Lecture with Adam.

To begin this session with Adam, we read a piece of text written by Gonzalo Frasca, which explained his perception of the difference between simulation and representation. Frasca suggested that you could have a simulation and representation of a city and the difference between them would be that you could interact with the simulated city, but not the representation.

The representation could be a drawing, or a painting and it did not need to be recognisable as a specific city, but it should be clear that it is one. The simulation could be a game that depicts a city that can also be interacted with whether that be by moving around it or making changes to it.

What I think of this: ...

The definition of a simulation is – an imitation of a situation or a process. It could be the action of pretending or a computer model of something, especially for the process of studying.

Simulation as a game genre – generally designed to closely simulate real world activities. It attempts to copies aspects of real life in the form of a game for purposes such as training, analysis, prediction or simply entertainment.

The difference between a narrative and a simulation: A simulation made for entertainment would usually provide player control, interactivity, spatial exploration, present tense and “real time”. Simulation games teach us how to think about structures of spatial relationships. A narrative does not provide opportunity of interaction with the player. The plot has authorial control, there is character depth, is in past-tense and is able to be edited.

I feel as though a simulation can have a layer of narrative past imitation of real-life, but it would usually be developed by the player. There are not complex characters or plot in the conventional sense, but the player could develop their own narrative by how they play the game and choose to interact.

This leads to the questions: can simulation games even have narrative? How do you prevent a game from becoming an interactive movie, by losing the element of gamification? How can narrative focused games still have re-playability?

Question: is Tetris a simulation? Is it representing something? Is it imitating a situation or process?

My answer: