Games Do Not Model/Simulate, but are a Business

This is how the world appears to game design: There are dependent and independent variables. Designers, through trial and error, will work out which are which. They will choose cultural, business and technical options that maximize long term advantages. If it doesn’t work out, they will do it over. Time is essentially of a piece. It is homogenous, but it can be divided into equivalent units, just like space. Civilization III models not so much ‘civilization’, as the game design business...

 Immersion in the Simulation Makes it Hard to Question It

Individuals become immersed in the beauty and coherency of simulation; indeed simulations are built to capture us in exactly this way. A thirteen- year- old caught up in SimCity, a game which asks its users to play the role of urban developers, told me that among her "Top Ten Rules of Sim" was rule number 6: "Raising taxes leads to riots." And she thought that this was not only a rule of the game but a rule in life.3 What may charm in this story becomes troubling when professionals lose thems...

 Agency in Reading VS Gaming

Comparing computer play with reading fiction reveals much about thes^se shortcomings. Reading stimulates the mental recreation of settingg, characterers, a and acactiojons in viLxal, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, and other sensory images. One "sees" the pirate h the scar slashing across his cheek. One "hears" the sail flapping in the wind. One "feels" the swell of the waves on ship deck. Perhaps one also "smells" the salt air. nd so on. The reader pulls all these sensory images together i...

 Gamification Set Collection

I recently codeveloped a game with a colleague who teaches a course in global studies to advanced high school students. We called the game Global Shuffle, and it was meant to simulate two realities of the 21st century global marketplace. First, the developed world creates certain kinds of resources, and the developing world creates different resources. Though this is true, these resources relate to each other and have a reflexive quality; resources that are available or made in the developed ...

 The Difference Between Pretend and Simulation

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is...