Introduction
A Brief History and Variety of Games for Serious Purposes

Over the last 30 years, a special vocabulary has been coined. This refers to games or gaming activities designed or adapted to make organizations more competitive, take a different approach to work and make tasks less constraining or more motivating. The expressions used are very varied indeed, and among the most common are the following: serious games, game with a purpose, agile games, serious gaming, serious play and gamification. Their roots in society are currently very strong and multifaceted, which is why this book sets out to explore some of these various forms: examining them from the point of view of their originality and their contribution to innovation, as well as the added value they can bring to an organization, a user or a customer. In fact, this book offers a journey through the practices and designs of serious games which are hidden among the widespread serious video games designed for educational purposes.

So, if we think of play as the device that accommodates the game used to achieve a serious end, the oldest forms can only be found outside those linked to humanity. Indeed, animals play serious games, or at least have activities that can be likened to them (see Chapter 1). This is where the oldest forms of serious games can be found, and they can be dated back hundreds of thousands - even millions - of years.

That said, from the point of view of human history, based on current knowledge, play has been redirected, at least occasionally, for serious purposes since Antiquity. First and foremost, we have gambling and betting. Indeed, dice have been found in numerous archaeological excavations, the oldest of which was found in a tomb in Ur, Mesopotamia, which dates back to 4,500 BCE [BOT 08]. Similarly, it is hard not to think of competitions such as the Panhellenic Games, including the Olympic Games and the Pythian Games, which were not only dedicated to athletic competitions, but also to musical ones. These games dedicated to the gods were also a time of peace and reunion between members of enemy cities. Moreover, to stay within the Hellenistic world, the metaphor was employed very early on by philosophers such as Plato (e.g. in his allusion to games of the city by analogy with the political city) [BER 11]. Of course, military transpositions in the form of games have also come down to us. Among these are games such as Wei Hai (the Chinese forerunner of Go) and Chaturanga (the Indian forerunner of Chess). Other games have come down to us, such as the Egyptian Senet and the Greek Petteia, but it is difficult to attribute a serious use to them directly, even if the latter cannot be excluded from this reasoning. In a similar vein, we can also mention games such as Mancala or Wari, including Awalé, which can be used to teach mathematical calculation [NUM 23], as well as algorithmics, since, like the game of Go, it was not until the beginning of the 21st century that an artificial intelligence beat the best players. In this way, the use of games for pedagogical purposes is very old and manifold, since we have sources and relics of alphabetical letters, such as toy soldiers made of various materials (including ivory), which enable children to play and learn [DEG 95]. We also note, in the use of Mancala, for example, that this game was directly integrated into a funerary ritual, since it was, in this context, intended to entertain and amuse the spirit of the deceased before departure from the earthly world [GRU 77].

Over the centuries, the approach to pedagogy through play, or ludopedagogy, at least with children, gradually became more refined, until the 18th century, when several mature, dedicated forms such as games (card and board games, puzzles, etc.) could be identified, including those proposed by Pastor Jean-Frédéric Oberlin [THO 10]. The games proposed at the time already bore a strong resemblance to those used today for utilitarian purposes, including pedagogy. For example, the forms and uses of some of Oberlin's games are very similar to those of current edutainment games such as the geographic puzzle. This work on games for children's education continued throughout the 19th century, with notable contributions such as those of Friedrich Froebel and his educational games (construction games, ball games, ring games, etc.) [THE 02]. Parallel to this evolution, in the military field, a first notable turning point in the consideration of games for serious purposes, as forms designed precisely for these needs, took place between the 18th and 19th centuries, both in the fields of pedagogy and military reflection. Indeed, the first wargames (data-based war or battle simulation games) were developed, such as the naval combat system based on wooden sticks or warship figurines proposed in Great Britain by John Clerk [CLE 27] and the first Prussian Kriegsspiels or wargames on map, including those by Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig [HEL 80], Georg Venturini [VEN 98] and the von Reisswitz family [VON 12, VON 24]. Since then, their use in armies has become established; they have spread throughout the world and have endured to this day (see Chapter 9), including in their form as tabletop games [APP 20].

Similarly, while military wargames were gradually developing in Prussian general staffs up to 1870, and then in the other powers of the time, an acceleration of game proposals for educational purposes, but not only for children or the military, took place between the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century [PER 11], even if older forms probably preceded them. Business games and other simulations used for educational purposes concerning the management of a company also emerged [TOU 17], such as Vital Roux's simulated business operations [ROU 00], Adolf Galliker's business games [LOS 38] and Mary Mironova Birshtein's simulation games (designed to train industrial managers in the USSR) [GAG 87].

Even if its uses were numerous and still enduring, for more than a century, play used for serious purposes was limited to pedagogy or military reflection. For example, another form of play was experimented with in the early 20th century for medical purposes, such as the Therapeutic Theater proposed by sociologist and psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno [CHA 08]. This type of play was more or less at the origin of the first roleplaying for business activities [MIL 51], which are still used today. It can also be seen as a source of inspiration for the team-building or T-grouping activities that developed in the 1960s [HIG 02], and which are very much in evidence in current management practices.

Thus, even before the First World War, multiple forms of games for utilitarian purposes were already present in many areas of society. This phenomenon became more pronounced after the Second World War and the start of the Cold War, with the spread of corporate roleplaying games [KAU 60], including business wargames, inspired by wargames [ORI 08], complementing the corporate games already mentioned. These were wargames without maps, with the exception of dashboards. They emulated the principle of closed wargames (or three-table wargames). In these games, at least two teams competed without meeting each other, each in a different room, and communicated their decisions to a refereeing team which liaised with all the teams and informed them of the results obtained and other changes taking place during the course of the game.

With the emergence of computer science, a new, serious use of games appeared, aimed at testing and improving the calculation and reasoning capabilities of the first computer programs. Games such as Morpion (Tic-Tac-Toe), Nim, checkers and chess foreshadowed research that continues into the 21st century, involving a wider variety of games [ALV 12].

In 1970, Clark Abt [ABT 70] first used the expression "serious games" in a book of the same name and in the sense in which it is used today, except that the games he presented were not digital. In this respect, this decade saw the first successful sales of video game consoles and the first personal computers, which were accompanied by the first attempts to develop serious games. For example, the US Army continued to invest in games for serious purposes, and simulation orders were placed with video game designers such as Ralph Baer, who developed an anti-tank fire training system for this client [WYC 11]. This type of military investment continued and was refined on the basis of real data over the following decades [VAN 13]. Naturally, it was accompanied by the development of serious civilian video games, including numerous educational games, and complemented by attempts at advergames such as Atari's Tooth Protectors (a kind of adaptation of the Space Invaders game, in which teeth have to be protected from food attacks), developed in response to a request from the pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson [BOG 07]. This type of game inspired the creation of persuasive games in the 2000s, which are games whose main objective is to convey a message and influence their players in order to raise awareness or convince them to change their beliefs or behavior in relation to a given situation [BOG 07]. In the same vein, we can mention expressive games, which are true roleplaying games,...