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Apr 28, 2022Liked by Paul Musgrave

I wonder what kinds of games might have more positive effects. More in my research area I've seen some fairly accessible tools about making federal or defense budget trade offs that may reinforce core concepts (even a high political salience cut like base closure may take 5-10 years to really see the significant budget impact) and might effectively be a form of procedural rhetoric. That said, I think most traditional games are going to focus on the moment of crisis in a way that doesn't really let one think about the peacetime investments and evaluations of capability and reforms that could drive effective performance.

Wargames themselves do play around more with different starting conditions and again get to a procedural rhetoric aspect, but I think that's a bit farther afield from how do you engage the public in a way where we can actually inspire preparation / recruitment / actually funding something like the biotech project Apollo to make progress on vaccines. Might be interesting to have a game with starting phase where you choose 2 of 5 possible investments that you'll have had in place going in, sort of like a character build except at an agency level.

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