Patrick Crogan, "Playing Through: The Future of Alternative and Critical Game Projects"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Interrogate the critical potential of games
- Relationship of games to their contexts
- Frasca opposes simulation vs narrative, theatrical forms - simulation as the form of the future
- Complicate notion that simulation stands alone/is uniquely suited to face the future (military past must be considered)
- Tekken Torture Tournament, Painstation (theatrical, public exhibition/performace)
- Relation to reality TV -> spectacle of pain and suffering (military training connection?)
- Real-world consequences
- Both made real/actual and theatricalized, made virtual, removed in the staging
- Defining, delimiting, controlling (military "theatre of operations")
- Undermines the suspension of the real/normal
- Games reproduce the "primal scene" of military cybernetics -> in doing so they can modify it, critically in some cases
- Framing/placing/situating, not representing
- Projective, not reflective (future, means of speculation?)
- Frasca: narrative = past, drama = present, simulation = future (projective, experimental, hypothetical)
- Aesthetic development of simulation also future-oriented in Frasca's conception
- Origins of simulation in military technoscience are ignored
- This refusal of the past is echoed in the presumed future-orientation of simulation
- Where is the past in simulation?
- September 12: subvert conventional forms, open critical reflection
- Donkey John: ironic "skinning," references real politics
- Under Ash: inversion/reproduction
- Frasca: simulation as a tool to promote critical thinking and highlight relationship between model and reality
- Narrative can also be future-oriented (produced to be read), tool for arranging/understanding experience
- Simulation reproduces this aspect of narrative, anticipating future
- War gaming, tension between historical record and complexity, unpredictability that created it and needs to be simulated
- Simulation (and narrative, and drama) as mnemotechnic: technologies for the retention of human experiences (Stiegler)
- "Draws on the past with a view to the future"
- Simulation emerges out of narrative, drama, inherits/reproduces them as a process of memorization for orienting the individual/culture in time and space, in the present and towards the future
- Pre-emptive force of simulation is a product of modern rationality
- Its heritage must be remembered as simulation is proliferated, and adopted in the name of different futures