The present and future of wargaming

Riskgaming is part of the broader movement known as wargaming, playful experiences designed to improve decision-making across domains like defense planning, business leadership and competitive analysis. It’s a burgeoning field, and it has now attracted its very own publication in the form of the Substack newsletter Wargaming Weekly. This week, I talk with the editor Rwizi Rweizooba Ainomugisha. He’s a wargaming fanatic based in Uganda, where he first started learning the gaming world in high school by building an underground casino. He then discovered gamification while working in B2B marketing before eventually entering the wargaming world as a player and now as a designer of two micro-games. He’s also a co-founder of the gamified fintech startup, Lupiiya Books. We talk about Rwizi’s background, how gamification is infiltrating all kinds of different fields, the rise of wargaming and the artificial delineations that still plague the field, the ebb and flow of strategic thinking, and finally, why solitaire games offer a unique on-ramp into this world.