Ancient Games: Crash Course Games #2 — Transcript

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1. 0:00Hi I'm Andre Meadows and this is Crash Course Games.
2. 0:02You've got games in your house right? You know the ones you play on family game night.
3. 0:06Games like Monopoly, Life, or modern ones like Ticket to Ride or Settlers of Catan.
4. 0:12Do you have a drawer, filled with dice?
5. 0:14Or maybe even have one rolling around in your pocket right now?
6. 0:19Dice in there.
7. 0:20Well believe it or not, board games and dice games are the result of thousands of years of human development,
8. 0:25and they've led directly to the massive variety of games we play today.
9. 0:28In some ways, that dusty Yahtzee game in the hall closet? That's the end result of human history, man.
10. 0:34[Theme Music]
11. 0:43Games have been with people from the very beginning of civilization, and probably even earlier than that.
12. 0:49As soon as we dropped from the trees, outran the lions, and put a few buildings together...we got bored.
13. 0:55And started playing games. Some estimates put the dawn of games at 5,500 years ago.
14. 1:01Fun fact that actually when they started programming Duke Nukem Forever
15. 1:05Pretty much every civilisation we've studied, played games. The Ancient Egyptians had Senet.
16. 1:09While the Ancient Chinese had Go. The Romans were playing Backgammon, or Tables, as they called it.
17. 1:15Ancient Aztecs in South America had a game known as Patolli.
18. 1:19I don't know if we can confidently say that games were ubiquitous,
19. 1:22but I am comfortable saying pretty much everyone in history has played games.
20. 1:27Let's start with what is probably the most ancient of ancient of gaming technology: Dice.
21. 1:32Dice are a part of a lot of games and to get a little mystical about it:
22. 1:36Dice symbolize the chance and randomness involved in many games.
23. 1:40They serve to remind us of the randomness of the universe.
24. 1:44For thousands of years, dice were actually made from bones, teeth, horns, tusks, and even sheep knuckles.
25. 1:51Sheep knuckles are still used today in Mongolia for both games and fortune telling.
26. 1:55You've heard the phrase "Rolling the bones"? It literally meant bones at one time!
27. 2:00Now why sheep knuckles? Sheep knuckles are durable, roll well and have four unique sides.
28. 2:05The flat, concave, convex and twisted sides, each side has a recognisable shape, each with their own meanings.
29. 2:12The Greeks called knuckle bones, Astragali and used them to add chance to a game.
30. 2:16Basically it was a way of leaving some parts of the game up to the gods.
31. 2:20But Astragali weren't just for gaming. Remember when I talked about dice as reminders of randomness of the universe?
32. 2:25Well, Ancient Greek fortune tellers and mystics would roll these bones as a way to assign order to some of that randomness.
33. 2:32They used dice to get life advice from the gods. These astragali were seen as messengers of higher authority.
34. 2:38And everything from when to marry, to who will get sick were determined by these little bone fragments bouncing along the floor.
35. 2:45Wonder how they would be at the Powerball?
36. 2:47Now knucklebones took a long time to become the dice we know today.
37. 2:50Archaeologists have found them in sites dating as far back as 800 BC, though they could probably could go back even further.
38. 2:56Over time, people adjusted and crafted knucklebones into the dice you recognise today.
39. 3:00Slowly the sides were worn down and sculpted. Symbols and holes were added.
40. 3:04And dice evolved from unique organic bones to uniform plastic cubes with little dots or pips across their surfaces.
41. 3:11Don't worry sheep, your knuckles are safe.
42. 3:13And cubes aren't the only regular shaped dice evolved into.
43. 3:16A lot of role-playing games today use the D20 or 20 sided die but its not actually a modern creation.
44. 3:21In 2012, archaeologists discovered a D20 crafted out of serpentine in Egypt dating back to the Ptolemaic Period;
45. 3:29somewhere between 300 and 30 BCE.
