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A video game usually mimics some real-life situation: rockets accelerating and moving in space, bouncing Ping-Pong balls, a kayak in river currents, the food-chain in an ecology. The game of Chess is an abstraction based on a battle between two small groups of warriors: similarly, video games imitate life. A video game is a simulation, a model, a metaphor.—Warren Robinett, Inventing the Adventure Game
Introducing Simulation
Games as the Play of Simulation is our third and final schema exploring the play of representation. In Games as the Play of Meaning, we examined how games become meaningful through the process of signification. In Games as Narrative Play, we unearthed the wealth of techniques by which games tell stories. For the purposes of this schema, we hone in tightly on the mechanics of play itself, and the way representations are constructed dynamically, through interaction with a game. How, for example, does the board game Diplomacy simulate the art of negotiation? How does the paper-based game Ace of Aces dynamically represent World War I air combat? How does the digital game Deus Ex depict action and intrigue through designed algorithms and rules? The concept of simulation lies at the intersection of representation and dynamic systems. As simulations, games create representations, but they do so in a very particular way: through the process of play itself. We look for answers to questions regarding games and simulations by focusing on the representational mechanics of game systems. A game creates representations in many ways, from its instruction manual text and imaginative fictive world to the visual design of its spaces and the audio design of its soundtrack. At the center of all of these depictions is the game system itself. This system generates representations from a player's interaction with the game, out of the experience and logic of play. This special class of representations, experienced as procedures, sets of behaviors, or forms of interaction, is the raw material from which simulations are constructed. We call this form of depiction procedural representation. A simulation-based approach to representation in games, it is the central concept of this schema. However, procedural representation is only part of what we study in this chapter. In addition to exploring the mechanisms of procedural representation, we also investigate the relationship of those representations to the world outside the game. We know something is a simulation, in part, because we are familiar with the thing that it is simulating. Diplomacy is a polit-ical simulation because it mimics processes of negotiation that are known and familiar in the real world. Yet even though Diplomacy faithfully models the art of negotiation, its representation is still in some measure artificial, contained within the game, separate from the real world. The relationship between a game and the "reality" that it depicts is a fundamental aspect of considering games as simulations. This is not our first mention of representation and "reality." Back in Games as the Play of Meaning we introduced the concept of the cognitive frame. A cognitive frame is a way of organizing or understanding the world, a framework that shapes interpretation and therefore what we take things to mean. Considering not only how a game simulates, but also what it simulates raises questions regarding the relationship between the artificial world of a game and the "real life" contexts it intersects. These questions will play an important role in our understanding of games as simulations, and will become increasingly important as we move into our primary schema on CULTURE.
