Scaling The Mesocosm

• Authors: BREITLING Dustin
• Year of publication: 2022
• Type: Conference abstract
• Description: Scaling the Mesocosm This talk endeavors to explore how Video-Gaming has emerged as a global ubiquitous medium and critically an engine that ‘premediates’ or actively shapes future pathways. Further, it intends to explore the intersection of premediation in relation to spawning possible futures, complemented by an exploration of how gaming engenders questions in terms of 'scaling' with respect to complex systems. This talk aims to link up the role of gaming with Alenda Chang’s contention that gaming environments generate ‘mesocosms’ that in turn can equip us with ‘scalar understanding’. Departing from the conception of games as oversimplified abstractions, we can rather explore how they compel us to investigate into the nature of scaling and modeling. Respectively, games are vehicles that attempt to replicate natural spaces that afford the possibilities to tinker, create tractable scales, and critically play with the key properties or specific features that are mimicking the physical world. Surveying an array of ecological games, we can chart out the intimate historical relationship and understanding of ecology bound up with simulation from the works of Jay Forrester, Howard T. Odum, Buckminster Fuller, and the seminal bookGaming: the Future’s Language by Richard D. Duke (1974) that posited a simulation game or serious game could be utilized as a means for planning and decision making. Critical questions arise concerning the nature of visualization that accompanies my investigation, particularly how worlds are rendered or modeled in their spatial representation, and the potential hindrances of the ‘complexity paradox’ as posited by Hugh Cannon. We are posed challenges that highlight how the addition of variables or diversity of game parameters that bid to further represent the complexity of systems potentially can dilute the capacity to effectively track and furnish us with the needed resources of legibility in the face of wicked problems and the multiple elements that compose complex systems. Thus, key considerations concerning how to scale up from the mesocosms of our gameworlds to face the challenges of capturing the frictions and realities of nonlinear and interconnected phenomena, the emergence as well as alternation of properties of systems that are deeply scale-dependent, becomes a decisive terrain for exploration. Moreover, it requires being attendant to the realities that video games fundamentally and thermodynamically differ in many respects from complex systems. Importantly, this becomes crucial in grasping the difference in aspects of scale between the virtual and legacy world that are also interdependent on multiple factors. These factors can be highlighted along the grounds of key concepts such as ‘irreversibility’ due to the potential to wipe away a systems’ or a games’ history, openness of a system by virtue of a video game itself incapable to interact with its surrounding environment.Nonetheless, with the emergence of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, the speculative contours that arise to complement the focus on providing legibility and ways of reimainging scale in relation to complex systems becomes negotiable. With the increasing sophistication of Artificial Intelligence that becomes fruitful grounds for expanding the possibility of rebuilding adversarial or scorched landscapes, environmental generation as well as the collection of real-time data or player experience modeling that are bound to enrich and equally further complexify the nature of gaming experience. Ultimately we are thrust in a position to imagine the increased employment of Deep Zoom Technology, Generative Adversarial Networks, Natural Language Processing that will complement the role of Real-Time Data, or Player Experience Modeling as opening the space of possibilities for translating and enriching considerations concerning concepts of scale as more tangible.