The Simulation

A simulation is a ’story that is not a story’.

The year is 1918.  The story is this.  (It starts in the cockpit of a SE5a biplane.)  You have been instructed to escort a flight of bombers scheduled to hit a German airfield behind enemy lines; the airfield some way over to the north east in Cambrai, about five miles beyond the broad muddy strip of no-mans-land.   Dawn, the sun just on the horizon, the air sharp and cold.  White fluffy clouds float in the sky where shadows darken the fields still.  Behind, to the southwest, is a pretty town with its spires and houses.  You are the story; sitting in a fragile box of plywood, piano wire and doped fabric - but in a way also you are the not-story; for it is not a story yet.  And perhaps never will be.  You take off, in flight you briefly test the .303 Vickers guns.  The smoke goes puffing away.   There are broad views on either side of the aircraft. 

Later the enemy come to meet us amidst of dark spots of flak.  I am shot down first shot by an albatross.  There is nothing I can do.  I hit the ground in flames and explode, and then in free camera view watch the ensuing air-battle take place without me.  We do badly.   I hit replay, restart, fast-forward to the same encounter, hoping to do better this time.  So it goes.  One can say that this, having these possibilites so created in the form of the simulation, takes the story represented - 1918, the RAF, the war in the air - that it takes this to pieces, and puts it back together in modular form, in terms that because they enable me to choose the ’story’ for myself create not something complete but on the contrary an open-ended field of behaviours, of roles that the story disintegrates into.

The story ceases, to be replaced by a kind of role-playing.   

Tags: Narrative, PC Games, Postmodernism