An Introduction to the Rhetoric of Simulation
THIS IS A MANIFESTO
We shape and are shaped by cultural artefacts. No cultural phenomenon stands alone and none are ideologically neutral. With the myriad of new social media anyone can make public the produce of their creativity to the entire world, unmediated by the old gatekeepers of mass media. User-generated content does not represent mass culture but culture by the masses. The Internet thus facilitates now in novel ways a decentralised construction of society. As for societal ideals, a healthy democracy needs constant critical review by means of broad engagement by a knowledgeable public. One premise among others for such engagement is a general feeling of community; society is per se a common thing. Another is the dissemination of good channels to facilitate that engagement. I see in computer games and in digital media technologies in general the potential to embody, instil, advance, and not least to function as laboratory for such a democratic attitude of critical social engagement.
The concern of this essay is to provide perspectives of three consequential usages of simulation each representing currently evolving tendencies of digital media technology. As computer games, social software and simulations are used increasingly in political advocacy, commercial advertising, and many other areas of communication, science, art, and entertainment by governmental and non-governmental organisations, private businesses and individuals, so increases the social need for exact conceptual tools with which to examine and describe the communicative and facilitating qualities of such media. I will start with a short introduction to the potential for a far higher sophistication than is the case today of computer games in the cultural field between entertainment and art. Following a sketching of the communicative qualities of using computer games for instance in awareness, advertising or political campaigns, I will end by drawing a perspective of the expansion and fusing of computer games, social software, and scientific simulations to a new kind of digital laboratory and parliament of participatory democracy where collaborative solutions can be found for complex problems utilising computer-supported experiments based on corroborated data provided by feeds from the world’s statistical institutes, knowledge and research centres, and data repositories. The larger claims thus set forth is of the high potential of simulations for artistic expression, communication, and experimental mediation for finding non-zero sum solutions for natural, economic, political, social, or cultural problems on a global, regional, national, local, or personal scale with computer-supported collaborative deliberation.
ENTERTAINMENT
It was not long ago that the mention of computer games or video games would immediately and almost invariably conjure up visions of pimpled teenage boys in darkened rooms wasting sunny days trying to beat some arbitrary high score or some end-of-level boss or each other with fictional and absurd weaponry. And indeed many computer games today still peddle adolescent male power fantasies in spite of many things it would seem. I will not go into any deeper analysis of the computer game industry but only state a few tendencies indicating a change I hope will manifest itself ever wider. Many big computer game publishers seem reluctant to experiment as they publish mainly what has paid off in the past. The result is scarce innovation and only minor tweaks to the established form of punishing hardcore gaming although puzzle games and all sorts of so-called casual games are very much on the rise both in terms of market penetration, diversity and quality, attributable to many things such as the success of the Nintendo Wii video game console, shifting demographics in Europe [pdf] as well as the US, and the ubiquity of personal computers and access to the Internet.
This supposed cultural adolescence of computer games or their developers is changing, though, as the industry is forced to reinvent itself to keep up with and take advantage of the evolution of gamer demographics, which show that computer games are no longer exclusively, and far from even largely, played by children, as well as to keep up with and take advantage of the steep advancements in technology.
Intuitive interfaces are being developed in the field of human-computer interaction well beyond the already revolutionary controller of the Wii. Even research in brain-computer interfaces is coming along. Especially interesting is the technological progress in the power of computing, which at an exponential rate places today the capacity and speed of yesterday’s supercomputers in the hands of ordinary citizens in personal computers and by means of the emerging so-called cloud computing. The explosion of raw computing power available to be exploited by entertainment software will continue to feed the race toward ever more realistic computer visualisation, which according to computer scientist Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory will pass the Graphics Turing Test in the foreseeable future when computer generated images become comparatively indistinguishable from real images while also being interactive. Similarly, Tim Sweeney, computer game engine programmer of the Unreal Engine by Epic Games, predicts in an interview on game development and publishing website Gamesutra.com that computer game graphics will be completely life-like in 10-15 years. Together with advancements in physics simulations, artificial intelligence, semantic and natural language capabilities, and the expanding possibilities of tapping information by real-time data-feeds from endeavours such as weather forecasting, the global stock exchanges, traffic supervision, medical research, geological and astronomical survey, and statistics, all in all it is not hard to envision that computer games before long will exhibit a deep and multi-levelled realism that will enable them to deal delicately and indeed maturely with highly complex issues.
