Video in progress...
Release Date: July 1973
Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)
Genre: Puzzle
Developer(s): Walter J. Koetke
Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation
I've probably mentioned this before, but I've done some basic programming in my time. One course I took had me program a game in C++ called Number Wizard. It's a simple number guessing game - the computer picks a number between 1 and 100, and you guess it, with the computer telling you if your guess is higher or lower than its number. I don't remember how to code it, but I know it was very easy to do.
Today's game, Guess, is one of those Number Wizard types of games. We've seen plenty already, and will see plenty in the future. Guess does have a couple of ways in which it distinguishes itself from the pack, however. One of those is its author, who is unquestionably far more interesting than his game could ever dream of being.
Origins & History
Walter J. Koetke is the author of Guess. I've played one of his other games for the blog already, Bull. Although, that's not technically his game - he just had his students convert the game, originally written by David Sweet, into BASIC. So, I suppose we could say that Guess is Walt Koetke's first actual game that he authored himself. I didn't give him much of a bio in the Bull article, so now's as good a time to do so as any.
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| Walter J. Koetke (1939 - 2013) |
Born in Chicago in 1939 (died 2013), Walter J. Koetke was actually quite a significant figure in the realm of computer-based education. He earned a Bachelor of Science from MIT, and did his Masters in Education at Harvard. We know that he worked as a teacher at Lexington High School in Massachusetts during the late 60s and through the 1970s thanks to the games he was involved in producing, such as Guess, but his contributions go much beyond that. We'll get to his work on integrating computers into mathematics education a bit later, so I'll instead turn my attention to his later work.
During the 1980s, he worked on a series of educational programs for the Microzine magazine, run by Scholastic. These magazines often came with a computer program that was basically a "choose your own adventure" styled educational game. Koetke worked on several of these, and also worked on a few other educational programs for Scholastic, such as Math Shop. For all this, he earned a Distinguished Teacher Award, from the Presidential Commission on Academic Scholars. Unfortunately, nobody on the internet bothered to mention when he earned this award. I even tried to do some digging myself, through the US Department of Education's online database, but to no avail. The "Distinguished Teacher Award" records go back to 2003, but they don't even have lists for all the years! All the ones I looked at didn't have Koetke's name in them, so either he's in one of the years that didn't have the list available (2005-08), or his award predates 2003.
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| The source for Guess. |
I digress. Back to the game. What's likely the most interesting thing about Guess is where it's been sourced from in Walter Koetke's body of work. 101 BASIC Computer Games cites the original source of the game being from a book, written by Koetke himself, entitled "Computers in the Classroom." Another of Koetke's important contributions, this book is intended as a resource manual for teachers in using computers to assist students in learning algebra. Keep in mind that this book was originally written in 1968-69. To say that computers weren't commonplace in the classroom at that time would be an understatement. The original form of Guess appears across pages 40 and 41 of that book, from which someone at DEC (possibly David Ahl; 101 BASIC Games doesn't say who) converted the game from FOCAL into BASIC. This all makes Guess another game rooted in Koetke's educational purposes, though not strictly an "edutainment" game itself, unlike his 1980s projects.
Guess the Game
As I noted at the start of the article, Guess is another one of these simple number guessing games that we've already seen several of up to this point in time. Number: A Number Guessing Game, Trap, Stars, and even Letter: A Letter Guessing Game are alternative takes on the format that I've already played. None of these games rate particularly high in my esteem. Guess is no different, hence my saying that the most interesting thing about it is the where and who it originates from. Although, it does distinguishes itself slightly above all of the above in one way none else do.
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| The numbers - what do they mean?? |
Guess allows the player to choose the range of numbers the computer can select from. The lowest will always be 1, but the upper limit can be whatever you like. This was not the case in Koetke's original program - that had a set range of 1 - 100. Someone added that in for 101 BASIC Games. Once again, we don't know who that was. The idea in Koetke's mind remains the same across both versions of the program, regardless. The premise of number guessing like this was built on binary search - how computers essentially think in bits that can either be a 0 or 1, each successive bit representing the next number in a sequence of numbers always increasing to the power of 2 (think of the 2048 sequence, to use a game analogy: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and so on and so forth.) The logic in number guessing is that you should be able to guess the number in one less digits than required to represent the number in binary notation. So, for example, a number like 73 would require 7 digits to represent in binary (100 1001, read from right-to-left.) Therefore, it should take you no more than 6 guesses to guess the number chosen from within that range. The game will actually tell you this if you take more guesses than expected to correctly guess the number.
