SIMULATION

Myers / SIMULATION
& GAMING
AS PLAY
/ June 1999

Simulation as Play:
A Semiotic Analysis

David Myers
Loyola University

This article discusses the distinction between algorithmic and experiential simulations from a
semiotic perspective. Parallels are drawn between theories and definitions of play, and theories
and definitions of simulations. Conclusions concern the degree to which defining simulations as
a form of representational play might more clearly explicate the value and function of educa-
tional simulations.

KEYWORDS: computer games; play; representationalism; semiosis.

Some time ago, Simulation & Gaming (September 1991) offered a debate
on human component modeling for computerized business simulations. One
of the main issues raised during that debate was whether simulation algo-
rithms or simulation experiences should be uppermost in the minds and plans
of game designers. Arguing for the former, Thavikulwat (1991a, 1991b)
agreed that “incidental aspects of reality should be omitted, and simplicity is
preferred” (1991a, p. 350) yet championed the validity of algorithmic struc-
tures within simulations. Representing a more interpretative stance, Wolfe
(1991) maintained that “a game’s theoretical algorithmic validity might
divert the attention of game creators from the [more important] holistic
aspects of the experiential situation” (p. 360). This experiential situation is
characterized not by the game itself but by “how players cognitively and
emotionally interact” (p. 362).
More recently in Simulation & Gaming (March 1996), this same topic
guides a discussion between Klabbers (1996a, 1996b) and Law-Yone (1996).
In a detailed analysis of simulation game components, Klabbers argued for
“free-form” (but not formless) gaming within “autopoietic systems” in which
algorithmic validity is of less concern than recursive algorithmic construc-
tion. Law-Yone, on the other hand, expressed dismay over the tautological
implications of such a learning environment. His conclusion, in contrast to
that of Klabbers, was that simulation algorithms (e.g., game rules) are more
properly imposed by game designer than game player.
SIMULATION & GAMING, Vol. 30 No. 2, June 1999 147-162
© 1999 Sage Publications, Inc.
147

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148 SIMULATION & GAMING / June 1999

This article further explores the ontological issues underlying this debate.
Are simulations fundamentally unique learning tools emphasizing experien-
tial processes? Or are simulations properly categorized as variations on exist-
ing learning techniques emphasizing algorithmic validities? The focus of this
article will be on how these two different perspectives on the value and mean-
ing of simulations can be understood within the theoretical domain of semiot-
ics and how these two contrasting perspectives within the literature on educa-
tional simulations are duplicated within existing literature on human (and
other species) play. Final comments concern how to distinguish algorithmic
and experiential simulations within a model of representational play.1

The Play Debate

Debate concerning the function of simulations parallels debate concern-

ing the function of play. These parallels occur in two related thematic con-
texts concerning children’s play—one relatively narrow, the other compara-
tively broad. The first context is that of learning theory; at issue is what
children (or the youth of any species) learn from play. The second context is
that of evolutionary biology; at issue is whether play results in random or
nonrandom variations in behavior.

Functional Versus Dysfunctional Play

Learning theory has become synonymous in many educational contexts
with a theory of child development. In these contexts, play is conceptualized
as a developmental aid or catalyst in achieving some advanced cognitive
stage in which play is less useful (Piagetian learning models are exemplars
here—see Piaget, 1952).
Within this developmental framework, play is best understood as a means
to an end and is well defined only with regard to its efficacy in achieving that
end. Because a full range of play behaviors is rarely contained within devel-
opmental categories, this leads, commonly, to play being poorly defined or,
in other words, “many difficulties in locating the appropriate phenomena [of
play] as well as in locating a useful methodology to capture such phenom-
ena” (Sutton-Smith, 1995, p. 275).
In contrast to the assumptions of structuralist developmental paradigms,
however, Sternberg (1990) has found that human learning strategies and
intellectual development continue beyond the physical maturation process,
and, after cataloguing a great variety of children’s play activities (e.g.,
rough-and-tumble play) that do not easily fit into existing developmental

