a talk about games and simulations by Thomas Bøndergaard.
Introduction to The Rhetoric of Simulation
Computer games manifest in their core the art of simulation. They possess representational omnipotence and carry status as complex media machines.
This simulative art include the ability to represent all symbolic media formats such as text, audio, image and video. A simulation is as such a multimodal media product. Simulation further adds process as symbolic media format. The procedural format is not only the core mode of rhetoric in computer games, it is the essential modality of any digital media product, it is the essence of the rhetoric of simulation.
It demands active engagement to partake in any game and to navigate its rules. When engaging in the simulated processes of a model system, you’re deliberations are based on which particular laws and characteristics have been included in or excluded from the procedural representation of the original system whether real or imagined. In this perspective a computer game is in itself an argument for participation; an argument with particular biases.
Simulations are thus seen to contain an inescapable capacity for laying out real or imagined contexts in fields of experiment and for communicating serious messages from, concerning and to that world of which they are part.