1. Experience is a great teacher, strategy gaming gives your mind experience finding solutions and develops courage
   
2. Challenges, inherent in games, stimulates minds and hearts and encourage lateral thinking (thinking outside the box)
   
3. Pleasure and pain stimulate changes in behavior; games are often fun but sometimes hard on the ego and social standing (if applied properly both pleasure and pain can lead to improved performance)
   
4. Engaging the passions (thrill of victory, agony of defeat) stimulates self knowledge and thus the route to self improvement (if you lose don't lose the lesson). Games arouse deep feelings (both for good and for ill)
   
5. Games help you practice problem solving with others and listening skills (fostering better communication skills)
   
6. Games provide a safe forum to test new strategies, ideas, and methods (experimentation and adapting to new environments, new realities)
   
7. Games can expand social skills of leadership, fair play, following the rules, gracious in victory and humble in defeat, appreciate the motivations of others
   
8. Appreciate the consequences of actions and inactions, greater understanding of how rules influence human behavior. Games improve the habit of following directions.
   
9. Deal with the pressures of success and failure in a safe environment, games both causes stress (desire to win, fear of failure) and relieves stress (as one escapes to other times, other realms, new frontiers, etc.)
   
10. Create bonds with those with whom you game, a habit of analyzing problems together fosters camaraderie, sportsmanship and an esprit de corps. Thus games can be excellent for team-building.
    

Those who love freedom, justice and democracy should appreciate the fact that the more you sweat in peace the less you bleed in war. Likewise business leaders should understand that the harder the training for themselves and their staff the easier the work becomes. In short, no pain, no gain.

Aristotle said "All who have meditated on the Art of Governing mankind are convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth."

See also: http://jergames.blogspot.com/2008/01/do-games-matter.html