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 Myers / SIMULATION AS PLAY 149

models, Sutton-Smith and Kelly-Byrne (1984) have questioned the bounda-

ries and limitations established by dominant social-scientific theories of
play—particularly defining play “as contributing to child development in one
way or another” (p. 308; see also Sutton-Smith, 1998). Similarly, Csikszent-
mihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi (1988) have located play-like phenomena
(“flow”) within a variety of human experiences, and Bateson (1991) has been
influential in particularizing play as a representational (framing) mechanism
operating within ecological contexts including but not limited to those
involving human beings.
Even in these alternative paradigms, however, a proper accounting for
play is difficult. In studies of animal play, for instance, it remains controver-
sial whether play has some well-defined evolutionary function—even one so
basic as contributing to species survival. Despite many observations and
theories (see the compendia in Fagen, 1984) emphasizing the uselessness of
much of animal play, “the trend of current biological arguments . . . still
seems to favor adaptive significance for play. This is so even if we cannot yet
say just what that significance is” (Fagen, 1995, pp. 34-35). In this
regard—emphasizing the adaptive significance of play—most research on
animal play operates within the same developmental paradigm that guides
learning theory. In both research contexts, play is significant only insofar as it
aids the transition from child to adult and/or, by extension, from animal-like
to human-like behavior and cognition. Most glaringly missing from this per-
spective has been a full acknowledgement and adequate explanation of the
nonadaptive characteristics of play, particularly the individual organism’s
loss of time and energy.2
An exciting alternative to the notion of play as developmental aid—one
that avoids the arbitrary delimitation of play functions—is play as plasticity,
wherein both positive and negative consequences of play are allowed and
expected.

The concept of plasticity has a long history in the field of psychology. . . . Plas-
ticity is accepted as a genetic process, and is defined as “production by a single
genome of a diversity of potentially adaptive responses, whose timing, struc-
tural relations, and environmental sensitivity are subject to natural selection.”
(West-Eberhard, 1989, as cited in West, King, & Freeburg, 1994, p. 238)

This notion has been bandied about as plasticity, open-ended evolution,

perpetual novelty (Bedau, 1996), adaptive variability (Gould, 1997), and
adaptive potentiation (Sutton-Smith, 1998). All of these definitions concep-
tualize play as a behavioral randomizer of some sort and would ultimately
draw parallels between behavioral variations observed during play and

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150 SIMULATION & GAMING / June 1999

physical variations observed during species propagation. Both types of varia-

tion would enhance species adaptability through similar procedures applied
within dissimilar temporal contexts. This particular conceptual framework is
advantageous in that it allows functional and dysfunctional play to serve the
same goal of behavioral flexibility. However, this approach remains at odds
with much traditional learning theory.

Genetic mutation, the ultimate source of biological variability, is a random

process, whereas the generation of new ideas is constrained by existing knowl-
edge and is far from random. . . . This difference in the generation of variability
leads to children’s cognitive development being directional in a way that the
evolution of species is not. (Siegler, 1996, p. 24)

Siegler’s (1996) model of cognitive development—here representative of

an amalgamation of competing neo-Piagetian developmental theories—
assumes that individual cognitive change is guided along species-specific
(directed) paths because that development is largely predisposed to operate
through “goal sketches,” which can be “limited to domains in which evolu-
tionary history has specially prepared children to learn” (p. 196), and thus
play remains subordinate (both theoretically and functionally) to the imbed-
ded structural characteristics of preformed learning (developmental)
channels.
In the broader contexts of evolutionary biology, however, the seemingly
random and apparently dysfunctional aspects of play are more difficult to
ignore. In these contexts, the emphasis is not on how children learn but (to
paraphrase Bateson, 1991) on how organisms learn how to learn or, put even
more broadly, how living systems evolve how to evolve.

Random Versus Nonrandom Variation

Evolutionary biology defines that category of life described by learning
theory models (e.g., the child) as a self-organizing system, and there is con-
siderable controversy over whether self-organizing systems are governed
most fundamentally by random or nonrandom processes. Of particular con-
cern in this respect is the evolutionary process of natural selection, and most
critical to an understanding of natural selection is “that most frustrating of
Darwinian black sheep, the theory of variation” (Ridley, 1985, p. 44).
On the nonrandom (directed change) side of this controversy are a great
variety of approaches unified by an assumption of universal structural or
developmental constraints that bias species variability—similar in many

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 Myers / SIMULATION AS PLAY 151

respects to Siegler’s (1996) model above. “This position seems to be the

majority view” (Maynard-Smith et al., 1985).

