A few months ago, I launched a workshop series for library staff called Serious Gaming. The premise is simple: sometimes the best way to learn something is to experience it rather than hear about it.

That idea isn’t particularly new. If you’ve spent any time in the training world, you’ve probably come across conversations about gamification, game-based learning, or learning through play. Karl Kapp has been writing and speaking about these concepts for years. Educators have embraced approaches like Teach Like a Pirate, encouraging instructors to create engaging and memorable learning experiences rather than relying solely on lectures and slides.

Because of all that, I had quietly assumed that using games in adult learning was a relatively modern concept.

Then I stumbled across something that made me rethink that assumption.

Someone working with the American Library Association archives shared a social media post featuring a library budget game that had been used with graduate library science students back in the 1970s. At first, I thought it was simply a fascinating piece of library history. But the more I thought about it, the more it nagged at me.

Why was I surprised?

The strange thing is that I probably shouldn’t have been.

During my own postgraduate studies, I encountered simulation-based learning multiple times. Systems thinking practitioners have long used simulations such as the Beer Game and the Anti-Company Game to help learners understand feedback loops, unintended consequences, and the complexity of organizational systems. Even as a student in the 1980s, I remember playing a lemonade stand game in a tutoring center to help with math skills (this is also where I learned to play Blackjack…the 80s was the Wild West of education!). The idea of learning through a game wasn’t completely foreign to me.

Yet somehow, I had come to think of games and play as something relatively new in adult learning.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that games never really disappeared. Instead, they became concentrated within certain disciplines. Military training continued to use simulations. Business schools continued to use management games. Systems thinkers continued to use experiential exercises. Medical education relied on simulations. But in many workplaces and higher education settings, learning became increasingly associated with lectures, presentations, and information delivery.

Part of this may have been a shift toward efficiency. It is easier to put fifty people in a room and show a PowerPoint than it is to facilitate a simulation. Part of it may have been cultural. Somewhere along the way, many of us began to associate play with children and seriousness with sitting quietly and listening.

What is interesting is that many of the ideas currently being discussed under labels such as gamification, game-based learning, and serious gaming are not entirely new. In some ways, they represent a return to approaches that educators were already experimenting with decades ago.

The more I dug into the history, the more examples I found.

Military organizations have used war games for centuries to teach strategy and decision-making. By the 1950s, business schools and management programs were using simulations that placed learners in the role of executives making decisions for fictional companies. Participants would adjust prices, allocate resources, respond to market conditions, and experience the consequences of their choices. Sound familiar? It’s not all that different from modern business simulations.

By the 1960s and 1970s, management games had become common enough that researchers were studying their effectiveness. Universities used them to teach leadership, economics, and organizational behavior. The games weren’t digital. Most were paper-based exercises, facilitated discussions, or tabletop simulations.

Libraries were experimenting too.

The budget game I discovered wasn’t an isolated example. Libraries have a long history of using playful approaches for learning and community engagement. Looking through historical records, you can find examples of libraries using puzzles, contests, simulations, and structured games as educational tools. The idea that learning and play belong together is far older than many of us realize.

What strikes me about that 1970s library budget game is how relevant it still feels today.

Library budgets involve trade-offs. You cannot buy every book. You cannot fund every project. Every decision affects something else (Hello systems thinking!). A budget game allows participants to wrestle with those realities in a safe environment where mistakes become lessons instead of disasters.

And that, I think, gets to the heart of why games work.

A lecture can tell you that decisions have consequences.

A game allows you to experience those consequences.

A presentation can explain how systems are interconnected.

A simulation allows you to feel those connections as one decision creates unexpected ripple effects elsewhere.

A trainer can describe the challenges of leadership.

A role-playing exercise can place you directly in the middle of those challenges.

The learning isn’t happening because the activity is fun. The learning is happening because the activity creates an experience.

Perhaps that’s the distinction we’ve lost over the years. Modern discussions often focus on making learning more game-like. Many of those earlier simulations weren’t designed to be entertaining. They were designed to be experiential. The goal wasn’t to make learning fun. The goal was to make learning real.

That realization has changed how I think about my own Serious Gaming workshops.

When participants “destroy” a library in order to understand systems thinking, or work through a challenge that requires collaboration and problem-solving, the game itself isn’t the objective. The game is simply a vehicle for creating an experience. It gives people a chance to experiment, fail safely, test assumptions, and discover insights for themselves.

In many ways, that’s exactly what those educators, librarians, and trainers were doing decades ago.

The library budget game from the 1970s reminded me that innovation is sometimes less about inventing something new and more about rediscovering ideas that worked all along.

Play is not the opposite of serious learning.

Sometimes it is the reason serious learning happens.

What about you? Do you remember playing games or simulations as part of school, workplace training, or professional development? I’d love to hear about them in the comments. Sometimes the best ideas for the future are hiding in the past.