Ah. That sort of makes sense. The single thing I found hardest to deal with in G/N/S was their weird statements about simulationism, which seemed to me to bear no relation either to what I knew about simulation as an actual scientific practice, or to the way I applied it to GMing.
In particular, I kept running into the statement that if you decided that things in your game world worked like X, and simply forced things to happen according to X directly, that you were "simulating" the fictional world that was the source for X. And I'd reflect that if I programmed my computer with a model of planetesimals orbiting a central mass, colliding, and sticking or bouncing, and the result of every single run was a star orbited solely by worlds of terrestrial mass or less—I would have to either say, "Okay, we're simulating an alternative cosmogony" or go in and change the basic parameters of the model till it produced solar systems with gas giants a reasonable part of the time, to simulate the real world where (many) solar systems have gas giants. But if I just stepped in and wrote a line of code to introduce gas giants at time T because I wanted them to be there and my model wasn't giving them to me—that would not be a simulation of solar system formation at all.
I eventually came to speculate that the Big Model was formulated by people who in fact detested simulation, and so were trying to define it from the outside, with no understanding of it.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-04-11 01:39 pm (UTC)In particular, I kept running into the statement that if you decided that things in your game world worked like X, and simply forced things to happen according to X directly, that you were "simulating" the fictional world that was the source for X. And I'd reflect that if I programmed my computer with a model of planetesimals orbiting a central mass, colliding, and sticking or bouncing, and the result of every single run was a star orbited solely by worlds of terrestrial mass or less—I would have to either say, "Okay, we're simulating an alternative cosmogony" or go in and change the basic parameters of the model till it produced solar systems with gas giants a reasonable part of the time, to simulate the real world where (many) solar systems have gas giants. But if I just stepped in and wrote a line of code to introduce gas giants at time T because I wanted them to be there and my model wasn't giving them to me—that would not be a simulation of solar system formation at all.
I eventually came to speculate that the Big Model was formulated by people who in fact detested simulation, and so were trying to define it from the outside, with no understanding of it.