The central concern . . . is the relation between developmental constraints and

natural selection. Developmental constraints are defined as biases on the pro-
duction of variant phenotypes or limitations to phenotypic variability, caused
by the structure, architecture, functions, and dynamics of developmental sys-
tems. Such constraints . . . allow exploration of certain regions of genomic,
morphological, or behavioral space in a nonrandom manner. (Depew & Weber,
1995, pp. 481-482)

On the other (random, nondirected change) side,

Natural selection is viewed instead the way Dobzhansky, Lewontin, and Levins
view it. Its most challenging task is to produce a range of life-cycle traits that
allow populations, or perhaps species and lineages, to respond to changing
environments. Adaptability, in this view, is itself a paradigmatic adaptation. So
construed, adaptability depends on maintaining a great deal of variation in
populations. (Depew & Weber, 1995, p. 484)

These two positions—selectionism and neutralism—involve many

related controversies, including exactly how natural selection works and at
just what level of evolutionary process (micro or macro) natural selection
might exert greater influence than neutral drift. At the core of this debate,
however, just as in the debate concerning the function of children’s play and
the value of adult simulations, is a dialectic of form and formlessness, order
and chaos. “In essence, the neo-Darwinian expects that a given variation is
correlated with some environmental variable, and the neutralist expects that it
is not” (Gregory, 1987, p. 239).
The great problem facing play theory is that there is the widely experi-
enced but poorly understood phenomenon of play. Some subset of what we
call play seems to aid in achieving educational, developmental, and evolu-
tionary goals. Some subset of play does not. Should a proper theory of play
ignore the second subset, prioritize the first, and confine play to domains
other than its own? Or, should proper theory and explanation admit the sec-
ond subset on equal footing with the first and release play to the white noise
of currently unquantifiable ends?
The contention in the remainder of this article is that semiotics—particu-
larly biosemiotics—offers a useful theoretical framework for explaining and
resolving the distinctions between random and nonrandom variation, ordered
and chaotic play, and, ultimately, algorithmic and experiential simulations.

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152 SIMULATION & GAMING / June 1999

Simulation as Representation

Here, most fundamentally, a simulation is a symbol system: that which

represents something else. This is perhaps clearest when simulations are
designed to represent (and communicate) algorithmic structures. However,
even when the experiential aspects of simulations are emphasized, the refer-
ential aspect of the simulation remains intact, that is, “[free-form] games
are . . . self-referential systems” (Klabbers, 1996a, p. 88). Therefore, a first
step in understanding the differences between experiential and algorithmic
simulation designs is to examine their similarities as representations. This
requires a brief overview of fundamental concepts and approaches in
semiotics.
There are many variants of semiotic analysis, but all refer in some manner
to three important components of symbol systems: representations (e.g.,
signs and symbols), referents (i.e., that which is represented by signs and
symbols), and the relationship between the two. The relationship between the
representation and the represented is perhaps the most interesting of these
three and the most controversial. The manner in which this particular compo-
nent is characterized most often distinguishes among different semiologies.
Most contemporary semioticians, following the lead of Saussure (1960),
contend that the relationship between representation and represented is arbi-
trary in nature and, correspondingly, governed by social conventions and
rules. Many poststructuralist semioticians have exploited the arbitrariness of
representation-represented relationships to reveal the ambiguities of mean-
ings derived from culturally dependent sign and symbol systems (Derrida,
Foucault). However, despite assigning different social origins and attributes
to the representation-represented relationship, semioticians implicitly
assume that intentionality is characteristic of all mental phenomena.

Representation in Philosophy of Mind

In Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint (1874/1973), Franz Bren-
tano advanced the thesis that mental (psychical) activities—in opposition to
physical activities—are most essentially object directed or, in other words,
about something else. This assumption of “aboutness” (intentionality) has
been critical to all subsequent development within philosophy of mind. With
few exceptions (see, for instance, Gibson, 1979, and Van Gelder, 1995), most
celebrated theories and simulations of mental activities have been represen-
tational models (Chomsky’s transformational grammar, Johnson-Laird’s
mental models, Newell’s SOAR, Fodor’s language of thought, etc.), wherein
great effort is expended to detail the precise manner in which mental

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 Myers / SIMULATION AS PLAY 153

representations (“mentalese”—Fodor) are manipulated and transformed.

