Learning through play: why simulations and AI are transforming management training

In the book *Gaming and Learning: Play, Game and Knowledge*, Andrea Pontiggia and Tiziano Vescovi explain why video games and simulations can serve as laboratories for practising decision-making, dealing with mistakes and managing uncertainty. With artificial intelligence, the leap could be even more radical.

For years, we have referred to the idea of incorporating points, badges and leaderboards into university courses and corporate training as ‘gamification’. Alongside this, for years the market has, with mixed success, been experimenting with ‘serious games’ – video games which, rather than offering an escape from reality, use gameplay, simulation and the power of code to help you understand the complexity of the real world: you learn by playing, by making mistakes in a safe environment and by discovering that the rules of the game are, ultimately, the rules of our society. Kerbal Space Programme falls into this category, and is probably the best lesson in aerospace engineering ever disguised as an interactive simulation. In KSP, you don’t just ‘play’ at being an astronaut; you run a space agency from scratch, populated by funny little green men. The point, however, isn’t the cartoonish design, but the code under the bonnet. You assemble your launch vehicle module by module — liquid-propellant engines, stages, heat shields, aerodynamics — and then try to launch it. In 2003, Gonzalo Frasca invented the ‘newsgame’ with *September 12th*: the video game that becomes an editorial piece. ‘You can neither win nor lose,’ the intro warns.

How does it work? The crosshairs are trained on a square: you fire missiles to hit the terrorists, but you also wipe out civilians. The survivors mourn the victims and, in their anger, take up arms themselves. The more you shoot, the more enemies you create. It takes just two minutes of gameplay to get the message: the war on terror is self-perpetuating, and the only rational move to avoid collateral damage is not to pull that trigger. *September 12th* has remained the benchmark for anyone studying game design applied to information: the empirical demonstration that when game mechanics embrace the complexity of reality, the video game ceases to be a toy and becomes an extraordinary tool for critical thinking. And today, the events in Gaza make this more relevant than ever.

The games analysed in the book represent a new category of video games designed for educational purposes.

The point, as Andrea Pontiggia and Tiziano Vescovi argue in *Gaming and Learning: Play, Game and Knowledge* (Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2026), is far more interesting. Play can function as a machine for producing knowledge. Not because it explains a theory better, but because it forces players to make decisions, observe consequences and adjust their strategies.