Educational games were all the rage in the early ninteenth century. As the narrator of Sir Walter Scott’s 1814 novel, Waverley, observed, “the history of England is now reduced to a game at cards, the problems of mathematics to puzzles and riddles.” This bemusement reflects the burgeoning industry of instructional card, dice, and board games that sprang up in the late 1700s, partly in response to changing attitudes towards juvenile education outlined early on by the philosopher John Locke a century before.
Women at the time were, of course, generally barred from attending college and generally discouraged from the pursuit of learning beyond acquiring the skills of a governess. Yet the wave of enthusiasm for educational games nevertheless created an opportunity for some enterprising women—despite significant structural obstacles—to find an intellectual and creative outlet. Standout figures in the history of game design include Margaret Bryan, who directed a girl’s school in Blackheath in southeastern London. A writer on science with a particular interest in astronomy, Bryan produced the boardgame Science in Sport, or the Pleasures of Astronomy in collaboration with the well-known game publisher John Wallis.
This game, a variation on the staple of the Game of the Goose (akin to Chutes and Ladders), requires players to spin a teetotum and race their pieces along the board. Most of the squares illustrate scientific phenomena, explained in an accompanying rule booklet, but some depict bad behavior, such as square six, which features “The County Gaol…for those who attend to the motion of Billiard Balls, more than to the motion of the Planets,” and square twelve, which features “a blockhead.” Landing on these meant losing a turn or worse, a player’s place on the board.
Other pioneering game designers include children’s author Alicia Catherine Mant, who also published an astronomy-themed board game, while the ludic inventions of the poet and schoolteacher Elizabeth Rowse encompassed A Grammatical Game, in Rhyme, by a Lady (1802) and Mythological Amusement (1804).
Perhaps the most creative arena for female game designers, however, was music, and more specifically, music theory. Among the middle and upper classes, music was generally seen as a female accomplishment, and teaching its rudiments to children was typically left to mothers, governesses, or schoolmistresses. Learning the rules of music theory by rote could seem difficult and tedious. But the subject itself—with its principles, prohibitions, and occasional exceptions—lent itself remarkably well to gamification.
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The nineteenth century’s best-known musical game designer was the Edinburgh-based pianist and music teacher Anne Young. In 1801, she received a royal patent for a set of games intended to “render familiar and impress upon the memory, the fundamental principles of the science of music.” The first British patent ever granted for a game, it was also the only one awarded that year to a female inventor, as David Ghere and Fred Amram have discovered. Two years after the launch of the Musical Games, Young, now the respectably married Mrs. Gunn, published a two-hundred-fifty page companion treatise entitled An Introduction to Music, which explained music theory fundamentals via instructions for playing her Musical Games. The treatise is organized as seven sections, each corresponding to a different set of games, and includes a number of optional variations, outlining twenty-two different games in total.
A handful of Young’s Musical Games can be found in libraries, museums, and private collections today. They’re luxury items: the boards were made of mahogany, while most of the nearly two hundred parts in each game—pins, dice, plates, and counters—were carved out of ivory and ebony. Priced originally at seven guineas, which was more than the annual wages of a laborer at the time, this game set would have been affordable only for the very wealthy.
Unlike earlier musical dice games, which were designed to encourage composition, Musical Games aimed to teach the rudiments of theory. Some of the games that can be played on the set involve racing, with players competing to move their pieces up and down various configurations on the board. Others involve the acquisition of points for correct answers, tallied with delicate ivory counters. A child following the treatise’s progression of games would engage many of the fundamentals of music theory, ranging from notation through more advanced topics in harmony including chord resolution and modulation.
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Young’s invention haunted musical journals throughout the nineteenth century, resurfacing from time to time in newspaper queries, sometimes from readers intrigued by the warm endorsement it got from her husband John Gunn, a distinguished Scottish music pedagogue who wroteinstructional treatises. (In his writings, Gunn protested “without having ever previously heard the name of the ingenious and scientific Inventor, I was struck with the merits of these Games.”) Interestingly, the Musical Games reappear nearly a century later in the essay “Games of Music,” published in 1907 in the London-based magazine The Musical Times by Bertha Harrison, who was very likely the anti-suffrage activist also known as Ethel Bertha Harrison. Harrison was interested in music history—her earlier writings in The Musical Times had treated topics such as child prodigies and historic concert venues—but it was only in her essay on musical games that she revealed her political leanings.
In what may be one of the earliest pieces of ludomusicology, the study of music and games, Harrison’s essay surveys the role of musical games from the eighteenth century to her present day. Although she ostensibly examines musical games in general, most of her article is dedicated to Young, whom she characterizes as a woman “possessed of an uncommon order of mind.” Harrison describes Young’s games as “so clever and ingenious, so full of nice detail, that all the music games of the present day seem poor in design and clumsy in execution in comparison with it.”
However, the crux of Harrison’s argument appears in a subsequent paragraph, where she struggles to put a positive spin on the striking disparity in the quality of games designed by women and men, writing that
[it] is a curious and interesting fact that, among musical games, those invented by women are very complicated and extraordinarily full of detail, while those invented by men are, with very rare exceptions, quite simple and generally adaptations from other games. From this we may draw one of two conclusions: either that in this particular line woman has more originality than man, or that when she begins to invent, her mind becomes so engrossed with details as to lose sight of the main issue, and, in the words of the proverb, she cannot see the wood for the trees.
Conceding that women might be intrinsically better at musical game design, Harrison immediately undercuts this notion with the claim that women are overly concerned with details, and that is why their games tend to be more complex. The stereotype of the detail-oriented woman, as exemplified in this example, is a trope that, as Naomi Schor reminds us, has informed and limited understandings of female ability for centuries.
Harrison’s critique notwithstanding, the nineteenth century saw many impressive music educational games invented by women. The 1851 Great Exhibition in London featured Gioco di Euterpe, (a game whose name invokes the Greek goddess of music) designed by Abelinde Prince and “intended to assist beginners in the knowledge of the relative value of musical characters, and to render them good timeists.” The editor of The Girl’s Own Book (1869) described a game developed by an anonymous female friend, entitled “Sir Samuel Semibreve,” which taught sight-singing and could be ordered from a music shop in Middlesex.
Across the Atlantic, Abbie T. Hays, principal of a music school in Wichita, Kansas, filed a patent in 1895 for a “musical game device” designed to teach notation with pictures depicting the words spelled out by note-names (think B-A-G or B-E-E). Later that year, Sarah W. Featherstone, a schoolteacher in Toledo, Ohio, filed a patent for Nota Bene, which used a spinning wheel to teach children rhythm. And in 1897, the enterpreneurial Evelyn Fletcher of Toronto filed both Canadian and US patents for a Music Block Game. Her “Fletcher Music Method” would later be endorsed by luminaries such as John Philip Sousa and Hugo Riemann, and it was highly popular with schoolteachers. This is just a small selection of the names and devices that pop out of the archive.
In my experience searching historical patent records, one is more likely to come across games designed by women then by men. Bertha Harrison seems to have gotten that right, at least!
Today, using gamification to teach music seems like a no-brainer. Indeed, many music videogames have become wildly popular—think instrument-based rhythm games like Guitar Hero. While these games generally teach synchronization, there are also plenty of music theory games available to try online, such as ToneGym, Solfege Story, or Chet – Ear Training. Although these modern creations would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago, these games are still part of an unusual—and unusually female—tradition.
