Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Simulation Games: Fact or Fiction?

In Fiction, Juul discusses the fictional world: what comprises it, how its classified, how its interpreted, and more. His main argument is that "all fiction worlds are incomplete," and that " no fiction exists that completely specifies all aspects of a fictional world." Juul claims that "the reader must work in order to imagine a fictional world," and consequently "different readers and game players will imagine a fictional world differently." While this may be true, I have to wonder what Juul would say about Simulation games.

Some games use the "simulation" classification as a humor tactic. Surgeon Simulator, a popular hospital surgery simulation game, emulates open heart surgery with the player as the surgeon. The
player is given finicky controls and an unrealistic time limit, and is scored based on the amount of blood lost by the patient during the surgery, with of course the smallest amount of blood loss yielding the highest score. While Surgeon Simulator classifies itself as a simulation game, it does not simulate a realistic surgery. It, in fact, uses the concept of simulation to play off of its purposefully radical design, telling an unspoken joke about the complexities of surgery and the consequences of lay-men performing these surgeries.

These types of simulation games aside, I would be interested to hear Juul's commentary on the fiction Euro Truck Simulator 2, where the player sits in the driver seat of a large truck and is able to drive to an from a host of major cities in Europe. Euro Truck Simulator 2 attempts to provide an ultra realistic truck driving experience, and subsequently gives the player turn-for-turn accurate roads to interact with.
worlds created by the other type of Simulation game, the type that seeks to perfectly emulate the idea or concept that it is simulating. These games actively attempt to avoid creating fiction worlds, and much of their selling points involve the realism that they can provide. One example is the truck driving simulator

These types of games, including Euro Truck Simulator 2, could just be seen as games that create their own, intensely realistic, fiction worlds, but because Euro Truck Simulator 2 intends to offer as realistic an experience as possible and in no way seeks to provide fiction, it can also be argued that it does not create a fiction world at all and that it simply creates an incomplete representation or reference to the non-fiction world.

I imagine that Juul would agree with the first case, while many others might agree with the second case. There exist many simulation games that are used for job training, for education purposes, and more. If Juul were to agree with the first case, that even simulation games that intend to not provide fiction create fiction worlds, I would wonder what this would mean for games used for training that I just described, do these games also create fiction worlds? And if they do, is it enough to train in a fiction world for a performance in the real world?

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