Wracked by economic malaise and global insecurity, American voters in a near future are increasingly embittered and long for an escape.

Sensing an opportunity for a stunt, a jovial long-time television comedian named Chuck Branner decides to run for president, promising to fire all government employees and replace them with artificial intelligence.

The tagline for his “Singularity Pledge”: “The last job in government will be the president — and I will fire myself!”

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Buoyed by voter excitement about the potential for AI and their deep trepidation of his opponents, Branner takes an early lead in the polls — ultimately emerging victorious.

The one-time jokester now has a very serious task: executing his pledge to fire all federal workers within four years while breathing life back into the United States’s anemic economy and strengthening its national security in a rapidly changing world order.

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There is one area of economic optimism though: the AI innovation ecosystem. Five companies have started to gain attention as critical players across the commercial and defense sectors.

Even as the government attempts to shed its human workforce, the president must try to protect the country — or reap the disappointment of voters. Will Branner be the last man standing? Or will voters fire him before he can fire himself?

Scenario Goals

Riskgaming’s No Man’s Land places eight players into leadership roles at American AI companies, politics, and the defense sector. It simulates how exponential improvement in AI will radically change the ways in which America procures the key national security capabilities required by warfighters. In the process, it forces all players to balance challenging tradeoffs, including:

Research safety versus technology capability improvement
Emerging threats versus great power competition
Open source versus proprietary technologies
Security versus economic growth
Competition versus cooperation
Productivity versus employment
Long-term investment versus short-term business goals

Within a compact timeframe, all players will develop an intellectual framework of the tradeoffs required around AI as America seeks to secure its military and economic dominance in the twenty-first century.

Characters

Lucas or Layla Mayfield

CEO of Awesome.Ai

Mayfield sees themselves as the next social entrepreneur in the Zuckerberg fashion. Early betas of the product went viral within the Fortnite community and eventually, across all of Gen Z through TikTok. Awesome.ai's sudden popularity has drawn in a huge community of young developer hackers who want to play with the buzzy technology du jour. On one of the rare days Mayfield went to high school, though, they ran into a military recruiter. That got them thinking about the potential for Awesome.Ai in the defense context. Maybe a meme or two would be useful for Branner’s Singularity Pledge?

Alexander or Alexandra Williamson

CEO of BoldPrecision

Williamson’s connections in Silicon Valley alerted them to the rapid progress in AI over the last few years. They began to connect their experience at their former company Tesseract with the new paradigms emerging from the field, seeing an opportunity to take advantage of their extensive sales contacts to found a new startup and build a category leader in enterprise software. Williamson timed the market early, and has a first-mover advantage. The downside is that AI has developed rapidly, and BoldPrecision has been called “too early” by some industry analysts. Williamson isn’t used to failure, nor to being one-upped by ambitious teenagers. This is their world — and it’s time everyone comes to terms with that.

Michael or Michelle Davenport

CEO of Caliber

Davenport was light years ahead of others on the development and evolution around AI, and when the venture capital dollars started arriving, they were prepared to leap from a tenured sinecure at a prestigious university into building the most ambitious AI company the world has ever seen. Taking advantage of a dense and close network of former PhD advisees and colleagues, Davenport has built Caliber into a defining force in the AI space, known for its extraordinarily rigorous technical interviews and exceptional aggregation of engineering talent. It’s one thing to have the best talent — and quite another to build a profitable company in one of the world’s most competitive spaces.

Samuel or Samantha Hester

CEO of DarkLark

Hester grew up around the world, following their parents from embassy to embassy as the whims of the U.S. Foreign Service dictated. Passionate about the NSA's mission but struggling with the technology gap between Fort Meade and Silicon Valley, they left for the West Coast to find new solutions to long-standing defense challenges that had been unaddressed by legacy government contractors. Eventually, Hester found a group of co-founders to start DarkLark, a defense-first company focused on the government’s most daunting operational challenges. Hester has some of the best government sales experience, but AI development is expensive — and the money’s in the private sector.

Daniel or Danielle Gordon

CEO of EagerSource

A “white hat,” Gordon once discovered a flaw in a major banking website and wrote an email to the company’s information security team. Later that day, federal investigators arrived to interview Gordon as well as their parents, eventually pressing charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that were dismissed in court. The experience radicalized Gordon, who has since become one of the world’s top advocates for open-source and free software, passionately arguing that the increasing commercialization and privatization of software code has slowed human flourishing. Worried about the same pattern slowing the AI industry, Gordon founded EagerSource as a way to fund and strengthen open-source software.

