End of an Era

Crawford's work that I'm most familiar with is a game called Balance of Power -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)

I played it as a cold war kid and was fascinated by it. Mid 80's, post War-Games, this game blew my mind. It simulated the world.

The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was not zero-sum. One side would win and one side would lose. There were (in this game) no win-win outcomes. But - and this is the key point - the value of each win or loss was unequally felt. For the US to back down in Indonesia was disappointing. To back down in West Germany was fatal.

Oh - and also the notion of graduated escalation & de-escalation. Playing the game well requried using escalation wisely. Sometimes you escalate (a bit) to see how they respond & judge the value of a conflict to your opponent. Sometimes you escalate (a lot) to signal to your opponent that a given conflict is very serious to you.

I don't know if I ever had _fun_ playing the game - but of the hundreds of games I played as a kid this one stuck with me.

All this with something like 64k of memory - brilliant!

> The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was not zero-sum. One side would win and one side would lose. There were (in this game) no win-win outcomes. But -and this is the key point - the value of each win or loss was unequally felt. For the US to back down in Indonesia was disappointing. To back down in West Germany was fatal.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it's not clear to me how this describes something obviously non-zero sum. Independent losses can have different values in a zero-sum hand game; what matters is whether each win is proportional to the corresponding loss. If the USSR winning in West Germany was only a small win, that would demonstrate it was non-zero sum due to the size of the loss there for the US, but I don't think the magnitude of the outcome in Indonesia would relate to that at all.