A Universe to Call One’s Own

“…our brains did not evolve tools to perceive or intuitively understand the scales of microbes or galaxies. You can catch glimpses of the long zoom in special-effects sequences, but to understand the connections between those different scales, to understand our place in the universe of the very large and the very small, you have to take another way in”.

— Steven Johnson “The Long Zoom” [2006]

 

The quote above is part of an article by Steven Johnson for The New York Times, in which he interviews game creator Will Wright, who developed Sims and SimCity. The article examines Wright’s game Spores, which allows the user to create new worlds and colonize entire galaxies and individual worlds. Wright, throughout the article, discusses the viability of simulation in gaming as a vehicle through which to explore the limits of our experiential threshold and through which to best understand the physical laws of the universe. Wright talks about his struggle to create a viable atmosphere for one of his planets and how, through interaction with the platform, he has gained an appreciation for how complex our own environment is and how difficult a stable planetary atmosphere is to achieve. Like his other, previously mentioned games Spores encourages certain decisions and discourages others, with the world either flourishing or failing, as a result of the gamer’s decisions. The ‘reward and punishment’ method in gaming is a common feature, although it often does not relate to learning outside of the gaming platform, except for the ability to reward reflex skills and/or abstract thinking. Survival in a first person shooter game, for example, rewards certain decisions, such as one’s ability to hide effectively or take aim, yet the gaming controls used to achieve this function could be seen as too far removed from reality to reflect any useful, educational learning. Spores focuses on simulation that tells the user about scientific ‘truths’ that exist as physical and biological laws, independent of gaming function, such as the atmospheric conditions necessary to support life.

Like more complex gaming platforms Spores allows the user to explore numerous options outside of the main storyline, to interact with objects within the virtual world and to begin to understand how one might approach galactic colonization. Not all designs will lead to life and successful planetary conquest, but each user may widen the definitions of a life form or a viable planetary system. Wright argues that to truly understand the real world we must explore it using a platform through which we make our own decisions, whether in a fictional reality where we can control all matter, or merely the operations of an entire city. To be shown a video which explores our existence from single celled organisms to complex, self-aware beings would not, following this argument, give us an appreciation over the difficulty and unlikelihood of a successful outcome. Like most gaming platforms Spores operates in a rule based world, in which our actions cause reactions based on gaming rules, and therefore object A plus object B will cause variable C to happen because of the consistent rule D. Gaming platforms which use these rules could conceivable be explained as teaching a cause and effect relationship, in which the user learns an association between two events, and their action results in a preprogramed response from the game, either reward or punishment. An explanation of this rule does not offer, however, the answer as to whether this is the only or the most effective way in which to learn these associations, nor what lessons learning through gaming has that cannot be learnt by other means. Wright’s statement seems to merely reflect the old, unsubstantiated belief that ‘doing’ is better than simply observing, the difference today being that developments in gaming technology allows gamers to ‘do’ what was only possible to observe before.