Eimi d'ego therapôn men enualioio anaktos
kai museôn, eraton doron epistamenos

      -- Archilochus, 7c BC

Andrew Stern points out a Popular Science article about more DoD-funded military modeling of military and terrorist scenarios:

This is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to the Serious Games Summit at this year's GDC. I'm not too fatalistic (yet) about the military "taking over" all funded progress the games and interactive entertainment. However, all of us need to inject a modicum of self-irony into applications of game rhetoric (yes, I said rhetoric, not technology), not just as researchers or hobbyists but as world citizens.

For me, the issue boils down to a question of how the government makes game-based scenarios fungible as tools for international policy. To my great glee, the Popular Science article admitted that this is the main challenge for these simulations, despite an enormous $100 million budget.

Following Will Wright's comments (here and here, among others) about the role of imagination in sims, I have argued elsewhere that gaps and spaces in representation are the most important meaning-makers in games. Wright has his doubts that players -- command and control or policymakers -- can assemble useful conclusions from such specified models as "Virtual Pakistan":

But, isn't this what goes on in military strategy and foreign policy all the time? We never have enough information to fill in what's left out, so we use that gap as a space of debate. In the simulations cited in the article, this debate is primarily military strategy -- battlefield tactics. What remains to be seen is how public policy and citizen debate can weave itself into this space. Is it possible for such debate to take place inside the military sims themselves? I'd like to think that, given $100M large to spend, the DoD might be willing to spend at least a fraction of it on introducing human reflection into these systems, rather than relegating them to a hand-wave and a foodnote. Any takers, Washington?