ABSTRACT
Making ‘simulation games,’ and creating their content, is a protracted process riven with paradoxes. On the one hand, the guiding objective and ambition of the development team must always be to strive, unswervingly, towards the goals of authenticity, fidelity, and realism, since these goals mark out ‘simulations’ from the merely ‘casual’ game. And on the other hand, design compromises imposed by technological limitations or by essential ludic features, or even by pragmatic commercially driven decision-making, always seem to move these goals beyond reach. Indeed, in some respects, the proposition ‘simulation game’ is oxymoronic since ‘game’ seems to always already undermine ‘simulation.’ However, following that particular line of discourse would lead us far away from the enterprise at hand: exploring the inherent creative tensions that exist between the development of commercially viable simulation games on the one hand, and satisfying the expectations of simulation game players on the other.