Even in the case of recent models and simulations of the mental involving
neural networks and distributed processing—wherein signs and symbols are
not explicitly a part of the simulation design (most particularly, Van Gelder,
1995)—representational qualities are assumed and expected to emerge.3
Unfortunately, classical representationalism as advanced by Locke (An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690) suffered from a well-
known infinite-regress problem: If indeed the mind could only know objects
through representations of those objects, then the mind was forced to know
about representations only through representations of those representa-
tions—and so forth and so on until this problem was made most obvious. Of
what then, critics asked, could mental content possibly consist?
This problem was eventually mediated, if not solved, by critical realists
(see Sellars, 1922) through either oblique or direct reference to sensation.
The basic representational characteristics of mental activities, just like the
basic characteristics of sensation, are built-in, hard-wired within the human
species through evolutionary processes. Thus, the original “content” (or the
represented) of representations is that content that serves some biological
function necessary for species survival. In this manner, through final refer-
ence to evolutionary processes and biological necessities, representational
regress can be at least slowed and perhaps halted.
It is exactly this same problem of content, originating in discussions of a
representational mind, that is at issue in the debate concerning experiential
and algorithmic simulations and concerning random and nonrandom play.
That is, what exactly is play (or, are simulations) “about”? Law-Yone (1996),
for instance, fears that simulations based on “self-referential systems” too
easily become “isolated from the real world and . . . but an artifice”
(pp. 96-97).

Representation as Living Process

Much effort in modeling human mental behavior representationally,
although successful in certain artificial intelligence (expert system) applica-
tions of extremely narrow focus, has been undermined by this nagging prob-
lem of content. Searle’s Chinese box problem presents this problem most
dramatically. (See also Harnad’s, 1990, explication of “the symbol ground-
ing problem.”)4
Problems of content have caused artificial intelligence to reevaluate one of
its most basic assumptions: the “physical symbol system hypothesis” (Gene-
sereth & Nilsson, 1987; Newell & Simon, 1981). This hypothesis states that
symbol manipulation is a sufficient process for explaining intelligence.

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154 SIMULATION & GAMING / June 1999

However, the problem of content suggests that symbol manipulation within a

representational mind may be necessary but not entirely sufficient for this
purpose. Also required is the contextualization of symbol manipulation
within a living organism. With this realization, artificial intelligence gives
way to artificial life as the proper theoretical domain within which to under-
stand Brentano’s (1874/1973) intentionality. “Since intelligence is an
emergent feature of living systems, AI and cognitive science can be
thought of as included with A-Life, or (ahistorically) as offshoots of it”
(Boden, 1997, p. 60).
Artificial life is the study of mechanical/logical systems that exhibit
behavior(s) of living systems—self-organizing systems. One of the most fun-
damental assumptions driving A-Life research is that “life is form”
(Emmeche, 1994, p. 18). That is, life has a certain structure or form that is its
essence. This form does not depend on the physical embodiment of life but
may be, at least partially, determined by the physical (e.g., chemical) charac-
teristics of that embodiment.
Given this assumption, life can be explained in purely formal terms—just
as Turing’s universal machine can be explained (and simulated) in purely for-
mal terms. For this form to be convincing, however, it must possess some
content that we, as living creatures, recognize as our own. Thus, the problem
of content in artificial life studies (as opposed to that problem in representa-
tionalism) is as much a problem of semantic function as semantic identity.
That is, important questions asked by artificial life research include, “How do
representations emerge in nature?” and “What is their biological function in
living organisms?” And it is a new variant of semiotics—biosemiotics—that
most directly addresses these issues.
As critical realism was to classical representationalism, so biosemiotics is
to cognitive science. Biosemiotics offers a natural-historical grounding point
for the problem of content. From such a theoretical perspective, certain natu-
rally occurring recursive representations—including the human representa-
tion of self—are indicative of a “closed causal circular process” (Maturana,
1970, p. 5). It is this particular formal structure that Maturana and Varela
(1980) label “autopoiesis” (or self-forming), and it is this same structure of
representation that Klabbers (1996a) uses to describe “free-form” simula-
tions. (See also Fleischaker, 1984.)
The relationship between the represented and the representation, so con-
tentious in other variants of semiotics, is here more clearly defined. In a very
real sense, what is being represented by a self-forming system is the represen-
tation process itself.