46. 3:32It has Greek letters on various sides, but no one knows for sure what it was used for.
47. 3:36That could be one really long game of Dungeons and Dragons.
48. 3:39So even though dice and ancient games began to take a more playful nature, the mystical hand of chance
49. 3:45(not to be confused with the master hand of Super Smash Bros)
50. 3:47was always present and shaped why and how games were played.
51. 3:51One of the earliest examples of this can be seen in the Ancient Egyptian game of Senet, which roughly translates to "passing."
52. 3:57The game itself has been found or represented in hieroglyphs from even before the dynastic periods of
53. 4:02Egypt, around 3,000 to 3,500 BC, and through the middle and late dynasties.
54. 4:07Senet involved a grid of 30 squares arranged along a rectangular design with 3 rows of 10.
55. 4:13The majority of squares are blank minus several at the end which contained very specific hieroglyphics and symbols.
56. 4:18But with time being time, the exact rules have been lost.
57. 4:22Kind of like when you lose your instruction manual in a video game.
58. 4:24But through research of temple paintings and hieroglyphic text a solid assumption of the rules has developed.
59. 4:30Senet started off as a secular game and there are many hieroglyphic references to drinking wine, playing Senet and calling it a day.
60. 4:37But over time, the game took on a increasing mystical nature.
61. 4:41Senet evolved to indicate how a player would fare in the afterlife.
62. 4:45The mystical side of gaming had infiltrated the play side,
63. 4:48and people would play the game to see if they were blessed by the gods.
64. 4:51The idea was that a good Senet player was destined to have a pleasurable afterlife,
65. 4:55while a player who lost constantly probably wasn't going to fare that well.
66. 4:59Which seems like a bad deal to me as I don't know how to play Senet.
67. 5:02But senet was by no means the only ancient game.
68. 5:05All your favourite ancient civilisations played games. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.
69. 5:09Let's look at Ancient China, where they had the game Wei-Chi or as it is known more commonly, Go.
70. 5:14Some archaeologists estimate that Go has been played for upwards of 4000 years.
71. 5:18In fact, it's the oldest game we know of that's still played in its original form.
72. 5:22The game consists of a solid line grid where players take turns placing either a white or black stone.
73. 5:29The goal of the game is to control or surround the majority of the board.
74. 5:32Go is a little complicated and players have a lot of possible choices.
75. 5:36And by a lot, I mean there are 10 to the 761st power moves available to a player.
76. 5:42In chess, you only have 10 to the 120th power. That's a lot chess but you're no Go.
77. 5:47While human chess players have been beaten by computers as far back as the 1980's,
78. 5:50Humans playing Go are just now being beaten by special computer programs.
79. 5:54Which is pretty impressive for a 4000 year old game.
80. 5:57In South America, Patolli was played across Meso-American cultures.
81. 6:01This game, played between 200 BC and 1000 AD,
82. 6:04was a series of four lines one two axis that intersected in the middle forming a cross.
83. 6:09The object of the game was for players to move their pieces along the lined tracks based on the throws of beans or stones.
84. 6:15The Aztecs even had a God of Patolli named Xochipilli.
85. 6:19Betting on Patolli was common, and players would bet everything from gold to plants to food to even furniture.
86. 6:26The game was so common and so popular that Aztecs could be seen carrying Patoli mats around with them during the day, just itching for a game.
87. 6:32Huh, it is like the first Gameboy.
88. 6:34This game encompasses the main pillars of ancient games: Fun, mysticism, skill and chance.
89. 6:40No matter the land or people these main themes keep popping up time and time again.
90. 6:44Thanks Thought Bubble. So a lot of these ancient games have fallen off of popularity today,
91. 6:50But all of them illustrate the core principles of fun and engagement that drive people to play games.
92. 6:54These games are the ancestors to those table top games in our cabinets,
93. 6:58and the video games on our phones and consoles.
