Outside Your Heaven

Simulations vs. Games or: Why I'm Disappointed I Can't Melt Myself

Posted: 17 Aug 2018 02:47 PM PDT

I wrote off No Man's Sky upon its release. I didn't think it was a bad game, just not what I was looking for personally. Recently I gave it another try, since I'd heard so much about these updates that altered the experience. I played it for a few hours, appreciated some of the new survival gameplay and the enhanced usability, but my interested deflated when I realized, despite by bravest efforts, I couldn't fly into a star and kill myself. Stars are just cosmetic backdrops. You can fly at them forever and never get closer.

Simulation design is a tricky thing to pin down. It's related to game design, and indeed sometimes a simulation and a game can be the same thing, but they are not always the same thing. They are both rule systems, and both share things like mechanics, dynamics, and goals. But in the case of a simulation, all those things are aligned towards an experience that models a referent, something in reality or fiction they the audience already has some mental model of that the simulation design has to satisfy. A game doesn't have to have a referent. It can be purely abstract. Referents help, of course, since they can kickstart our understanding of a rule system by piggybacking off an existing mental model, but they aren't essential. They aren't part of the definition.

No Man's Sky strikes me as a game, not a simulation, because it is full of examples of game logic overwhelming simulation logic. That's not to say it has no simulation elements -- clearly what it does with planets and minerals has a sort of simulation model -- but you don't feel that simulation was intended as an overarching design aesthetic for the entire experience. Most things exist in the game world not because they model space at some level of abstraction, but because they plug holes in the colonial social-economic survival scenario that the game promises players. This is why space is improbably full of asteroids that you can always mine for space fuel, so you can never be stranded in deep space, lightyears from the nearest planet. It feels like the game designers are just giving you fuel so you can keep trading, because that's what you paid for, not facing the gnarly problems of actual space travel.

Not every game can be a realistic space simulation, I know. But realistic is beside the point. You can make a coherent simulation that models a referent in a simplified, abstract way. It's not about how complex the simulation is. It's about what the simulation is choosing to focus on in the referent, what it's choosing to simplify and abstract. One of the reasons I can't get into stuff like No Man's Sky is because I had such a powerful experience with Freelancer, an obscure open-world space flight game from 2003. It at least modeled all the cosmic phenomena it featured. The fact that it did so in an ultra-streamlined, simplified, totally unrealistic way is actually what made it great -- that made its simulation elements easy to experience. In Freelancer you can fly right into a star, watch it get brighter, more blinding, until your ships alarms begin to scream and you see yourself burn up. The fact that you can close that distance so quickly is absurdly unrealistic. Freelancer embraced all the usual sci-fi bullshit of impossible movement on your part, but other basic things -- like stars being hot and having gravity -- was all there. And it made you want to explore the universe just to see things you've only read about in books.

I got far enough in Freelancer to find black holes and a neutron star. When traveling between jump gates you could see nebula get closer, then farther away, like passing a town on the freeway. The star map was all hand-made and coherent. You could look at the stars and know where in the quadrant you were by the placement of familiar constellations. It was real crafted Universe, the space equivalent of Tamriel or Britannia or Hyrule.

I did all this in Freelancer after having to literally cheat my way out of its boring-as-hell combat and resource management. Freelancer's simulation was trapped under a tedious game of colonial shenanigans that took real effort to ignore. I remember trying to explore some nebula and the game constantly screaming at me "Hey! Hey player! Wouldn't you rather be fighting pirates?! Look, I spawned some. Now you can have fun again!" Thanks, game! Thanks, gamer culture. Thank for convincing yourselves that exploring scientific wonders beyond our imaginations couldn't possible be more interesting than murder.

You might think based on what I've said so far that I love the simulation genre, stuff like Microsoft Flight Simulator and its ilk. I don't. Their fetish for meaningless detail bores me. I am interested in simulations, but simulations that seek to find a sweetspot of expressive abstraction. Simulations that are marketed as simulations fetishize complexity, whether it be the complexity of interface (flight sims) or large socioeconomic systems (Sim City, Civilization). That's what those audiences want. But what if you want the dramatic "let me try out this thing I've always wondered about" possibilities of simulations but also the focused, accessible, abstract elegance of games?

There are a lot of games that don't necessarily call them simulations that embody this philosophy. Sky Odyssey, a little-played PS2-era flight sim, embodies it beautifully, as do games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild -- games that have ultra-consistent rules that allow for improvisation and honor the mental models they signpost yet express those models in the simplest, most abstract way possible. This is how you can have a "cartoon simulation" of something -- by choosing a cartoon exaggeration of a referent, the referent always remains ultra-clear.

In the end, it's not important that the simulation be realistic. It's important that the audience understand the metaphor, the line of abstraction that leads back to the referent. Feeling the mental model was honored is what creates engagement and satisfaction, no matter how abstract it is. This is the sweetspot that we miss when we think of games and simulations being naturally at odds. Complexity doesn't make a simulation a simulation. Realism doesn't make a simulation a simulation. Coherence and adherence to the referent -- at any level of abstraction the designer chooses -- makes a simulation, and choosing a level of abstraction that maximizes emotion, drama, and accessibility -- informed by the best practices of game design -- is how you leverage simulation design in the creation of a great experience. That's when you've given players The Cosmos, not just signed them up for a space-themed combat LARP.

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If you want to get meta, you could argue that No Man's Sky simulates the logics of a Star Trek-like sci-fi show, as opposed to real outer space. That's fair. You can choose to look at it any way you want, depending on what you take as your "model". This of course pushes us into Baudrillard territory, where we have simulations of simulations (simulacra). Go ahead and plunge into that rabbit hole if you feel like it.

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