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 Myers / SIMULATION AS PLAY 155

The deep issue for the student of cognition is how the meaning seeker proceeds
in getting to a final formulation. . . . I am not going literary or anti-science.
These are the things we see when we observe how people construct their mean-
ings in the world . . . —probably all have biological roots in the genome.
(Bruner, 1997, p. 287)

Thus, the problem of content is shuttled into the deep background—into

“biological roots.” This is not, however, a trivial solution. The defining
assumptions of biosemiotics and artificial life research—that semiosis is an
irreducible property of physical form and that life is a formal property of mat-
ter—imply that the problem of content is actually a property of content,
indicative of natural and necessary limitations of the universal representa-
tional process. From this perspective, representation requires boundary con-
ditions (such as those that exist between self and other) and results in para-
doxical representations whenever these boundary conditions are themselves
the object of representational transformation. Because life is, itself, a special
sort of boundary condition, the study of life is best positioned as a study of the
relationship between representations of life (here, the sign/symbol-making
process itself, or semiosis) and that which those representations represent
(here, physical properties of matter). Or, as Hoffmeyer (1995) states,

Rather than understanding biology as a separate layer “between” physics and

semiotics, we should then see biology as a science of the interface in which
these two sciences meet, an interface in which we study the origin and evolu-
tion of sign processes, semiosis (p. 5). A modern unification of biology there-
fore has to be based on the fundamentally semiotic nature of life. (p. 11)

Simulation as Play

Currently, what distinguishes simulations designed and played for educa-

tional purposes and simulations designed and played for entertainment pur-
poses? Certainly, some very successful commercial computer games (e.g.,
CIVILIZATION and SIMCITY) have been promoted as educational simula-
tions after receiving notice and serious review in educational publications
(Frye & Frager, 1996; Pahl, 1991; Teague & Teague, 1995).
After observing computer game play in a variety of settings over the past
decade (beginning with Myers, 1984), I have found two important distinc-
tions between the self-motivated play of computer games and the administra-
tion of educational simulations. These two distinctions are very much rele-
vant to the theoretical issues raised in this article.

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156 SIMULATION & GAMING / June 1999

Repetitive Play Behavior

First, and perhaps most important, simulations designed for entertainment
purposes are designed for (and receive) repeated play. Educational simula-
tions, on the other hand, are played much less often, frequently only once.
SIMCITY is prototypical in the former respect; it is, essentially, a never-
ending game—see Myers (1991) for a more detailed description—that can be
neither fully experienced nor mastered in a single setting.
A very common experience among computer gamers (not restricted to
players of simulations per se) is an obsessive preoccupation with game play,
often resulting in sleep deprivation to the point of physical exhaustion.
Games that are most “fun” (according to popular game reviews and player
feedback, e.g., CIVILIZATION and CIVILIZATION II, both coarse-grained
simulations of human history) are distinguished by their ability to retain
player interest during repeated play. These games retain a high level of player
interest despite the player’s full knowledge of all simulation algorithms:
mechanics, rules, and winning strategies. Players often return to such games
and repeat their moves and decisions in a very patterned and predictable way,
apparently—much like practiced ballroom dancers—gaining as much joy
from the repetition as the novelty of the experience.
In this instance, then, the appeal of the entertainment simulation is not so
much in its content as in its manner of presentation (and representation) of
that content. Particular representation processes (e.g., “empire builder”
designs, of which all the above are examples) are now well known within the
popular game marketplace and have, in fact, attained genre status.

