About the Hidden Hero and their story
In 1964, when the The Sumerian Game was tested, I was a toddler. It wasn't until my early teens when Mabel Addis' work touched me. The mid-1970s were the ancient times of microcomputers, and a local computer store would let me play games on their S-100 bus, 8-bit, 8080 based machine with 8" floppies. It could barely play text games, but I was entranced by "Hamurabi" which was a shadow of The Sumerian Game, written in 100 lines of BASIC. In high school I was lucky to get onto the school district's, time-shared DEC-10. We had a line printer connected to a 300 baud modem, and a video terminal that talked across the city, to my district's computer. It played a variant of Hamurabi too! I took a year and a half of computer classes. (FORTRAN was my first language!) At university, I enrolled in the software engineering program, and the main computer was a Xerox, Sigma-6 mainframe, with a room full of video terminals. It ran all sorts of Hamurabi like games. I remember one was set in the American Civil War! By the time I graduated, the microcomputer revolution was well in progress. After a few years of working for dull corps, I found out that game companies actually hired people! That's a lot of 'brief.' Sorry, but now imagine the day when I learned of The Sumerian Game's existence - originally written in 15,000 lines of FORTRAN at IBM, and designed by a teacher! The effort that she must have put into her game, resonated deeply with my experience! I can still feel how Hamurabi inspired me to be a game developer, and it's a direct link to Mabel Addis' creation of a genre in our industry. Faded Fluorescence, uses the concept of palimpsests to overlap kingdom management gameplay on top of a fictional, erased story of the first study of 6th graders playing The Sumerian Game. Instead of paper (which would have been more historically accurate), FF simulates screen-burn-in (on a video terminal) to contain the hidden story. During the game a player deciphers clues from the game's text, into unlock codes which will reveal a portion of the 'lost' story. The revealed text not only rewards the player with a segment of the story but provides clues about optimizing how the game is played. This represents how people can learn from the past, to be more empowered in their lives.

Horizons Participant
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