Episode 64: Playing for Real: Serious Gaming for Preparedness and Decision-Making
It’s Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, and Practical Significance is celebrating with a special guest. Hosts Donna LaLonde and Ron Wasserstein welcome Francesca de Rosa, cognitive engineer and founder of FDR Strategies, to explore the growing field of serious gaming, where statistics, probability, modeling, and data-informed design come together to help people make better decisions when it really matters. What better way to mark MSAM?
de Rosa shares her unconventional path from civil and environmental engineering to artificial intelligence and game science, highlighting how her early work with NATO revealed the power of simulation-based games to generate rich behavioral data. What started as serious doubt about the value of games evolved into a career focused on using games to study how people think, act, and make decisions in uncertain environments.
Throughout the episode, de Rosa underscores the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, strong statistical and analytical skills, and the ability to translate data into meaningful real-world insights—especially fitting for a month that celebrates the impact of mathematics and statistics on society.
And you won’t want to miss Ron’s traditional top 10. This month, he counts down the “Top Ten Classic Novels—Statistician’s Version.” Listen in!