Recursive Play Design

Second, commercially popular simulations depend to a much greater
degree on self-reflexive structures than do most educational simulations.
This is, in fact, a design characteristic that I have argued elsewhere (Myers,
1991, 1992a, 1992b), and it is strongly associated with the repetitive play
described above.
Here, I am defining self-reflexive structures—or recursive design—as
elements of game play that, during play, change the rules and/or context of
subsequent game play. This is seen in its least complex form—in video
arcade “shooters” and the like—as a series of levels through which the gamer
must pass to successfully complete the game. In the least sophisticated
implementations of this design structure, only the temporal characteristics of
the game are altered: The player must accomplish tasks within the simulation
at an ever-increasing speed. In more sophisticated implementations,

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 Myers / SIMULATION AS PLAY 157

however, it is the game rules themselves that are altered, requiring the player
to rewrite those rules and, in effect, redesign the game during play.
Simulations of human interaction, including pencil-and-paper fantasy
role-playing games (see Myers, 1992a) and the extremely popular card game
MAGIC: THE GATHERING, are common, noncomputerized (and noncom-
puterizable in their original forms) examples of this design structure. None
allows a definitive game end, and, for this reason, none is too concerned with
a definitive set of game rules, preferring to present rules and rules addenda as
endless encyclopedic lists rather than to detail them in some more objective-
ly verifiable (and compact) algorithmic format.
In this instance, again, the appeal of the entertainment simulation is not
determined by content alone but rather by those rules and design structures
that allow content to be transformed during play.
These two important distinctions between educational and entertainment
simulations would seem to indicate—as might be expected—that entertain-
ment simulations are more appropriately classified as experiential than algo-
rithmic simulations. However, this is not universally the case. The problem of
content remains in entertainment settings, and much the same debate
between designers of algorithmic and experiential simulations takes place
among the designers and players of computer simulations—particularly war
games. In this context, battle lines are drawn between those who prioritize the
entertainment value of a game over its verisimilitude and those “grognards”
who take a more strongly realist position and argue that war-game simula-
tions should reproduce the mechanics of history as closely as possible.

#: 850194 S4/Strategy Games

09-Jan-95 20:14:07
Sb: #WAR VS SIMULATION
Fm: Peter T. Szymonik 70474,235
To: Chris A. Keller 74644,2157 (X)

To me, and most die-hard veteran grognards, a game like Panzer General is not
a wargame, it’s a strategy game with the emphasis on game. A wargame to us is
a complex military simulation that takes into account dozens of different fac-
tors with serious historical limitations as to what the gamer can and can’t do.
(CompuServe Gamers Forum, 1995)

Here, though, importantly, the issue is not precisely that between formal
algorithm and free-form experience but rather between the mechanics of his-
tory and the mechanics of fun—or, in the vernacular, between the grognard
and the beer-and-pretzels guy. Certainly, the fun aspect of experiential simu-
lations is not ignored within more scholarly debates; free-form (experiential)

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158 SIMULATION & GAMING / June 1999

games are, as Law-Yone (1996) notes, “especially strong in the ‘feeling good’
criterion of game evaluation” (p. 95). However, the debate presented in Simu-
lation & Gaming has most often assumed—on both sides—that the degree to
which players benefit from educational simulations is the degree to which
those simulations go “beyond their entertainment roles [and] relate in some
way to reality” (Law-Yone, 1996, p. 95).
Left unanswered is the degree to which the process of having fun—of
playing—represents reality and within what theoretical context that playful
reality might be most beneficially explained and understood. Why, for in-
stance, is playing games fun? Why is it that the human species finds pleasure
in play, pretense, and simulation? And why are these questions—surely fun-
damental to an understanding of the biological origins and functions of
play—of such little concern within discussions of experiential and algo-
rithmic simulations that define simulation value in terms of “reasoned action
in the context of the real world” (Law-Yone, 1996, p. 96)?