Cameron Miller

Congressional Liaison

Now a giant on Capitol Hill, Miller is known for their long and eidetic memory, which contains the minutia of Congressional budget discussions and the interests of all 535 representatives and senators. While formally an advisor to a senior congressional leader, Miller now slashes their own path through Capitol Hill. That’s one reason they have become known as “The Machete” — the person who cuts through the impasses typical of DC legislative gridlock to protect the interests of their own boss and the institution as a whole against executive overreach. Miller sees an opportunity with Branner's election for finally restoring Congress to its rightful place as the people’s assembly, but can “The Machete” slash through virtual AI bots that can’t be seen?

Emery or Emily Abrams

Budget Director

When Branner was asking for campaign staff in the heady early days, Abrams was sent to the bootstrapping campaign team as an interim financial controller. The first check that Abrams approved bounced — its accounts only had $247, not enough to clear. Fast forward a few months though, and Abrams manages a much bigger budget: the U.S. Federal Budget, the largest in the world at $6.1 trillion. Abrams is deeply loyal to the goals of the “Singularity Pledge” and wants to help Branner secure his vision of a human-free government. It’s time to be a machine themselves — one that can overcome the resistance and bring the president's vision to fruition.

Owen or Olive Blackburn

Defense Official

For Blackburn, part of working in defense is that you never know what the hell is going to come your way. Sometimes it’s the threat of nuclear catastrophe, or a global pandemic that strips humanity to its most atavistic kernel. Then, there is the self-serving and ever-cycling species known as “politicians,” members of which have their own bizarre agendas completely alien to the basic idea of “domestic tranquility” (which, as far as Blackburn is concerned, only exists in a gin and tonic). Blackburn vowed to reasonably consider the administration’s proposals and fairly adjudicate its requests within the reality of the security context. Now, caught up in the AI craze, Blackburn realizes they need to balance the president’s popularity with the need to protect America from its threats.

Official Game Kit

Download all materials required to run this game

characters

scenes

180 mins

Difficulty:

Hard

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Game Scenario and Rules

Full scenario and rules booklet

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Score Calculator (Numbers)

Spreadsheet in Apple Numbers format to calculate game metrics and scores

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Score Calculator (Excel)

Spreadsheet in XLS format to calculate game metrics and scores

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Scenario Introduction

Print one copy of the scenario introduction for each player to give them an overview of the game

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Character Sheets

Print one full set and issue them at the beginning of the game

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Gardener Research

Print one copy per player to advise them on AI capabilities and future commercial revenues

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Decision Sheets

Print one full set of decision sheets for players to use in playing the game

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Security Briefs

Print one copy per player to give updates on each scene's three emerging threat attacks

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Newspapers (Optional)

An in-game newspaper that offers clues on each scene's emerging threat attacks

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Report on Riskgaming Results (Optional)

A high-level review of the main lessons of No Man's Land. Useful for post-game discussion

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Acknowledgements

This Riskgaming scenario was born out of a serendipitous conversation with Beth Kroman, a senior advisor to Mike Bloomberg, who at the time was the chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. She and Mike wanted to convene a unique group of distinguished flag officers, elected representatives, tech executives and policymakers to consider the strategic implications and future challenges for bringing next-generation AI technologies into the armed services. This scenario was designed with that group in mind, which formally convened in February 2024. I thank Mike and Beth for their warm embrace of this scenario. I also want to highlight Audrey Kotick’s industrious efforts to bring a very busy and globe-trotting group into one room, which made this game possible.

The production of the game would not have been possible without the thoughtful and eye-catching work of Mandee Johnson, who brought together a Los Angeles-based crew of creatives to design in-game newspapers, briefing materials and presentation templates that made the live play experience nonpareil. I also want to thank the comedian Jared Logan, who took on the ridiculous role of President Branner and fully embodied Banner’s desire to shrink government employment to zero with AI technologies. Little did any of us know that Elon Musk and DOGE would arrive a year later with that very same aim in mind, but hey, sometimes fiction becomes fact in Riskgaming.

The design of the game and its venture capital economy were informed by innumerable conversations with the Lux Capital team and startup founders in the industry. I want to thank them for their ideas, data and wisdom, which brought important realism to the experience.

Credits

Designer: Danny Crichton
Editor in Chief: Danny Crichton
Editor: Katie Salam
Front Cover Illustration: Barry Blankenship
Production Designer: Justin Barber
Website Designer: James Clements