A Policy Game for Singapore

A Game from Silicon Valley

Please check out "Making Sense of the Games Politicians Play" in Bloomberg Businessweek, September3-9, 2012 issue, page-26-27.

Or this link or this link.

According to the Businessweek article, the computer game teaches the player about budgeting, trade-offs and compromise etc.

A Better Game to Come

We can design a better game, and we'll design it for free, too.

Here are lots of excellent programmers amongst Singapore's citizens, PRs, EPs etc. If even a handful of them feel any amount of love for this beautiful island, they will come and code the game.

Why this game is better:

1. dilemma vs problem, problem vs wicked problem, either/or trap, "doing both"
2. A quote I forget where I read first: "When given two bad options, good statesmen create better ones."
3. Feynman's famous quote form Wiki: "Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics." 
4. Trade-offs is a fact of life, a fact of physics. We cannot yet wilfully teleport ourselves to another planet or another parallel( or otherwise) universe where we get more than 24 hours a day, not yet. Still, we need to reduce (1) the frequency/number of times we play and (2) the duration of the time we play trade-off game.

Why not an option-generation game?

The kind of game young (Mr) Sim Wong Hoo played (a poly grad , they told him, had no right to design a new sound card) ...

The kind of game young (Mr) Lee Kuan Yew played (a third-world country, they believed, must become a second-world country before becoming a first-world country).