Games have always had an economic dimension. Game sets had their own value, and sometimes they were values in themselves. But games became related directly to economy only from the end of the nineteenth century, and mainly in the twentieth. Starting from the game phenomenon Monopoly, a number of games introduced players to economic activities and economic systems, as for example capitalism. In the second half of the twentieth century, the so called “business simulation games” were used as training tools in industry, to introduce professionals to economic management. Apart from that, please do not forget the often disastrous phenomenon of gambling that is so often related to gaming.
Games and gaming as historical sources