Josh Shen is the gaming diplomat at the State Department.
Josh Shen is the gaming diplomat at the State Department.
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The DeanBeat: The State Department’s gaming man wants more citizen diplomats

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 6 min

Josh Shen is one of the only people in the federal government whose job has a lot to do with video games. He’s a foreign service officer in the State Department, and he surfaced this week as a speaker at the Games for Change online event about games that make a social impact in our lives.

You can think of him as a friend of the gaming industry in Washington, D.C.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.