Scribbles and Horrors

When you no longer believe in metaphor, all that’s left is simulation.

What happens when the sparkles of clever allusion grow dim, when resonance tends shallow, and the waters of shared cultural familiarity show signs of drought? How can we proceed through the desert, for who knows how long, until we reach the oasis of the next shared cultural moment?

To persevere through such perils games have developed Simulationism, a method for carrying on despite madness and incoherence, maugre flagging zeal, irrespective of creative famine. A simulation continues to tell you what happens next long after excitement has let out its last gasp.

Simulation sustains faith that an imagined place can correspond to a real one. It justifies the experience of wonder we sometimes get in glimmers and glances. Simulation lets us maintain our toys without having to moor them so directly to our psyche, protected from hurricanes of moodiness and earthquakes of self-doubt.

But simulation comes at a cost. It is a simple cost, no more than is fitting. The cost of simulation is making the imaginary real through time and labor. The debt can be paid in one of two ways: Counting or Scale.

To counting belong dice and statistics, models, maps, and scientific expertise. To scale belong big groups of players, swathes of literature, and so on. Expenses pile up, and have a knack of compounding with interest.

Physical and mental limitations will conspire against simulations eventually, not because there is too little, but because there is too much. There is only so far simulation can take us before collapsing under the weight of its own success into burnout.

We must hope, then, that before this happens a new oasis will have been found, another wellspring of spontaneous connective fantasy delight.

When simulations fail, we look towards metaphor.