There has been a lot of talk about serious games the past few years. What I did not realize was that a fellow named Clark Abt wrote a book called Serious Games back in 1970. Yes, 1970.
Abt had worked at Raytheon and served in the Air Force, and he wanted to take wargaming out of its narrow, military role and expand it to include all kinds of policy issues — and to use it as an educational tool.
What might shock modern serious-gamers is that he was working almost entirely with manual games — computers were still expensive behemoths reserved for big-budget military simulations.
If you’re a fan of SimCity, you should note that Abt describes a multiplayer Simpolis game in this text, years ahead of the PC breakout hit.