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Meaningful Play and Simulation
How does framing a game as a simulation assist in designing meaningful play? In considering the play of simulation, we are simply re-working fundamental game design concepts established in previous chapters. Although the emphasis here is on how games create representations, fundamental principles of the design of meaningful play remain the same. Whether a simulation allows players to experience the representation of something known and familiar or fantastically imaginative, it does so through the design of meaningful play. In order to see this principle at work, we can take a close look at Ace of Aces, a game designed by history teacher Alfred Leonardi in 1980. Ace of Aces simulates a dogfight between two World War I aircraft, using a complex formal system to represent the speed, maneuverability, visibility, weapons fire, and other aspects of two-plane air combat. The striking thing about Ace of Aces is that the game takes place not on a computer or even on a paper wargame map, but instead inside two paperback game books. Each player has his own book, and each of the more than 200 pages has an illustration of what the player sees from his or her airplane cockpit. The point-of-view illustration shows the enemy plane at a certain distance, location, and angle relative to the player's own plane. For example, if an illustration shows your opponent's plane coming towards you over your own tail, it means the other player is directly behind you!
Players interact within the simulation by navigating through their book (players cannot look into each other's books) and selecting maneuvers. At the bottom of each page is a list of the possible maneuvers a player can take, with a number assigned to each. Both players select a maneuver in secret and call out the corresponding number, which determines the next page each player turns to in their book. The elegant formal system of the game is amazingly effective at simulating a dogfight between two World War I airplanes.
Does this seem hard to believe? Consider the scenario we describe: your opponent positioned directly on your tail. You choose a maneuver to slow down and perform a weaving turn to the right, in which you shift your position to the side, ending up parallel to your previous position—something like a car changing lanes. Let's say your tailing opponent thought you were going to make a run for it and made a decision to move forward at top speed—this choice would cause your oppo-nent's plane to zoom right by your decelerating plane. When you turn to the appropriate page in your book and see the outcome of last round's maneuvers, the illustration would show your opponent's plane ahead of you and to the left; and in your opponent's book your plane would be visible behind and to the right.
Your book
Through the use of a clever spatial model, Ace of Aces simulates aspects of World War I air combat. It does not simulate every facet of the experience (there are no rules to handle different kinds of weather and their effect on flying, for example), but it does represent important aspects of its referent. Spatial logic, tactical maneuvers, weapon jams, and even an increase in skill over several combats are all aspects of World War I air combat the game depicts. Furthermore, these representations are made possible through a dynamic system—a process based on a multifaceted mathematical model of air combat. It is through this process that Ace of Aces simulates a World War I dogfight. Ace of Aces constructs this simulation by combining emergent and embedded elements. The drawings and pages themselves are fixed in print, and do not change as the game is played. In this sense, the book pages might be considered embedded narrative elements, pre-scripted narrative descriptors experienced by the player during play. However, the complexity of the underlying game rules incorporates these pages as elements within a truly emergent system. The Ace of Aces book pages are less like the pages of a Choose-Your-Own Adventure book and more like video frames from a real-time simulation display, snapshots of an ongoing battle. In creating a simulation, both emergent and embedded elements can be incorporated into the overall game. However, because of the way that simulations rely on dynamic systems, framing a game as a simulation tends to emphasize the emergent components of the game, the more purely systemic elements that interact in complex ways to generate unexpected results.
Ace of Aces not only provides a rich and coherent simulation of air-to-air combat, but also facilitates meaningful play. Because the pages of the two books contain all of the possible spatial relationships between planes (made possible by a set of rules), the players are literally navigating through the game's space of possibility, experimenting with maneuvers, taking daring risks, and psyching each other out. Each decision they make is both discernable and integrated into the larger game experience, an experience made possible by the simulation. The representational mechanics of the simulation solidly support player decisions, establishing a taut and meaningful domain of interaction. The simulation creates a space of play that exists somewhere between the two printed books, the social interaction of the players, and the battle playing itself out in their overlapping imaginations.
Your opponent's book
Ace of Aces is a fascinating example of a game simulation, not just because it provides meaningful play, but because it does so through such unexpected means. Since the game was first published, real-time flying simulations on computers have become commonplace, used both for training and entertainment purposes. But Ace of Aces manages to engage players without illusionistic 3D graphics and sophisticated force-feed-back pilot controls. Playing Ace of Aces is radically different than flying a plane, yet it somehow still manages to function as a successful simulation. Simulations do not need to literally embody the material and sensual forms of the phenomena they are simulating. This is what Robinett means when he calls a game "a simulation, a model, a metaphor." As representations, simulations often represent metaphorically, meaning they can create representations in non-literal ways. Sometimes, game simulations try and replicate the actual experience of the thing they are simulating, as with VR displays that take over a player's entire field of vision. More often, however, simulations take on modes of representation that are not so literal. There is an underlying mathematical model that connects Ace of Aces to planes moving through space. But the activity of playing the game—turning pages and calling out numbers—is nothing like sitting in an actual cockpit. In fact, this metaphorical difference between the core mechanic of Ace of Aces and its simulated referent is one source of the game's pleasure.
