!["Disneyland is presented as imaginary in
order to make us believe that the rest is real,
whereas Los Angeles [is] no longer real, but
belongs to the hyperreal order and to the
order of simulation."
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation,
1994](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/simtheory-111026084046-phpapp01/85/Simtheory-3-320.jpg)
![Disneyland's Main Street […] is an extremely shrewd
commercial reality. [It is] presented as at once
absolutely realistic and absolutely fantastic […] The
houses of Disneyland are full-size on the ground
floor, and on a two-thirds scale on the floor above,
so they give the impression of being inhabitable
(and they are) but also of belonging to a fantastic
past that we can grasp with our imagination. The
Main Street facades are presented to us as toy
houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior
is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy
obsessively, believing that you are still playing.
Umberto Eco Travels in Hyper-reality](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/simtheory-111026084046-phpapp01/85/Simtheory-4-320.jpg)
![Unlike most of the stories we're used to hearing, a
simulation doesn't have characters or a plot in the
conventional sense. Instead, its primary narrative
agent is geography. Simulation games tell a story
few other media can: the drama of a map changing
over time […]
As a still frame is to a movie, as a paragraph is to a
novel, so is a map to a simulation game. Simulation
games are maps-in-time, dramas which teach us
how to think about structures of spatial
relationships
Ted FriedmanCivilization and Its Discontents: Simulation,
Subjectivity, and Space, http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/civ.htm](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/simtheory-111026084046-phpapp01/85/Simtheory-12-320.jpg)
![representation v. simulation
“watch someone who is unfamiliar with simulation
games playing The Sims for the first time. Building
houses and naming characters is straightforward
enough, but as the family goes about its daily
artificial life the tendency is to treat the characters
as if they were real people, or at least as fictional
characters who behave according to established
conventions of narrative, and try to intervene
accordingly. The game's dynamics are driven by
algorithms which rarely map directly onto any sense
of actual human behaviour or the expectations of
narrative cause and effect […]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/simtheory-111026084046-phpapp01/85/Simtheory-16-320.jpg)
![[..] so simulation in a digital game could be
analysed as productive of reality (a gameworld).
The Sims is representational on one level: its
images of houses, human figures, ornaments are
familiar from the universe of popular media
culture. But to play the game is to interact with a
profoundly different kind of environment to that of
a film or a television programme. The gameworld,
its dynamics, relationships and processes, is
mathematically structured and determined”.
Giddings & Kennedy 2006, Digital games as new media, in
Bryce & Rutter (eds) Understanding Digital Games,
London: Sage](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/simtheory-111026084046-phpapp01/85/Simtheory-17-320.jpg)
Simtheory
- 1. simulation
- 3. "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas Los Angeles [is] no longer real, but belongs to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation." Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation, 1994
- 4. Disneyland's Main Street […] is an extremely shrewd commercial reality. [It is] presented as at once absolutely realistic and absolutely fantastic […] The houses of Disneyland are full-size on the ground floor, and on a two-thirds scale on the floor above, so they give the impression of being inhabitable (and they are) but also of belonging to a fantastic past that we can grasp with our imagination. The Main Street facades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing. Umberto Eco Travels in Hyper-reality
- 5. “Baudrillard's analyses point to a significant reversal of the relation between representation and reality. Previously, the media were believed to mirror, reflect, or represent reality, whereas now the media are coming to constitute a (hyper)reality, a new media reality -- "more real than real" -- where "the real" is subordinate to representation leading to an ultimate dissolving of the real”. Douglas Kellner http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell26.htm
- 6. simulation: a copy without an original….
- 7. Baudrillard in The Matrix, but the virtual world of the film is not Baudrillard‟s hyperreality…
- 8. Animal Crossing: let’s go to the city
- 9. The suffix –oid means „like‟. E.g. an asteroid is an object that is like a star, an android is like a man, etc. „Oids‟ in Animal Crossing then are „like,‟ but not like anything in particular. They simulations, but simulations of nothing… a playful version of Baudrillard‟s key idea that simulacra are copies without an original. They are virtual, but they aren‟t fake, they exist, they are real
- 10. simulation versus representation “Simulation can now be used to model systems that were before way too complex to deal with. We now have a powerful alternative to representation and narrative to explain and understand our world. And simulation does not necessarily have to be a tool for education, but also for art and entertainment (as it happens with videogames). Unlike narrative, simulation offers a first hand experience of a dynamic system (and if the term "dynamic system" doesn’t sound very exciting to you, you can replace it with "family", "society", "person" or whatever is that you would like to simulate). Simulation is a great tool for understanding rules and relationships among them”. Gonzalo Frasca „Simulation 101‟ http://www.ludology.org/articles/sim1/simulation101.html
- 11. SimCity: copy or original? Model or world? Territory or map?
- 12. Unlike most of the stories we're used to hearing, a simulation doesn't have characters or a plot in the conventional sense. Instead, its primary narrative agent is geography. Simulation games tell a story few other media can: the drama of a map changing over time […] As a still frame is to a movie, as a paragraph is to a novel, so is a map to a simulation game. Simulation games are maps-in-time, dramas which teach us how to think about structures of spatial relationships Ted FriedmanCivilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and Space, http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/civ.htm
- 13. Advance Wars: the territory is the map
- 14. But what does Super Monkey Ball simulate?
- 16. representation v. simulation “watch someone who is unfamiliar with simulation games playing The Sims for the first time. Building houses and naming characters is straightforward enough, but as the family goes about its daily artificial life the tendency is to treat the characters as if they were real people, or at least as fictional characters who behave according to established conventions of narrative, and try to intervene accordingly. The game's dynamics are driven by algorithms which rarely map directly onto any sense of actual human behaviour or the expectations of narrative cause and effect […]
- 17. [..] so simulation in a digital game could be analysed as productive of reality (a gameworld). The Sims is representational on one level: its images of houses, human figures, ornaments are familiar from the universe of popular media culture. But to play the game is to interact with a profoundly different kind of environment to that of a film or a television programme. The gameworld, its dynamics, relationships and processes, is mathematically structured and determined”. Giddings & Kennedy 2006, Digital games as new media, in Bryce & Rutter (eds) Understanding Digital Games, London: Sage