If we talk about this in more game-like terms, the basic strategy that gets you to this "binary-1" number of guesses is what I call "splitting the difference." If the number range is from 1 to 100, split the difference and guess 50. If the number is higher, split the difference between 50 and 100 - 75. If lower than 50, split the difference between 1 and 50 - 25, and so on and so forth. Bigger numbers simply require more splits. Thinking about it in binary notation just helps in knowing how many guesses (and splits) you'll probably need. Like, a number between 63 and 32 is going to need about 5 guesses, whereas a number between 512 and 1,023 should expect 9 guesses.
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| I get a lot of enjoyment out of these cartoons - mostly for the sheer oddness of them. |
This is probably far more of a discussion than a game like Guess deserves, yet I'm here doing it anyway. I haven't even talked about my experience playing it yet! And, truthfully, that's because there's very little to report. I've played countless games just like this, so what new can I possibly say?
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| Pick a number. Any number. |
Well, I can at least comment on the one thing Guess does differently. Having a choice of the upper number limit is surprisingly refreshing. There's certainly a temptation to see how high the game will let me go with it, even if, in reality, it just boils down to the same thing, but with more steps, and therefore more mental maths to do.
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| 15 is 1111 in binary. |
The one thing that does annoy me, though, is that Guess doesn't let you change the upper limit during gameplay at all. It's a pick-and-stick game, the upper limit you set is the one you're stuck with until you close and reload the game. It's a minor annoyance, but minor annoyances become major annoyances when there's nothing else to talk about.
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| Something a bit more adventurous. 255 is 1111 1111 in binary. 5 guesses is a good round; 7 guesses is par. |
And, seeing that I now truly do have nothing else to talk about, let's do the scores.
Scores
Time Played: 11 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (Brain-dead)
I don't think I need to comment on the "challenge," or lack thereof, in a game like Guess.
Gameplay: 2
I'm giving this a 2 to distinguish it from the other "Number Wizard" games - purely because Guess lets you choose the upper limit of numbers the computer can select from. It's one more gameplay element than Letter has, and that, by default, makes it better and more interesting to play.
Controls: 5
It couldn't be simpler. Remember, I don't give extra points just for doing what should be expected.
Visual: 1
There's nothing noteworthy about the game's formatting to speak of; very standard.
Functionality: 5
Free points if the game works properly.
Accessibility: 4
It's very easy to understand a game like this, and it seems to be written in a way that's designed for younger children to understand and read. It's still text-based, which is a fundamentally inaccessible format for a video game, but Guess is probably as accessible as it gets.
Fun Factor: 1
I can at least replay Guess fairly easily, with the free choice of number limit giving opportunity to try larger and larger upper limits. It's fundamentally the same, but generates a bit more interest in my mind - compared to Letter, at least.
Overall: 18 (weighted to 22.5)
A score of 18 (weighted to 22.5) for Guess is, for what it's worth, not actually that bad. It's a E-tier game, sure, but that's the same score that Galaxy Game and Fur Trader got - which are far more complex (and more deeply flawed) games. That one, simple little act of allowing the player some customisation of the game rules has made a big difference. Relatively speaking, of course. This still ain't a good game, nor is it really worth your time.
I can't believe I've written over 1,500 words on a simple number guessing game. What madness am I succumbing to?
Anyway, this will be the last "new" game from the list for a while. I'm quite intent on finishing the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device project, and getting started with what I'm calling a "soft reboot" of the blog. I will be revisiting all former years, covering all of what I missed, and redoing the "Prehistory" series in more detail with better research and writing. As for the video side of things, I think it's inevitable that it will become asynchronous with the blog; the videos do take a lot more work now, and are predicated on my having finished the game's blog article so that I can write the script. So if you're a follower of both, take note of that moving forward.
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