And even with pinball, it took decades for someone to finally add buttons and flippers to the game.
Not many games had a persistent state to begin with, but excepting that and being able to level the same piece, checkers -kinging- and chess - promoting pawns. Both have a lot in common with what people think of by levelling.
No more pedantic than your DnD character sheet being a protagonist, imo. The top hat represents a fictional player, just as a character sheet represents a fictional character. A narrative about starting out as a poor, ambitious businessman (landlord) looking to make it to the top and defeat all competition via luck, guile and cunning is not all together different from a beginning adventurer setting off to reach their goal.
Those wood box mazes you control with knobs to tilt and move a marble.
I know Magic The Gathering did this with Chaos Confetti from the Unglued set in 1998. When played, the card is to be torn up.
I’ve played a lot of games that come with score pads, and it’s never occurred to me not to use them.
I thought about the Chaos Confetti card earlier but “Unglued” was a novelty set and not intended for “real” (i.e. Tournament legal) M:tG play so didn’t feel like it really counted.
Not all that much. Leveling pawns and checkers follows a very strict set of rules, you don’t really have any options on how to upgrade them, nor what happens when you do.
But the top hat doesn’t have different skills and abilities from the iron. In Monopoly, your choice of “character” is purely aesthetic, in D&D, character creation has actual impact on gameplay.
Gary Gygax didn’t invent all or maybe even any of the elements of the game, but he did put them together in a unique way that created something new. I’d call that a technology.
Though of course, like most of Unglued (and Unhinged), it was intended as a joke (a reference to an urban legend surrounding the card “Chaos Orb”, which was itself already a very weird card).
And video games that require manual dexterity and reflexes are, in some ways, descendants of mechanical games that require manual dexterity and reflexes… but it’s a distant descent. Both Doom and Super Mario Brothers are equally descended from those games, and yet radically different from each other beyond that.
But that doesn’t fit any definition of “technology” I can find. It’s not using scientific principles, there is no engineering involved, it doesn’t involve machinery. I agree with what was said earlier about conflating the terms “innovation” and “technology”.
Yeah, “innovation” would have been a much better word choice. I struggled between “artform” and “technology,” but didn’t even think of “innovation.”
I do agree it’s an innovation though.