RetroGaming

Wasn’t gaming basically aynonymous with gambling at that time though?

Yes, in large part, and certainly to the way that the introduction to a book of that era would have been presented to the censors; there would often be a wink and a nod, though: "what a horrible thing to be doing! Now, so you can be completely sure how not to get caught up up in it, here are the complete rules to every game we can think of." This book is almost entirely consumed with games that were most often used for gambling, though stakes can be set at any level and played for fun at any time.

I think gaming as a recreation without gambling didnt really come about until the 1940s - 1950s, right? Commonly, of course.

I'm sure there's an element of truth in that certain direct modern lineages of trends in non-gambling gaming are sort of post-WW2 phenomena, but overall I don't think that's fair. Even just in the narrow sense, Monopoly was released in 1935, and other American board games date back much farther, which at east one scholar referring to the 1880s to the 1920s as a "Golden Age" for board games in the US. Also, certain games, like chess, have always had cultural associations beyond gambling. Children's board games have also been common forever. Additionally, TTRPGs and Wargames trace back not to gambling, but to military planning and education.

EDIT: Also of important note, in 1638 the Puritans in the US state of Massachusetts (colonial at the time) enacted a law that made gambling illegal. It outlawed ownership of everything gaming related from dice to cards, and citizens were not allowed to even play in their own home.

True enough, but there's an important context that they banned all forms of "idleness," and gaming got wrapped up in that.

It absolutely was. This is more of a meme than a genuine reference to historical "gaming" as we mean the term today.

I think gaming as a recreation without gambling didnt really come about until the 1940s - 1950s, right? Commonly, of course.

Historically, games have always been about recreation. Gambling saw an opportunity and just fucked many games because, hey, quick money! Some games were made with the full intent of being for gambling, but those are beside the point.

Anyway, outside the places where the dumb English puritanism* took over, you can see games being culturally significant throughout history: Go in SEA and Mancala in Africa, for instance. When important people received important guests (like royalty receiving other royalty), one or two matches of a board game like chess were common. Interestingly, Age of Empires 2's intro cutscene, and Total War: Three Kingdoms' Cao Cao trailer, should give a proper idea of that. Playing games wasn't exclusive to the powerful, of course, but it goes to show that games were deemed important even by them.

I remember a saying that roughly translated into "kids play, adults play games" - which also gives an interesting insight into how the English language disregards any difference between the two types of play (and theatrical plays, for that matter). In portuguese, it's the difference between brincar (kid play) and jogar (play a game)

* English puritanism went full on "anything fun = devil", games being included there, whether they had gambling or not. To them any idle time should be used for praying, work or something work related.

The book also describes a precursor to billiards and lawn bowling, although yes, most of the book is card games.

Wasn't gaming basically synonymous with gambling

Try searching for jobs in "gaming" or reading the marketing churned out by gambling companies and you'll see that they're still trying to claim that they're synonymous!

That should be a "long s". From the wiki: The minuscule form ſ, called the long s, developed in the early medieval period, within the Visigothic and Carolingian hands, with predecessors in the half-uncial and cursive scripts of Late Antiquity. It remained standard in western writing throughout the medieval period and was adopted in early printing with movable types. It existed alongside minuscule "round" or "short" s, which were at the time only used at the end of words.

I thought maybe they were talking about ftarcraft

In the early days of Lemmy there was some dude who insisted on using the old s just to be different and quirky. It was so annoying.