Let me also link a post from one of our collaborators explaining how, for most countries, the dichotomy between saving lives and economy was somewhat false and relative to the real outcomes it was possible to improve both: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
A lot of the discussion on this forum center around the question what was the optimal policy and how well the game simulated that policy. In particular, there is a lot of discussion around the two "extreme" approaches: "zero covid" and "no interventions". That is fine, we had these discussions many times and we can explain how these approaches are represented in the game (in my opinion, not too unrealistically) but, at the same time, it somewhat misses the point. The game was about building intuition about simple epidemiological SEIR model close to the regime where the real country was operating - and for political reasons it was very unlikely that the country will radically change the course.
Lot of the game design decisions were some compromise between different goals of the game. Let me give an example: the team of authors of the game strongly believes that expanding contract tracing would a good thing. We were considering adding it to the game. However, what would be a point of adding that option to the game? It would further clutter UI (we had mobile users on mind). It would not add anything to the game because the decision to expand tracing would have no significant downside. And last it would hardly add anything to the public debate, it would just communicate that the authors of the game like contact tracing. There were already zillion of well argued opinion pieces on the topic. In fact, failures of contact tracing were more about failures of the specific agency than any conscious decision on the decision maker side. In short, tacking this issue in the game would quickly move from mathematical modeling into much more murky waters of public service efficiency.
You should also keep in mind that the game was just a small piece in a bigger mosaic of truly incredible efforts of many other volunteers. E.g. "Interdisplinary group for epidemic situations" https://www.meses.cz/. The game was never intended to provide comprehensive picture or recommendations.
I am guessing that the renewed interest in our game is coming from the recent post at Astral Codex Ten: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness... It is well worth reading that post.
Let me also link a post from one of our collaborators explaining how, for most countries, the dichotomy between saving lives and economy was somewhat false and relative to the real outcomes it was possible to improve both: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
A lot of the discussion on this forum center around the question what was the optimal policy and how well the game simulated that policy. In particular, there is a lot of discussion around the two "extreme" approaches: "zero covid" and "no interventions". That is fine, we had these discussions many times and we can explain how these approaches are represented in the game (in my opinion, not too unrealistically) but, at the same time, it somewhat misses the point. The game was about building intuition about simple epidemiological SEIR model close to the regime where the real country was operating - and for political reasons it was very unlikely that the country will radically change the course.
Lot of the game design decisions were some compromise between different goals of the game. Let me give an example: the team of authors of the game strongly believes that expanding contract tracing would a good thing. We were considering adding it to the game. However, what would be a point of adding that option to the game? It would further clutter UI (we had mobile users on mind). It would not add anything to the game because the decision to expand tracing would have no significant downside. And last it would hardly add anything to the public debate, it would just communicate that the authors of the game like contact tracing. There were already zillion of well argued opinion pieces on the topic. In fact, failures of contact tracing were more about failures of the specific agency than any conscious decision on the decision maker side. In short, tacking this issue in the game would quickly move from mathematical modeling into much more murky waters of public service efficiency.
You should also keep in mind that the game was just a small piece in a bigger mosaic of truly incredible efforts of many other volunteers. E.g. "Interdisplinary group for epidemic situations" https://www.meses.cz/. The game was never intended to provide comprehensive picture or recommendations.