Sunday, December 16, 2012
Gaming is Now 100 Years Old
Wells did not invent wargaming himself: since the late eighteenth century, recognizable wargames had been popular in the German-speaking world as tools for training officers. Wells however saw an opportunity for deriving pure entertainment from such games by simplifying them and emphasizing playability over strict realism. In this regard he surely drew on the ideas of Stevenson before him, who devised wargames for his young stepson in the early 1880s, but Stevenson never published his rules, whereas Wells presciently marketed them as a commercial product.