Do you suffer from “simulation fever”?

I have been slowly and purposefully plodding my way through Unit Operations: an Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost.  It was published in 2006, which means I’m a bit behind the times for a scholar.  But, in my defense, Bogost’s other book, Persuasive Games, has received more attention.

Unit Operations melds together a wide ranging set of technical concepts in mathematics and industrial design (the origins of the term “unit operation”) with a number of cultural/interpretive theories in the humanities.  His idea is to posit a way in which videogames can be approached critically without overtly privileging one form scholarly discourse over another (a debatable project on a number of levels).

But, in his discussion, he identifies something he calls “simulation fever”, derived from a Derridean concept known as “archive fever”:

Writing about authority and origin in writing in general, Derrida has argued that archivization, in written and other forms, always implies inclusion and exclusion, the preservation of something to remember, and the omission of something to forget. … Archive fever is the simultaneous drive toward and fear of archivization.  (p. 108).

Postmodernism in general has made a lot of hay from the fact that any record is necessarily a biased one, even if its intentions are otherwise.  Any form of human expression emanates from a perspective partitioned off from others in some way, and it reflects the particular epistemologies and ideologies of that perspective.  Just as often, many forms of expression are manifested especially for the purposes of promoting a perspective.  In this context, an “archive” becomes the record that achieves this kind of partitioning while simultaneously pointing to the fact that such a partitioning occurred.

Hence, you get the projects of many scholars over the last 40 years or so to “recover” those voices lost in the generally accepted narratives that define different groups of people, geographies, or nations.  This has been, essentially, the project of feminism and civil rights.

But, back to Bogost.  He uses this framework to suggest “simulation fever” is “the nervous discomfort caused by the interaction of the game’s unit-operational representations of a segment of the real world and the player’s subjective understanding of that representation” (p. 136).  To put it more simply, players who pay attention may notice some kind of “gap” that exists between the rules that define a gamespace and the ways players expect that space to behave based on their experiences.

An obvious example would be playing some kind of war game, visually modeled on WWII, in which all the weapons shot flowers at their targets.  Instead of raining hell, death, and damnation upon the enemy a la Killzone, you plant their garden for them by shooting plants into the ground.  Think of Halo meets Animal Crossing.

A better, maybe more sophisticated example, are games that model complex systems with very simple actions.  For instance, clicking one button on a screen can tell a character to go to the bathroom, remove their pants, sit down on the toilet, use the toilet, flush, stand up, pull their pants back on, go to the sink, turn on the faucet, wash their hands, turn off the water, and dry their hands.  Watching my wife play The Sims 3 over the last couple of days, that’s what she’s doing.

What matters, though, is the experience that is being created here.  You may notice the new header image at the top of the blog.  It’s part of a visual that created in the spring to describe an instance of cognitive dissonance sometimes found in gamers’ experiences with a “serious game” called The Arcade Wire: Airport Security.  Here is the full image:

The graphic is an amalgamation of theories from Jesper Juul (“fiction” and “rules” from his book Half-Real) and Torben Grodal’s four-part cognitive theory of narrative.  Perception, emotion, cognition, and action are the four stages of cognitive reaction that Grodal identifies in narrativity.  People perceive things, suffer an emotional response, think about how to deal with it, and then implement some plan of action.  We craft stories in this manner.  The theory isn’t perfect.  For one, it tends to assume a clean cause/effect chain of events and establishes these four parts as a linear process.  I don’t believe that it is, at least not in gaming.  I think a better way to consider Grodal’s elements are as a matrix of mutually constructed pieces that shape a person’s experience of a stimulus.  With a game, that stimuli is partially defined by the fiction and rules that govern the gamespace.

The diagram is trying to account for the subjective experience that players encounter in ways that are frustrating.  In this case, it models my reaction to a “serious game” designed to critique airport security by intentionally engendering frustration.  The rules of the space dictate that the player cannot possibly “win”.  Actually, there really is no true end-state.

