoft used her original text to create a new version of The Sumerian Game that’s free to play on Steam.

Addis’s game might have only been played by a few dozen middle school kids in one school system 60 years ago, but it still had a tremendous impact upon games, even if very few knew it at the time. Doug Dyment, a programmer at the Digital Equipment Corporation, learned of The Sumerian Game at a computer conference in the late ‘60s. Despite having never seen or played it himself, he created a game based on that description in 1968; although Dyment named it King of Sumeria, it became popularly known as Hamurabi as it spread among computer programmers throughout the ‘70s, ensuring that Addis’s ideas gained currency within the larger computer community of the day, even if they were delivered second-hand. Hamurabi popularized the strategy game among the computer cognoscenti of the pre-home computer 1970s, which led directly to the iteration and refinement of that genre as technology advanced and became more accessible.