GAME, GAMING, GAMIFICATION
Games
As a matter of fact the game is still played in Iraq. The British Museum houses one of the two boards in its collections.4 Nonetheless, as mentioned above, we cannot assert that it is the oldest game ever. Another game that we can date approximately 2000 BC is the Chinese “Weiqi”, also called “Go” by Japanese people; it is a board game for two players who alternately place black and white stones on the vacant intersections of a grid of 19×19 rows. The goal of the game is to secure a larger portion of the board than the opponent. The game is very popular in East Asia. A conservative estimate places the number of Wei-qi players worldwide at approximately 27 million. Go reached the West through Japan, which is why it is commonly known internationally by its Japanese name. As of 2008, the International Go Federation has a total of 71 member countries. It has been claimed that across the world 1 person in every 222 plays Go.5 As it is easy to imagine, I could draft a very long list of millenary games which we have found exploring several histories of ancient population that
4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur
5
Fairbairn, John (2000), History of Go in Korea, 2007
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