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"In any sufficiently sized government, it's going to be pretty easy to cherry-pick examples of programs that seem wasteful or unnecessary. So it's not too surprising that Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) is able to do just that each year with his headline-grabbing "Waste Book," listing 100 examples of extraneous spending in the US government. ... But when the Waste Book deals with federal grants for a number of video game-related projects, it seems to write them off without considering the important scientific and artistic goals the projects achieve. While Coburn appears to believe it's self-evident that anything related to games couldn't possibly be worthy of federal funding, talking to the people behind these projects shows taxpayer dollars are going to much more than mindless entertainment."

A UTA economics professor explains how companies like Electronic Arts lobbied for and benefit from federal government assistance.

"The high cost of launching resources from the Earth's surface is a significant barrier to future long- duration human space exploration. A future resource economy in space may allow resource production, processing, storage, and transportation at distributed locations, but will have many stakeholders with var- ied and potentially competing objectives. Simulation games provide a medium for communication and learning richer than papers or linear presentations by combining the technical capabilities of simulation models with human interaction. Building on technology powering military wargames, federated simulation architectures such as HLA-Evolved use independently-developed simulation models connected over a dis- tributed network of computers. This paper presents an approach for developing a multi-player simulation gaming environment where human players take on roles of organizations or government agencies within scenarios designed to address the design and operation of a resource economy in space. The game design addresses the number of players, time advancement, level of abstraction, scenario selection, and other de- cisions based on past simulation games in the domains of military-political, educational, disaster response, and business-management games. Future research will focus on evaluating game executions to analyze human decision-making under various scenarios. Quantitative analysis of decisions using game logs com- bined with qualitative analysis of interviews and surveys will contribute to strategies for a future resource economy in space."