Games Built the Computer: Babbage, Lovelace and the Dawn of the Ludic Age
Bibliography
Pizelo, Samuel. 2024. “Games Built the Computer: Babbage, Lovelace and the Dawn of the Ludic Age.” Game Studies 24 (3). https://gamestudies.org/2403/articles/pizelo.
Abstract
This article argues that games were used as modeling technologies for the earliest symbolic computational device, the Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Consequently, it is argued that the history of computing technology is one part of a longer history of games as modeling technologies. Before Babbage first wrote on the theory of computation in the 1820s, he had spent nearly a decade developing a “geometry of situation” through the study of games of skill, inspired by the work of German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Babbage employed this new geometry to describe the operations of mechanical computers in space and over time in symbolic language. I argue that Babbage’s earlier study of games provided crucial tools and concepts for his later project of making a symbolic computational device. I also examine the discussion of games in Babbage and Lovelace’s earliest correspondence to argue that games continued to model crucial innovations in their design of the Analytical Engine. Examples of this include the use of punch card programs and the development of an “anticipating carry” to speed up computation. I demonstrate how Babbage and Lovelace relied on historically specific forms of games such as chess, solitaire and tic-tac-toe to develop a symbolic language describing the relationship between space, time and mechanism. This elemental correspondence between game form and computational architecture can provide computer game scholars with new ways of describing the relationship between computers and games. Recognizing the historical role of games as models foregrounds their ongoing epistemological influence.
Notes
Takeaway
Part of Babbage’s work or contribution was about the analysis of games as math problems and trying to mechanize solution-finding. That means he had to analyze real-world situations, that involve space and time, find a way to abstract that into math notations, and translate that into a machine (that again operate in space and over time). Lovelace built on and furthered these algorithmic machines, furthering how to program them and algorithmic math.
This arc of materialized play to abstracted notation to mechanized algorithm is beautifully captured by Lovelace.
Go to annotation “The bounds of arithmetic were however outstepped the moment the idea of applying the cards had occurred; […] In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science. A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed […] for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. (Lovelace, 1843, p. 163)”
I see some links between Lovelace’s highlight of the materialization of algorithmic operations and my interest in programming video games. Although I can’t formulate it clearly yet.
The author mentions how Babbage was inspired by what essentially makes a game.
Go to annotation “What characterized the automaton’s function were the two traditionally human capacities of memory and foresight, which are necessitated by the conditional logics and branching complexity of games of skill.” (Pizelo, 2024)
Go to annotation “For Babbage to develop this theory independently of games, he would have needed to stumble upon a problem that involved a turn-based agonistic encounter between two or more parties where items were placed in abstract space in a linear sequence for the pursuit of a measurable and finite outcome. For many scholars of games, these properties are the very definition of a game [12]” (Pizelo, 2024)