“Simulation fever”, then, operates within the gap between a player’s subjective expectations and what is actually modeled in the system.  The Sims 3’s one-click bathroom stop makes sense for players.  Who wants to control every single function individually?  Thus, the game’s designers had to make choices about what on-screen actions/behaviors are simulated and how that is controlled.  The interface system is designed to reflect the mental decisions that govern people’s behaviors.  For instance, I decide that “I need to take a shower when I get up in the morning.”  Yet, I don’t endeavor to clearly and consciously choose every single action.  Most of us are unaware of these kinds of small unit operations unless we do something out of our normal routine.  After all, do you remember putting on your socks this morning?

Yet, other games, if really considered, can point to some very strange realizations.  The interaction designed into a console-born first-person shooter is relatively simple.  One analog stick controls lateral movement within the space, the other controls the pitch and attitude of the camera (allowing the player to “look” in any direction), and a simple button press allows me to interact with the other on screen features.  “Shooting” is mimicked in a simple “trigger pull”.  Some games, like Medal of Honor: Airborne, even go to the extreme of recognizing and modeling on-screen the severity of the player’s trigger pull.  Slow, smooth actions result in more accurate shots.  Quick, jerky movements can move the player’s weapon off target.

The result is firing a projectile down range (language describing both a simulational rule and a represented feature of the gamespace).  Whatever I hit responds in programmed ways.  Fixed features might show some damage, other things might explode or be destroyed, and characters suffer wounds.  I expect all of this to be the case because the packaging has Call of Duty printed on it.  Yet, what’s represented is something that I find distinctly disturbing were it to happen in my everyday life.  I avoid violence and confrontation, find it difficult to justify anyone’s death, and tend to think war is usually a pretty terrible option.

Thus, playing an FPS, which I consider great fun, creates a simulation fever in my experiences.  The fictional representation inserts me into an experience I find disturbing and reduces my violent actions to a series of button presses that I want to master in order to reach the simulation’s end-point.  There’s nothing especially rewarding about that end-point.  Point totals aren’t kept.  The story is fairly thin, although the characters do have some personality.  It’s the “experience” that I find compelling.

In the diagram above, consider the dialectic driving back and forth between cognition and emotion.  I want to solve a situation on the fly, maneuver through and overcome an obstacle.  But, that involves “killing” on-screen characters.  If I pull of a neat headshot, I’m “rewarded” by seeing what Anthony Swofford refers to as “the pink mist” in his book Jarhead.  I get to see that character’s brain-matter explode into a cloud of goo.  And of course, the character dies much more quickly, making him less of a threat to me.

Why does all this matter?  Well, it’s hard for me to pin down at this point, but one thing I can point to includes the interface systems that Air Force personnel engage with while flying armed unmanned aerial vehicles.  They push buttons (a unit operation) that then effects a systematic action by the UAV — firing a missile at a target on-screen.  Modern Warfare even has a level relatively close to this real-life situation, in which the player controls the weapons systems on an AC 130 Spectre.  You fire at small, bright, vaguely man-shaped targets on the ground in a village.  However, to foster a cleaner, more heroic narrative, that village appears to be vacated by all but the enemy — no chance you might accidentally (or intentionally?!) kill civilians.  You can just level parts of the village.  But if you fire on the church, you lose!  Of course, firing an artillery gun, a re-purposed anti-aircraft weapon, and a mini-gun into a village is not a clean or especially precise action real-life.  The likelihood is that innocent people huddling in their homes would meet a rather tragic ending.  By taking them out of the simulation, the trigger pull/button press is cleansed as an action.  A significant moral barrier is removed, and the action’s simplicity makes the on-screen action that much more palatable.  Imagine this in real-life.

You don’t have to.  Below is similar camera footage from a real-life mission — the wonders of what you can find on Youtube…

I have no intention here of passing judgement on the morality of this situation.  But, it is culturally important that the player’s experience within the interactive space is largely manifested within a simple, single button press.