As computer games become increasingly complex both technologically and culturally it can be argued that some sort of vocabulary addressing their intellectual level of challenge is called for, which for instance considers their level of rhetorical, philosophical, or moral sophistication. Such a vocabulary would provide an opportunity for a positive perspective from which to analyse serious social potentials for computer games complementary to the purely negative perspective of moral rating systems.
Established moral rating systems of entertainment software such as provided by the Pan European Game Information (PEGI) and the American Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) work from the premise of protecting children from exposure to morally inappropriate game content. Both PEGI and ESRB provide warning of age appropriateness and of reprehensible content in the form of two complementary types of icons printed on products: age categories and concise content descriptors. Mutual for both organisations is that the intensity of the content as indicated by the content descriptors is relative to the age rating of the game. It is thus reasonable to conclude that moral rating systems such as PEGI and ESRB embody the perspective that computer games present moral obstacles to defend against. They arguably have their place for safeguarding children from exposure to inappropriate game content but they say little else of the qualities of computer games; certainly nothing of any constructive qualities.
Positive qualities, on the other hand, are the main subject of commercial game reviews such as published in myriad game magazines and websites. I will not describe any one of them in detail but merely provide a synthesis of their apparent objectives. Many such as the British computer game magazine Edge and on-line review sites such as ComputerAndVideoGames.com, GamePro.com, IGN.com and GameSpot.com conclude each game review by giving an overall point score, a one-line verdict, a few highlights of pro’s and con’s, or a rating in categories typically such as graphics, sound, gameplay, and replay value or lasting appeal, which often are contracted into the supposedly comprehensive category of fun-factor. Metacritic.com collects reviews and presents an overall metascore along with a user score. Mutual for the overwhelming majority of reviewers is that audiovisual production quality and engaging, fun gameplay are core issues of critique. They are seemingly informed by a naïve and hedonistic approach to the quality assessment of computer games with the narrow scope of evaluating the fun-factor of entertainment games.
There are certainly room for a framework complementing moral rating systems such as represented by PEGI or ESRB and the traditional reviews of entertainment value allowing for an evaluation of a much wider spectrum of computer game attributes other than fun-factor and how morally reprehensible a game is. No formalised qualitative rating criteria exist for literature, film or other art forms, although they too are often in reviews simplistically reduced to a usually single-digit numerical value, so why am I proposing one for computer games? I am not. But I will argue that for literature and film for instance there exists a well-developed, critical vocabulary and tradition, whereas for the much younger expressive medium of computer games two diverging vectors of critique exists, both with rather narrow critical objectives as I have indicated.
Between these two vectors lies a critique vacuum. A vocabulary and conceptualisation with which to describe constructive qualities of computer games other than some vague notion of fun is tentative and compartmentalised inside academia and closer to non-existent in the general public. With the growing popularity and complexity of entertainment software as well as of computer games and other forms of simulation with uses other than entertainment and with high social impact such as in science, learning, advertising and even politics, it is ever more pressing to skilfully be able to explore, describe, and explain their exact qualities as platforms for nuanced expression. Part of establishing such a critical vocabulary and conceptualisation is the necessity to expand public awareness not just of the capacity of computer games for sophisticated entertainment and artistic expression, but also to expand awareness of the potentials of digital media technology in general for communication, science, and the facilitation of democratic processes. The rest of this essay will continue to draw a rough sketch of such potentials.
COMMUNICATION
Computer games are composite artefacts boasting status as objects as well as processes. On one hand they are discrete program code on physical or electronic storage media, on the other they are dynamic possibility spaces for players to act in. They have much in common with simulations as have been explored [pdf] in some depth by computer game researcher and designer Gonzalo Frasca and game studies pioneer Espen Aarseth who argues [pdf] that computer games posses an “omni-potential” for representation and carry the status of “complex media machines” and that “the computer game is the art of simulation.” But what are these complex media machines? With the advent of the Internet and the digital so-called new media the word media have acquired diverse and many-levelled meanings. Media researcher Anja Bechmann Petersen explains in the article “Cross media som kommunikationsform” in På tværs af medierne (2007) that with the digital basis for media the possibility arises to simulate, incorporate and communicate with all known forms of media. And here we have the omni-potential of computer games for representation: the ability to span the entire range of symbolic media formats or media modalities such as text, audio, image, and video. In other words the computer game is a multimodal media product. As if echoing that notion, computer game researcher and designer Ian Bogost in Persuasive Games: the Expressive Power of Videogames (2007) proposes the new rhetorical domain of the procedural describing procedurality as “the unique representational property of the computer.” It seems that process can be added to the list of media modalities with the procedural symbolic format being the essential modality of not just computer games but that of any digital media.
