Ted Friedman, "Civilization and its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity and Space"

(In On a silver platter: CD-ROMs and the promises of a new technology)

- Video games seem to restructure/reorganize perception (driving like a game example)
- New frameworks for interpreting, understanding, mapping the real world
- Games are still new, not yet codified/familiar ("killer apps," rapid technological advancement and demand for novelty)
- Always-ideological ways of seeing -> presented in a fresh light? Radical possibilities?
- Civilization combines radical challenge and conventional ideological assumptions
- Omnipotent, almost omniscient leader-god with many roles (although, all the roles are essentially the same - resource management)
- "Internalize the logic of the program" -> teaches systems of thought -> identify with the computer (I might argue that these systems of thought are already internalized)
- Neither competition nor collaboration: synthesis, being-with, melding
- Immersion as being an extension of the machines (not the other way around)
- Cybernetic circuit/feedback loop
- Player is integrated into the system
- Simulation games create the opportunity to think through/reflect on what it means to be a cyborg
- New kinds of stories based on geography, space (encounter, transform, master spaces) Jenkins and Fuller, "spatial stories"
- Transform places into spaces (Heideggerian summoning forth of nature as standing-reserve?)
- Ther eis never a personal, subjective "tour" experience of Civilization's spaces (it remains abstract)
- "The story of the map itself" (ie: the system itself) -> not just an environment, the hero also
- Maps (and charts, graphs, etc.) are collections of subjective judgements in which subjectivity is ideologically erased (objectivity, scientific "god's-eye view")
- Does the technological aura of computers enable this erasure?
- Felxibility of multiple strategies (war, technology, etc.)
- Underlying truth that "global co-existence is a matter of winning and losing"
- Abstractness oversimplifies the complexities of imperialism, colonialism, etc.
- Transhistorical conceptions of science, religion, nation, etc.
- Purely functional role of religion and the humanities
- Scientific determinism
- Absence of hybridity -> nationalistic destiny (later versions of Civilization mediate this somewhat with the addition of Culture as a quantifiable gameplay element, but this carries with it another set of ideological assumptions)
- Possibility of transcending these assumptions through play -> mastery requires an understanding of how the system works (But can't this "understanding" just as easily take the form of precisely the same transparent, implicit, normalized ideological truth that Friedman suggests it might help to transcend?)