This is fun. Thanks to Peter Nguyen for calling it to my attention. The game, from the San Francisco Federal Reserve, has three variables: inflation, unemployment and short-term interest rates. You set rates on a regular basis. Newspaper headlines and graphs show what happens to inflation and unemployment as a result. There seems to be a heavily robotic Phillips Curve built into the program, but that's OK for amateurs like us. (Phillips' observation, that unemployment rises as inflation falls, doesn't follow the plot points as neatly as some might wish, and numerous other variables not included in the game can make the curve steeper or more gradual.)

In my stint as Fed chairman, I quickly got unemployment down to 1.5 percent -- an all-time low. Was the nation grateful? Did my name appear in headlines next to the word "maestro"? No. The president fired me, and I went back to my lucrative Goldman Sachs partnership in ignominy. Maybe the 17 percent inflation rate had something to do with it.