Computer games as expressive works represent process with process. To play games require active engagement. To engage in the processes of a model system is to learn about the procedurally represented original system, whether real or imagined, in a certain light. This light is cast by the characteristics and behaviours included in or excluded from the model system. In this respect a computer game is existentially an argument for participation; a discretely biased argument, which the player unavoidably negotiates as part of playing.
Bogost’s mission is the proposal of the mentioned domain of procedural rhetoric. But in Bogost’s many analyses where he shows instances of procedural rhetoric he gives plausible conclusions but largely fails to provide the reader with the theoretical means to span the gap between them and the concrete elements of the subject games consisting of procedural, visual and audio modalities other than what is given by his personal interpretations. I propose the use of the model of argument developed by British philosopher Stephen Toulmin in The Uses of Argument (1959) to enable deeper and more precise analyses of computer games as simulative multimodal rhetorical artefacts.
The Toulmin model of argument provides a powerful tool for evaluating and making arguments. It consists of six elements: claim, data, warrant, backing, rebuttal and qualifier. Toulmin exemplifies the model with the following argument: I can claim that Swen Petersen is not a Roman Catholic and as grounds for that claim provide the data that Petersen is a Swede. Backing for that data would be that he was born in Sweden of Swedish parents and is a Swedish citizen with a Swedish passport. The warrant of the argument validating the step from data to claim as reasonable would be that Swedes can generally be taken not to be Roman Catholic. Such a warrant would need a backing such as “according to Whitaker’s Almanac, less than 2% of Swedes are Roman Catholic.” But with those two percent lurking in the shadows I need to provide the rebuttal that unless he is one of those two percent my claim is true. This prompts a qualifier tempering my claim so that now “almost certainly” Swen Petersen is not a Roman Catholic. Claim and data are usually the most prominent elements but the four others are of special interest when evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and founding values of an argument.
The analyses of Bogost are also concerned with the underlying values of computer games. With inspiration in the concepts of metaphor and frame as developed by linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980), Bogost talks about the ideological frames of rhetorical expressions. Through multimodal patterns consisting of text, audio, image, video and structuring processes computer games provide configurative possibility spaces. The interplay of the actions of the game player with the various symbolic media formats can be seen to give life to intricate enactments of argumentation, which can be broken down into the elements of the Toulmin model. Though games are nonlinear or ergodic in nature the process of playing them can be interpreted as the discovery of or rather the active participation in completing nonlinear arguments, reassembling them in linear rows or hierarchies in the process of making sense out of, that is, forming and reforming mental models of the multimodal arguments. By means of intellectual and emotional investment the player discovers and assembles the arguments in interaction with the ergodic text and thereby makes a non-trivial effort prompting an attachment of value and thus attention to the arguments. These configurative possibility spaces where players by non-trivial effort interpret, complete and reinterpret arguments about the simulations themselves and about the real or hypothetical systems they simulate embody in this manner certain framings of those systems. Such metaphors can be expressed more or less abstractly and are at one end of the spectrum – with games such as Tetris almost completely void of significant cultural references – restricted to highly abstract symbolism and can at the other end even incorporate a self-focussing, ambivalent argumentation for its own confessedly subjective, particular framing. But on the other hand such sophisticated cultural metaphors embodied by the multimodal communication of computer games might falsely frame themselves as objectively true often with no more backing of their claims than the simulation itself. Politically charged games such as September 12th from Newsgaming.com, the Kuma\War series from developer and publisher Kuma Reality Games, or indeed the immensely popular recruiting tool of the American Army aptly named America’s Army seriously bring up this question if a given computer game acknowledges its own subjectivity and inevitable bias. If not then it would seem the application of the concept of propaganda could begin to show its relevance. This presents an absolutely crucial distinction, which not everybody that works with communication through computer games seems to acknowledge. Keith Halper, CEO of Kuma Reality Games, states in an interview on Gamesutra that “at the most basic level, there really is no difference between a political game and an educational one. Both are trying to teach the player about a process, an idea, or a concept, and by involving the player, games are an effective medium for doing so.” This point of view has the consequence of diluting and generalising the concept of learning to the degree where it no longer distinguishes between quantifiable facts and unsupported subjective evaluations.
