HISTORY OF GAMES

Games have been played for thousands of years and are common to all cultures. Throughout history and around the world, people have used sticks to draw simple game boards on the ground, making up rules that incorporate stones or other common objects as playing pieces. About 5000 years ago people began to make more permanent game boards from sun-dried mud or wood. One of the earliest games, called senet, was played in ancient Egypt. Like many early games, senet had religious significance. Pictures on the board squares represented different parts of the journey that the ancient Egyptians believed the soul made after death.Some of the oldest board games may have evolved from methods of divination, or fortune-telling. The game of go, which many experts regard as the finest example of a pure strategy game, may have evolved from a method of divination practiced in China more than 3000 years ago, in which black and white pieces were cast onto a square board marked with symbols of various significance. Go also involves black and white pieces on a board, but players deliberately place them on intersections of lines while trying to surround more territory than the opponent. Many modern games evolved over centuries. As games spread to different geographic regions, people experimented with rules, creating variants and often changing the original game forever. The name mancala applies to a group of ancient Egyptian mathematical games in which pebbles, seeds, or other objects are moved around pits scooped out of dirt or wood. As the game spread through Asia, Africa, and the Americas, players developed local variations that are still played today. Two such variations are sungka, from the Philippines, and mweso, from Uganda.Chess, Chinese chess (xiangqi ), and Japanese chess (shogi) are among the most widely played board games in the world. Although quite different, all three are believed to have evolved from a common ancestor-either a 6th-century game played in India or an earlier game played in China. Over the centuries, chess spread westward to the Middle East and into Europe, with rules changing frequently. The game also spread eastward to Korea and Japan, resulting in very different rule changes. For most of human history, a game could not gain much popularity unless it was fairly easy for players to make their own equipment. The invention of printing (which occurred in the mid-1400s in the West) made this process easier, but it was not until the advances of the 18th-century Industrial Revolution that it became possible to mass-produce many new varieties of games. Twentieth-century technological advances such as the invention of plastic and the computer revolution led to the creation of more games, and more new kinds of games, than in all previous centuries combined.