Business Games, Rationality and Control Logistics

This paper examines how business games emerged as instruments of control and rationality in the decades after World War II, arguing that their development reflects a broader shift in the logics of economic steering. The central thesis is that the decisive impulse for modern computing and control systems came less from military combat calculations than from banking, accounting, and corporate management, and that business games played a key role in transforming economic rationality from an external steering mechanism into an internalized managerial competence. The author frames this as a move from mechanical rationality toward a "ludical" rationality, in which play becomes an operational element in the production of knowledge.

The historical argument rests on the claim that wartime economies rendered market steering instruments inoperative, prompting economists, engineers, and mathematicians to develop Operations Research as a method for modeling supply chains and commodity flows. After the war, these techniques migrated into corporate management through consultants, who promoted both a vision of total rational steering and training methods for executives. Business games spread from the 1950s onward, first in the United States and Great Britain and later in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, where planned economies were seen as especially compatible with rational steering concepts. The paper situates this diffusion within a broader epistemological break toward axiomatic economic theory.

Among the most cited milestones is the 1956 Top Management Decision Simulator, developed by the American Management Association with the Naval War College and IBM, which is regarded as the earliest non-military computer-based game and an ancestor of later IBM and UCLA business games run on the IBM 650. The McKinsey-developed Business Management Game of 1958 is also identified as an important prototype.

The study is primarily a historical and theoretical reconstruction drawing on secondary literature in economic history, management education, and game studies, rather than an empirical study with survey data or a defined sample. Its sources include work by Tooze and Mirowski on wartime and postwar economics, Beninger on the control revolution, and historiographies of business teaching games, and it is presented as an initial exploration within a larger research project on business games as cultural techniques.