There is evidence of games being used for business trade, future prediction, and military strategy for at least 5,000 years. In this tutorial we explore the history of games as tools of military strategy, planning, and training from 3,000BC to the present. We reveal the long evolution of the basic components that are necessary to create a complex game. Concepts that first emerged in India and Asia at the end of the last millennia are still embedded in the games that we create today. Finally we explore how the evolution of serious games shows a trajectory for where games in modelling and simulation are headed, including digital twins, global mobile connectivity, virtual and augmented reality, the rise of generalizable artificial intelligence, automatic content generation, and the metaverse.
The tutorial has four major sections:
(1) Ancient games from 3,000BC to 500AD, with a focus on the essential mechanics and the emergence of game pieces and rules.
(2) Modern game design and early computer implementations from 500AD to 1980AD, in which the mathematics of wargames emerged and offered a format that was amenable to programming in the earliest analog computers of the 1940s through 1980s workstations.
(3) Serious games and the recent embrace of the technology by military leaders at all levels from 1980 to the present. In these last forty years computer-based games have been transformed from crude experiments with the technology to a major workhorse for training in all domains and at all echelons.
(4) Finally, we speculate on the possible future impacts of the metaverse, digital twins, AI, and global mobile connectivity.