Conclusion

Pondering the questions above poses, once again, the problem of content.
We know, we believe, what algorithmic simulations are about: They are about
the algorithms they contain. But what are experiential simulations about? It
has not been enough to say that they are about the experiences they contain
and leave it at that.5 What, exactly, do we learn from experiential simulations?
What, exactly, do they represent? What part are they, exactly, of the real
world—not the world they create, but the world of their origin?
Experiential simulations make obvious the difference between algo-
rithmic and experiential simulations—and, ultimately, the difference
between a representation and what it represents. Experiential simulations
teach us that some representational designs convey conventional representa-
tional content and some do not; thus, we learn by examining experiential
simulations that there are common features of representational designs that
convey no conventional content. Sometimes, we call these features autopoie-
tic and/or tautological. Sometimes, we call these features paradoxical. Para-
doxical representational designs are very common, very natural, very engag-
ing, and very empty. They are simultaneously novel and repetitive. Their
design is very much like the design of play.
If the representational designs we call educational simulations are truly
different from the representational designs we call classroom lectures—if

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 Myers / SIMULATION AS PLAY 159

they represent some different thing rather than merely representing some-
thing differently—then, ironically, it would appear counterproductive to pro-
mote verisimilitude as the value of these simulations. Simulation as play
forces an awareness of the representational process—semiosis—and how
dependent our epistemologies are on the biological mechanics of representa-
tionalism. In representing conventional representations, simulation leads us
to question those representations and, ultimately, assign reality elsewhere.
Simulation may be truly valuable and unique only insofar as it is about the
otherwise hidden reality of the semiotic process.

Notes

1. It should be acknowledged that the approach taken here begs the question of whether
simulations are significantly different from more traditional educational activities—a belief
widely held by most simulation practitioners but still somewhat controversial within the litera-
ture. Certainly, the benefits of simulations as learning tools have yet to be defined clearly in
empirical terms (Randel, Morris, Wetzel, & Whitehill, 1992; Wolfe & Roberts, 1993). Most
commonly, simulation proponents describe these benefits in terms of the two categories
above—as either related to improvements in learning traditional topics of academic study
(Wolfe, 1997) or qualitative differences in the learning experience itself.
2. This apparent oddity of dysfunctional animal play is so striking that some play theo-
rists—for example, Bolwig (1963), cited in Fagen (1984)—advance a “surplus energy” model in
which the major benefit of play is, in fact, the depletion of an organism’s unused time and energy.
3. Smolensky (1988), for instance, champions the use of parallel distributed processing
(PDP) models as bridging the gap between neural information processing and symbolic infor-
mation processing by supplying a “subsymbolic” interface.
4. The Chinese room problem is as follows: There is a man trapped inside a room. He knows
no Chinese. He receives Chinese symbols through a hole in the wall of this room, and—after
consulting some vast tome of abstract rules for manipulating the strange (to him) symbols—the
man returns symbols through the same hole in the wall. The symbols the man returns through the
hole in the wall are interpreted by outside-the-room fluent speakers of Chinese as intelligible
responses to the original input symbols. Yet, Searle maintains that the man inside the room need
know no Chinese—nor would a computer that would similarly accept input consult abstract
rules for the manipulation of that input and return meaningless (to it) symbols as output. This
output, in other words, does not have the same content for the man/computer inside the room as it
does for the outside-the-room speakers of Chinese.
5. Crookall, Oxford, and Saunders (1987), for instance, define the game-like “simulation”
experience as a “reality defining process” (p. 170) and therein distinguish it from a more repre-
sentational “simulator” experience that models (rather than defines) reality. However, distin-
guishing between these two experiences on the basis of one defining and one representing the
same “reality” has proved problematic—as the continuing debate (particularly Law-Yone, 1996)
demonstrates. The argument here retains the representational qualities of both experiences and
distinguishes between them most fundamentally on the basis of their content, not their function.

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160 SIMULATION & GAMING / June 1999

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David Myers is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of
Communications at Loyola University in New Orleans. His principal research interests are cog-
nitive play and novelty/randomness in human behavior. Recent publications are Playing Against
the Self: Representation and Evolution in Play and Culture Studies, Vol. 1: Diversions and Diver-
gences in Fields of Play (Greenwich, 1998) and Play and Paradox: How to Build a Semiotic
Machine in Semiotica (Walter de Gruyter, 1999).

ADDRESS: David Myers, Graduate Studies, Loyola University, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, New
Orleans, LA 70118-6195, USA; telephone 504-865-3296; fax 504- 865-2666;
e-mail dmyers@loyno.edu; internet http://www.loyno.edu/~dmyers/Nresearch_
and_personal.html

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