Baseball Game Designer Goes Geeky

I recently had the chance to visit the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, and take a tour of their collections.

They have over 30,000 electronic game related items from every generation of PC games and every console ever made.  It was the first time since the CES trade show of 1982 that  I'd seen an Intellivision, a Vectrex and an Atari 2600 sitting side-by-side... let alone in playable condition with big libraries of games for each machine.  (And remember, the Intellivision is clearly superior!)

They also have an unbelievable collection of toys and games that reach back to the origins of many kinds of play that we take for granted.  

There are lots of stories to share about what I saw, but one item still sticks in my mind several weeks later.

This "Game of Base-Ball" from 1887 was one of the earliest baseball board games ever made.  Although I didn't realize its historical significance at the time, I wrote a baseball simulation game in 1971 on a mainframe computer that was the first-ever computer baseball game.  I'd also redesigned the board game All-Star Baseball in 1967 for myself and a friend when I was 15 years old, to increase its statistical accuracy.

So looking at a baseball game from almost 125 years ago was very moving to me.

Then I noticed it had spinners!  This was back in the days when baseball pitchers threw underhand (like softball), and the dimensions of the field and pitching mound were all different from today.  But the spinners in the box recreated the basic math of baseball, or at least the basic math of that dead-ball era.

Now they did not have individual player cards with different stats -- those innovations did not come for another fifty years.  But I was looking at the work of someone who was addressing the same game design challenge I had faced, only doing so with far less technology and far fewer tools.  The innovation it represented -- and its ties to modern games -- floored me.  And I have to say I felt close to that long-ago game designer who had sought to create the same simulation that has been such a big part of my life.

So there it is, my geek-out moment.  Seeing any game from the 19th century is interesting.  Seeing a design from 1887 that foreshadows computer baseball sims is fascinating.

Copyright (c) 2009-2010, Don Daglow.  All Rights Reserved.

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