Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies © 2013 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. “I commenced an examination of a game called 'tit-tat-to'”: Charles Babbage and the “First” Computer Game Devin Monnens 3300 University Blvd Winter Park, FL 32792 303-506-5602 dmonnens@gmail.com ABSTRACT This paper examines Charles Babbage's tic-tac-toe automaton using original notes and sketches taken from Babbage's notebooks. While Babbage's work with games and computers has been mentioned previously by other authors, this is the first attempt to study that work in detail. The paper explains the origins of the automaton, imagines how it would have operated had it been built, describes how it might have functioned, and Babbage's inspirations for building it. The paper concludes with an analysis of Babbage's place in the history of videogames. Keywords Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Automata, Bagatelle, Chess, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon, Computer Chess, El Ajedrecista, John Joseph Merlin, Nim, Nimatron, Ralph Baer, The Turk, Tic-Tac-Toe, Torres y Quevedo, Wolfgang von Kempelen INTRODUCTION The origins of the computer game can be difficult to trace. Before early games such as Pong (1972), Spacewar! (1962), and Tennis for Two (1958), the history of games on computers becomes deeply entangled with experiments in computer chess, Goldsmith and Mann's 1947 patent for a “cathode ray tube amusement device”, and the Nim-playing computer by Westinghouse in 1939. Montfort (2005, p. 76) defines the first computer game as Leonardo Torres y Quevedo's chess-playing automaton (1914). While many of these inventions were not directly tied to the later development of the videogame industry, they stand out as anomalies in mankind's relationship with games and computers. One such anomaly was an invention of Charles Babbage, designer of the world's first computer. That invention was an automaton capable of playing tic-tac-toe. Babbage documented the tic-tac-toe automaton in his 1864 autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, describing the genesis of the idea, the automaton itself, and how it would work. Babbage originally pursued the problem from a philosophical perspective, asking whether he could build a machine capable of playing chess, checkers, or tic-tac-toe. After concluding that it was possible for an automaton to play any game of skill, he devised an algorithm by which it could win by analyzing every possible move for a guaranteed win condition. Furthermore, he considered the Analytical Engine