Women in the period were generally excluded from higher ed...
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Ano: 2026
Banca:
IGEDUC
Órgão:
Prefeitura de Altos - PI
Prova:
IGEDUC - 2026 - Prefeitura de Altos - PI - Professor Língua Inglesa |
Q4279241
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The Hidden History of Women Game Designers
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.
Learning the rules of music theory by rote could seem
tedious. But the subject itself—with its principles,
prohibitions, and occasional exceptions—lent itself to
gamification.
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.
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.
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 "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
than 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.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-hidden-history-of-women-game-designers/
Women in the period were generally excluded from
higher education, yet educational game design created
an alternative intellectual outlet. A researcher formulates
a counterfactual statement about this historical situation.
Mark the alternative that presents a CORRECT third
conditional sentence.
Comentários
Veja os comentários dos nossos alunos
A alternativa CORRETA é a E.
Análise da Terceira Condicional (Third Conditional):
A terceira condicional é utilizada para expressar situações hipotéticas/contrafactuais no passado (coisas que não aconteceram e as suas possíveis consequências, também no passado).
A sua estrutura gramatical padrão é:
* Oração condicional (If clause): If women had enjoyed broader educational access... (Utiliza o Past Perfect para indicar uma condição irreal no passado).
* Oração principal (Main clause): ...their intellectual opportunities might have developed differently. (Utiliza o verbo modal might + have + particípio developed para indicar a consequência hipotética no passado).
Por que as outras alternativas estão incorretas?
* A) Incorreta: Utiliza o presente (enjoy / develop), tratando-se de uma Zero Conditional (fatos/generalidades), e não de uma hipótese contrafactual sobre o passado.
* B) Incorreta: Mistura o Past Perfect (had enjoyed) com o presente (develop), violando a estrutura da terceira condicional.
* C) Incorreta: Mistura o passado simples (enjoyed) com o futuro (will develop), o que incorre em erro de concordância temporal.
* D) Incorreta: Utiliza would have dentro da If clause (If women would have enjoyed...), o que é incorreto na norma culta da língua inglesa, além de utilizar o Past Perfect (had developed) na oração principal.
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