Simulationism analogy from paintings

[Doctor Xero]

I have three friends who are all artists -- all concern themselves with the creation of images.  All consider themselves serious artists.  But they have very different attitudes and goals.

Simon is interested in accuracy.  He likes to draw and paint things the way they really are, or, if he's painting something fictional, he likes to paint them the way they would actually look if they existed.  Mistakes in, say, human proportions bother him a lot.  Inconsistencies between a series of pictures supposedly of the same subject bother him a lot.  If he draws a castle in the air, you may be sure that he has carefully designed the interior of the castle and could tell you what's inside it and why it's up in the air and how it stays there.  It's not that he's into "realism" as such -- he's perfectly happy to draw with simple outlines and schematic representations, if the occasion calls for it -- but whatever style he uses, he will be using it in the interests of accurate representation of whatever he's
representing.  For a living, Simon works as a medical illustrator, accurately representing bones and organs, healthy and diseased, and he also does some architectural work, drawing buildings both real and as yet imaginary, as accurately as possible.
---snip!--
* Simon represents a Simulationist gamer.  Simulationsts care about accuracy.

I would have to disagree with you about your definition of simulationism, and I think in my disagreement I can shed light on the biggest difficulty I see with definitions of simulationist approaches.

Simulationists do not care about accuracy, we care about fidelity to integrity of verisimilitude.

That's not a semantic difference -- it is a crucial difference.

A surrealist painter would be more of a simulationist rather than a narrativist, because (in general) the surrealist wants the entirety of the painting to represent the internal reality or mindscape.  Unlike the narrativist, who focuses on playing with the image, we focus on re-creation of the experience underlying the image, the imaginary reality as understood from an emic perspective not etic perspective.

This desire for fidelity, for coherence or integrity, for verisimilitude, is the hallmark of a simulationist.

A simulationist painter would make his or her living also illustrating SF and fantasy novels.  While the narrativist painter might paint a vivid image inspired by the novel, a simulationist painter would paint an image which was internally consistent with and adhered to the universe presented within the novel.  That's why a narrativist painter might give Frodo really cool looking rodent eyes on a cover of The Fellowship of the Ring, because it evokes that sense of terrified burrowdweller in the audience, while the simulationist painter would never give Frodo rodent eyes no matter how cool, because to do so would break fidelity with the verisimilitude of the reality presented within the book.

Personally, I think that simulationism will never be understood nor given the respect it deserves until this difference is recognized.  YMMV.

Risk in a sim game is pushed down to the level of the characters.  It is the characters who are at risk.  It is they who may experience either success or failure.  Ideally, in sim play, the players don't care which.  They are there to "find out what happens" and if "what happens" happens to be that the characters fail, that is acceptable.  Players may root for their characters to succeed.  Indeed much of the adversity in Sim play is predicated on the players doing a good job at portraying their character's desire to succeed and the GMs doing a good job at portraying an enemy's desire to see them fail.  But ultimately the player's don't want their characters to succeed badly enough to be willing to violate the integrity of the simulation to make that happen.  In other words, no fudging, no illusionary technique, no Deus ex Machina to save the day.  That would be worse than character failure to sim play.

Well put!  This interest in finding out what happens is one of the reasons that fidelity towards the integrity of the verisimilitude is the primary trait of a simulationist (when compared with a narrativist or gamist).

Doctor Xero