With this I point attention to problematic issues concerning the use of computer games for communication, which might be solved by a framework that would distinguish between the overtly subjective message and the covertly subjective message expressing itself as objective fact.
Umberto Eco’s ideas of open or closed works and the model reader, which discriminates between a critical and a naïve communicative and interpretative strategy, Lakoff & Johnson’s concepts of metaphor and framing together with the Toulmin model of argument and the concept of metacommunication as pioneered by Gregory Bateson tempered with Aarseth’s seminal work Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) and grounded for instance in Luciano Floridi’s work [pdf] on information ethics could all certainly produce interesting observations about how computer games and other sorts of digital – essentially simulative – multimodal media products communicate.
PROBLEM SOLVING
According to writer Lene Andersen in her book series and mammoth project of popular enlightenment, Baade-Og (2005-), three of western society’s great schemes or so-called meta-narratives – how a culture tells its own story – are presently changing fast: the Aristotelian binary logic behind Søren Kirkegaard’s question of “either/or” is being supplemented with the nonexclusive, fuzzy logic of an affirming “both/and”; linearity and the sequential is giving room for the exponential, chaos theory, emergent phenomena, and cut-up come to life; and somewhat polemically she states that the pacifying myth of the one, perfect hero that will save us all – be that in the shape of James Bond or Jesus – is changing into a holistic mythology or ideal of mutually beneficial, collaborative efforts. These three shifts in meta-narratives all seem to manifest in the sifting social and scientific usage of the Internet specifically with the open source movement, social media such as social networking websites, photo, video, and audio sharing, blogs and wikis, as well as the increasing use of simulations, which can provide a safe and powerful field for systemic experimentation.
At least since humankind began to formulate coherent hypotheses of causal relations have we in some manner been constructing, learning, and rearranging mental models of our world. Untested or unchallenged hypotheses discordant with reality but forcibly applied on large scale can have grim results as Europe’s history of totalitarianism among other things shows. Scientists have long been constructing mathematical models to predict natural phenomena such as apples falling to the ground and other approximate spheres moving through space. With the adoption of computers this practice has shown itself powerful beyond what could be imagined in the time of Newton or Copernicus. Simulation expands further than pure modelling allowing for user input, and the complexity and depth of computer simulation is unprecedented. An important aspect here is the means to interface such simulation. Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology at UC Santa Barbara JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is working on one of the largest scientific and artistic instruments in the world, the Allosphere. This gigantic and immersive spherical theatre/instrument maps complex data as dynamic and interactive audio and visual representations onto its almost completely enveloping walls with its operator standing inside of it. It represents data in a novel way and assists scientists in finding solutions to even unthought-of problems. In an article on the website of popular science magazine the New Scientist physicist Dirk Helbing points out how the flow of city traffic cannot be sufficiently described by mathematical predictions but that computer models with millions of virtual vehicles interacting on realistic road patterns can discover potential problems before they occur in reality. Helbing goes even further and urges that “we need to bring together scientists from different fields and put together tools that can be used as a kind of wind tunnel for testing out social and economic policies.” Such simulations could provide virtual laboratories fed by empirical data and where elements and mechanisms of actual issues of all types and scales could be tried, adjusted, and retried a million times over in the time it would take – if at all possible – to perform one such experiment in the real world. And that at an infinitely lower cost in any measure, be it money, lives, or environment.
With the paradigm shift presently taking place on the Web such problem-solving simulations are no longer only for scientists and others with access to expensive supercomputers and proprietary or siloed data. Supplementing the World Wide Web of linked documents and sites for social interaction a new application of the Internet is emerging; a Web of open, linked data interrelating former information silos of isolated islands of data so they can be shared and used by anyone with a need or a use for them. The DBpedia project, for instance, is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and make it available as raw data. Renowned statistician Hans Rosling uses presentation software from Gapminder.org to produce a stunning visual representation of the real state of world poverty in a talk given at TED 2006. This free software can be used to produce beautiful and very clearly read animated and interactive representations of large data sets such as those made available by DBpedia. Users can play, stop, rewind, change the representational focus, and in other ways interact with these dynamically animated graphs, which provide a simple example of how simulations can constitute fields of experimentation. The nonprofit Gapminder was purchased by Google in 2007, which now incorporates the graph software as a free gadget for Google Spreadsheets and also makes it available through Google Visualization API. This data-centric application of the Internet is popularly referred to as the Semantic Web and has been given the marketing moniker Web 3.0. With this approach as embodied in the concept of mashups combined with the collaborative potential of social software, the Web seems to be moving towards the manifestation of an open, decentralised toolkit facilitating innumerable variations of such wind tunnels for testing out social and economic policies as called for by Helbing.
