Simulation vs. Reality

In Black & White, you can reward and punish at your discretion.

Games as a credible course of study within universities is a reality. While this reality continues to emerge, issues that have plagued the games industry for decades will float to the surface and earn prominent placement on syllabi. The students have their work cut out for them. The simulation versus reality argument is possibly the digital entertainment realm's mind/body dualism issue. When we act through our character in The Sims, for example, at the moment we are playing, do we become the character, or are we simply acting the character? The ghosts in Pac-Man may have allowed us to reflect upon an internal state, but who felt they "became" the ghosts? Games today, especially MMORPGs and products like Black & White and The Sims, hijack our personalities, at least temporarily, while we escape to an alternate, but not always better, world.

Role-playing is ages old, but it is a particularly powerful force in early 21st century gaming. Frasca concurs that games are moving away from fantasy and toward reality and says, "As soon as you start playing with humans, things get messy and political--and therefore far more interesting. Thirty years ago, I could pretend to be a spaceship. Now I can be a housewife in The Sims. Without an inch of sarcasm, that's what I call progress."

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.

Conceptual artist, writer, and musician Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky - That Subliminal Kid) wrote in his recent book, Rhythm Science (MIT Press, March 2004), "Today we have an entire youth culture based on the premise of replication, which itself derives from the word 'reply.'" Replication of the self through refraction of our surroundings, as he describes, is most obvious in RPGs and simulations. Miller told GameSpot that he sees video games today as a "shorthand method" for grasping realities more complex than people are trained to understand. "Video games let people deal with a lot of information in a small amount of space" before moving on to the next level. The hope of "always evolving and attaining the next level," Miller says, is based on "much more rhetoric about reality than about reality itself."

We've come a long way from the days of minimalist characters sparring in an overly simplistic world where the "good guys" are differentiated from the "bad guys" by color and shape. Naturally, games have adopted the same complexities as life.

Miller's book, Rhythm Science.

Games today, as opposed to those created even 15 years ago, are "more real than real," Miller says, "but there's also more distance between yourself and reality than anything ever before." Miller sees a greater amount of alienation in games and in the media in general, which leads people to "cling to whatever it is that they consider real," when the fact of the matter is, what they identify with as "real" is "just a TV show."

The effects games have on society, however, are real. In April 2004, a Beth Israel Medical Center study revealed that "Doctors who spent at least three hours per week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery" and were 27 percent faster than doctors who didn't play video games. While debates over video game-inspired youth violence are pandemic, studies have shown that games can be good for you. They can improve reaction time and hand-eye coordination.

Miller calls games a "good training mechanism" for living in the information age. "I think it's all about responding to a digital environment in a way that you improvise and, at the same time, react to [with all of this] information around you." We can learn from games, he says, but they will "absorb more of our psychology."