Invisible walls, puffy clouds, and the unheavenly world behind them

[clyde]

Paolo Pedercini suggests that scope is not only a technical decision, but also a political one.

http://www.molleindustria.org/blog/invisible-walls-puffy-clouds/

[elmuerte]

Political? To me it sounds more like creating clear lines of where the simulation ends, rather than trying to lie to the player.

[Bjorn]

Political? To me it sounds more like creating clear lines of where the simulation ends, rather than trying to lie to the player.

 

But sometimes those clear lines are political or social in nature.  Take his point about SimCity:

 

Simulations like the ones from the SimCity series are complex and emergent. But they model only certain aspects of a city and city planning.

I always say: you don’t really see racial dynamics in simCity. Why is that?  Racial tensions, gentrification and white flight have been crucial component of the decline of big American cities. The designers simply decided to draw the line there – that is out of the system.

 

Completely ignoring those societal mechanics in a city building simulation is certainly a developer drawing a line, but part of the reason for that line is "political" in the sense that it is concern about the nature of those issues and how society perceives and reacts to them that they are left out, not necessarily due to a technical limitation.  You can see this piece that examines some of the controversy about how SimCity already handles environmental issues (and whether or not its really saying anything with its mechanics). 

 

It really makes me want to play a game that has themes like white flight and gentrification present.  That would be fascinating.

[BobbyBesar]

I don't see his point as especially controversial. Game design (particularly but not exclusively simulation) is about modeling, and modeling is fundamentally about deciding what NOT to represent. There's a Borges story about it.

 

There's an old joke about a dairy farmer that asks some scientists to help him increase his milk yield. The psychologist recommends painting the barn blue to simulate the sky so the cows are happier. The chemist recommends adding supplements to the feed to increase calcium intake. The physicist stands up and draws a circle on the blackboard and says: "Assume the cow is a sphere...".

[elmuerte]

Isn't that more sociological than political?

 

And to be honest, I don't think a lot of thought goes into it all. Sure, you can say they excluded racism, or LTBG. But they also excluded pedophilia, religion, bestiality, etc.

[Gormongous]

Isn't that more sociological than political?

 

And to be honest, I don't think a lot of thought goes into it all. Sure, you can say they excluded racism, or LTBG. But they also excluded pedophilia, religion, bestiality, etc.

 

Yeah, but I think it's deeply political to lump all those topics under one umbrella of "contentious" and exclude them from a game that would otherwise address them. I mean, Crusader Kings 2 can't leave out religion, because religion is one of the most powerful forces in human history, yet all Civilization games have tried their hardest to marginalize it. Likewise, most games would rather leave a gaping hole where "race relations" would be.

 

It all reminds me of Tevis Thompson's excellent article about Bioshock: Infinite and video game reviews, where he talks about the idea of something being "apolitical" as a special kind of subjectivity only available to a select few gamers, mostly white and male.

[TychoCelchuuu]

Chris and I and a few others had this conversation about Sim City in the Sim City thread starting on this page. As you can probably tell I come down strongly where Paolo does on these issues, generally.

[Spenny]

I shared this link in the "actual reading about games" but this idea is very similar to Ian Bogost's presented here. 

 

The take away from that article is that you could make a game that simulates something, but in order to win that game, the choices you make in the simulation are ones that mirror real political views. If you agree with that idea then every choice you make in terms of what or what not you simulate and how they effect the overall success of the player in the game are potentially political. 

[BobbyBesar]

Isn't that more sociological than political?

 

And to be honest, I don't think a lot of thought goes into it all. Sure, you can say they excluded racism, or LTBG. But they also excluded pedophilia, religion, bestiality, etc.

It's a "the personal is political" kind of thing.

 

 Civilization is the easy target because its content is inherently historical-political. But it isn't limited to that. You play as Dante in Devil May Cry? You're implicitly reinforcing the societo-normative conception of men as action heroes. So, you  include a man with a gun, but exclude pedophilia? You're implicitly representing a worldview where guns are more common, or more central to the human experience, than pedophilia is.

 

Everything that exists in the game IS a deliberately created artifact of art, sound, or code. (something they share with literature and animation but not, say, film). So, literally everything that you see in a game could have been anything else. Every time you justify something as "well, that's just the way real life is" what you're also saying is "my game is reinforcing the status quo of our current society." The decision to _not_ say anything is actually saying something.

 

It's easy to get carried away with this kind of thing, so I'm not implying that every single decision is carefully considered to have some greater meaning, nor am I saying that every game has a responsibility to buck the current social norms in favor of any other theoretical social norms.

 

That's a very weak form of the argument.

 

The stronger form of the argument talks about SpennyDubz's position in refernce to Bogost's article (which I haven't read yet). They strong form states that by tying implicit valuation (rewards) to game objects, you're inherently creating a hierarchy by which you've placed value and meaning on different elements. When you ALSO attach those to analogs to real life, you're also creating valuations on those analogs.

 

I'm being a little intentionally obtuse here, so for a more concrete example: take checkers. in checkers, any piece can take any other piece. This supports a basically egalitarian world-view purely via mechanics. Compare this to Chess, in which pieces are all inherently unequal and have different value. This standard applies even before you start attaching words like "Pawn", "King", "Bishop" to those pieces. Relationships can be expressed via mechanics themselves.

 

Now, if you take one more step back, you get to the strongest level of the argument, the narrative/mechanical level - it's also the most explicit. You're presenting a position via the interaction of the mechanics. This is where things like the Chess King being very important, but also pretty much useless for actual combat, which is a nice little bit of subversiveness for a Medieval court.

 

The longer I talk on this kind of topic, the more wrapped up I get and the less sense I make, so I'm going to stop now while there's still a chance of my being understood.