If “the medium is the message” as the famous aphorism of Marshall McLuhan goes then computer games and other simulative media products are fundamentally arguments for deliberative participation. The goal of such experiments could very well be to identify and/or decide on policy or the best course of action in a given situation possibly involving multiple parties with diverging means and agendas. And there are indeed already both governmental and private endeavours to support public participation through the Web. A Danish programmer has by own initiative created Folketsting.dk (Eng.: the people’s parliament) to do what the official website of the Danish parliament so far has not succeeded in: engaging the Danish citizens, which now has a focussed national blog-type platform to debate politicians, law proposals, and what goes on in parliament. Platforms for debate and argument are currently being refined to accentuate posts of more well-supported arguments. The MIT Deliberatorium, formerly called the Collaboratorium, is “a tool designed to enable better large-scale collaborative deliberation around complex topics like global warming.” It is being developed by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the goal of harnessing collective intelligence by providing a forum biased towards rational arguments rather than unfounded claims or emotional manipulation for structuring online debates. This tool for large-scale online deliberation is still under development and is in the words of principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Mark Klein “currently based on a style of interaction that is somewhat formal and artificial” but it’s main strength is “to tap, in ways not previously possible, the skills and knowledge of large numbers of people in the service of solving complex multi-disciplinary problems” such as in political decision making processes. Also there are many other academic, private, and collaborative efforts to produce web-mediated discussion and decision making tools or methods aiming to save the world, raise productivity by getting and sharing ideas effectively, or to raise the quality of debate about public policy issues. And then there are those that aim to completely revolutionise the democratic process by technological means such as the submittal for The Buckminster Fuller Challenge, the ambitious “EarthOS 1.0: Designing an Operating System to Govern Spaceship Earth,” which aims for world governance by participatory democracy or such as the related project Metagovernment, which is an avant-garde approach to collaborative deliberation with the political focus of direct democracy on any organisational scale applied through open source social software under the term open source governance.
One of the major problems in politics seems to be that conflicting parties often cannot or will not agree even on completely factual issues. This is a problem also treated in the commentary “From Karl Popper to Karl Rove – and Back” by controversial financial speculator George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Institute. Soros argues that democratic politics leads to manipulation because the main goal of politicians is to win elections rather than arrive at a better understanding of reality. Therefore a strong commitment to the pursuit of truth is required as a new ground rule for political discourse. This is exactly where the emerging Semantic Web can help by providing a reference framework of verifiable and replicable data on which to mediate the collaborative deliberation as set forth by the above mentioned tools and methods. Furthermore it can be imagined with the progresses in high performance computing and in graphic and physical realism of simulations, as discussed earlier, that procedurally rendered 3D environments will be able to enact the mediating framework of data, the arguments of the debate, and their potential consequences in a virtual world-style simulation à la Second Life and thus clearly visualise and guide the collaborative deliberation.
A key condition for the utility of such a system in assisting the pursuit of truth as the criteria on which to judge political views would be the feasibility of providing a framework of mutually agreed upon and satisfactory corroborated facts via open data feeds. This problem points to the key issues of using simulation to say anything about real world matters. These include the acquisition of valid source data and the selection of characteristics and behaviours of the simulation, which unavoidably will produce certain simplifying approximations resulting in assumptions or biases within the simulation. These issues are likely to impact the fidelity and validity of any outcome of a simulation. But if these issues can be overcome simulations can act as disinterested third party mediation in negotiation and any other sort of single- or multi-party decision making or problem solving. A convergence of innovative technologies for entertainment, communications, and scientific problem solving can thus produce simulations for use as experimental mediators for finding non-zero sum solutions to complex and global challenges with computer-supported collaborative deliberation.