Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest known game board is the Senet game board inscribed for Amenhotep III, created between 1390 and 1353 BC. This glazed faience board is now housed in the Brooklyn Museum and measures 5.5 by 7.7 by 21 centimeters.
French sociologist Roger Caillois defined games as activities that must be fun, separate in time and place, uncertain in outcome, non-productive, governed by rules different from everyday life, and accompanied by an awareness of a fictitious reality in his 1961 book Les jeux et les hommes.
John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, proved that games with several players have a stable solution provided that coalitions between players are disallowed, a result known as the Nash equilibrium. This mathematical breakthrough extended von Neumann's theory of zero-sum games and provided a framework for analyzing multiplayer interactions in economics, politics, and conflict.
The first commercial video game was Pong, which was a simple simulation of table tennis. This game emerged as processing power increased to allow new genres such as adventure and action games to be developed that involved a player guiding a character from a third person perspective through a series of obstacles.
Chris Crawford argued that if no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy, and if it has goals, it is a challenge. He further distinguished between puzzles and conflicts, admitting that video games with algorithmic artificial intelligence can be played as puzzles, such as the patterns used to evade ghosts in Pac-Man.