Game designers need to know something about how companies are organised and run, but this is boring. I therefore created a game that outlined the basic principles at an introductory level. It's called Game Game Game, and is played by students working in pairs (you can have larger groups but the game will take longer to play because they'll spend too long discussing what to do).
It's not a digital game. It takes place over the course of eight rounds, and students are given handouts at the start of most of them. There are some slides to present, which introduce what happens before each round and give players instructions on what to do next.
The narrative is that you've just been appointed as producer of a company called Game Game Game that will be building an MMORPG. You choose your leads, then how many staff to give them, then events happen as development proceeds. These are dependent on your choice of leads and your earlier responses to events. On the whole, the decisions that look important are important and the ones that don't aren't, but sometimes it's the other way round. Some bad events are the results of students' bad choices; some are the results of their good choices. There are also unforeseeable events that mean students who don't win don't feel too bad about it.
Game Game Game is rather dated now, so many of the numbers involved are too low (salaries, development times). I did have a student whose final-year-project was to make a general tool for creating these games (I have a second one that isn't as crisp as this one), but he didn't get very far. Still, the game continued to serve its original purpose. Well, it did until I stopped lecturing: now, it serves no purpose at all.
Here's one of the handouts:
I printed these particular ones out and laminated them, then cut them up so that students could more easily decide which one(s) they wanted to employ, and so I could re-use them from year to year. The non-people handouts were put for recycling once used.
Anyway, I've put it online so anyone who's interested in what I used to subject my students to can take a look. Feel free to adapt it or its concept to your own needs if you like. You can download the 9MB .zip file from https://mud.co.uk/richard/gamegamegame.zip.
The winning pair were given a box of chocs to share as a prize.