Patrick Crogan, "Gametime: History, Narrative and Temporality in Combat Flight Simulator 2"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Flight sims as exemplary of tendencies in games and digital media
- Relation between war/military technology and games (as part of peacetime culture more generally)
- Blurring of distinction between war and peace - Virilio's pure war, constant preparation for/anticipation of threats
- Logistics: the abstraction of reality in the management of a state or military, mapping out challenges
- "Military-entertainment complex"
- Reversal of military influence on games -> games influence military (appropriation of forms and technologies from entertainment for military purposes)
- Two way traffic between games and military is part of the pure war tendency
- Abstraction of historical events
- Aestheticization of information processing, mapping computer ontology/logistics onto all cultural activities
- Goals make us experience games as narrative (narrative reconstruction of "historical" events)
- Strong emphasis on authenticity in Combat Flight Simulator 2
- Comparison to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbour
- Narrativizing "unrealizes" events (makes them less real as an ordered temporal sequence)
- Historical narrative/representation as a secondary function or a motivation (similar to high concept/spectacle/special effects films)
- Abstraction of film-making processes due to CGI, emphasis on post-production (logistics), everything else secondary to the production of effects
- Narrative in digital media as a "plotting of a trajectory of tasks to accomplish"
- Narrative supports the presentation of tasks -> provides a contextual frame and an arrangement of the time spent playing (feedback loop)
- Time in games is the player's time, not the game's
- Games model problems in anticipation of the player solving them (like military logistics)
- Gametime is training to solve problems, transforms events in a simulation into "potential resources for the execution of [an algorithm]" (flow chart analogy)
- Level editor as play with logisitical conception of the world
- Gametime as "theoretical time"
- Instrumentalization of war -> airwar conducted at a distance (closely related to military simulation, logistics)
- Flight sims as recreational "anticipation machines"
- Anticipatory deterrence goes hand-in-hand with proliferation of threats
- Supplementarity of narrative in digital media as a form of multi-tasking
- Derrida: supplement is always significant
- Ethical positioning is replaced by control in this kind of historical representation/simulation