94. 7:00And you can still easily buy a copy of Senet or Backgammon,
95. 7:03and the Honinbo Go tournament in Japan has a grand prize of over $400,000.
96. 7:08These games have staying power.
97. 7:10And trust me -- you figure out a way to add microtransactions to them, they'll be in your phones in no time.
98. 7:14But those aren't the only ancient games that we still play.
99. 7:17Mancala Is more of a game type or mechanic like dice.
100. 7:20But it dates back at least as far as the 4th Century or even further and has survived all that time.
101. 7:26Pretty much in its original form.
102. 7:28Games all over the world, from the traditional Hao Le Kiswahili in East Africa,
103. 7:32and many modern Euro-style board games use the mancala mechanic of transferring a counter along a continuous track.
104. 7:39The familiar children's games shoots and ladders also has ancient origins.
105. 7:42And by ancient I mean it goes even further back than 1952, when Milton Bradley introduced the game in the United States.
106. 7:48It's based on the game Snakes and Ladders, a game that was bought to England during the 17th Century from India,
107. 7:54where it was played as early as the 2nd Century BC.
108. 7:57In India, the game was played for fun but it also delivered a moral message to the kids who played it.
109. 8:02The ladders were virtues that could lead a player to a higher spiritual state,
110. 8:06while the snakes represented sins that could drag a person down to a lower plane of being.
111. 8:11If you ask me though, the moral message of Shoots and Ladders is a little muddled given that the game is completely random.
112. 8:17Or maybe I am missing some deeper message about free will here.
113. 8:22Now this makes for a completely different change of philosophy about Candyland.
114. 8:26The beautiful thing about history is that there is always more to learn.
115. 8:29Archaeologists are digging up previously unknown games all the time.
116. 8:33The Royal game of Ur was discovered in Iraq during the 1920's in a royal tomb.
117. 8:37Like a board game from a garage sale, the Royal game of Ur didn't include rules, so archaeologists just made up rules.
118. 8:44Until the cuneiform tablet was discovered much later.
119. 8:46Sadly this rule set was incomplete and there's still a lot of debate among gaming experts as to how to play the game.
120. 8:52In 2015, another new game was found in a 2,300 year old tomb in Qingdao city in China.
121. 8:58Archaeologists found a handmade 14 sided die made from an animal tooth alongside 21 game pieces with numbers and a broken piece of a game board.
122. 9:08Sound like the beginning of a Goonies sequel,
123. 9:10like, there's one half of the board game piece, we must find the other half and then we will find the treasure!
124. 9:14The game is believed to be called Bo, or Liubo the last time that it was known to be played widely was over 1,500 years ago
125. 9:21The rules for this game are incomplete like the rules of the Royal game of Ur and your guess on how to play it is as good as mine.
126. 9:28Actually it is probably better than mine, I have no idea how to play it.
127. 9:30We could go on and on listing games but we're running out of time. Or your internet attention span.
128. 9:35So we should get to the point of all of this history.
129. 9:38People have been playing games for a long time, and while games have obviously evolved since the days of
130. 9:43sheep knuckles, mancala, the royal game of Ur, and Senet,
131. 9:48those games, and the mechanics that make them work, are still at the core of the games we play today.
132. 9:53And it's not just the mechanics of those games that survived.
133. 9:56While we may no longer believe that games can predict kind of afterlife is in store for us, or who we should marry,
134. 10:01the best games can not only forge connections across the small group of friends on game night,
135. 10:06they can connect people over centuries and across continents.
136. 10:09And we're still only on our way to having an answer to the question of why we play games.
137. 10:13I think the connection that we feel with each other and with history are clearly a part of it.
138. 10:17Thanks for watching and I'll see you next week. I gotta go work on my Mortal Kombat game.
139. 10:22*whispers* My afterlife depends on it.
140. 10:25Crash Course Games is filmed in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis, Indiana,
141. 10:29and it's made with the help of all these nice people.
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