You Are the One - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 5

We would often express a model as a diagram, or something made out of string
and cardboard, or even as a cartoon, a game, or indeed anything that allows us to
visualize the theory more clearly. Computer games are themselves models. SimCity
is a model that illustrates some of the complexities of urban planning. SimCity uses
a relatively simple theory of urban economics that is visualized in terms of a city
model. These days SimCity is actually used by economists to play “ what if ” games
to see how their economic theories work or don't. You can replace SimCity' s eco-
nomic model with a more complex one of your own and play and research at the
same time.
Scientifi c models may be more pragmatic in that they are related to some aspect
of reality by means of observational data, which in turn causes the theory upon which
the model is constructed to be reformulated, and so on. But doesn't that sound like
what I was just saying about how we learn to play games by experimenting with
them, by building up our own theory of how they work?
Theories and models have been at the heart of much of human understanding
and inquiry from very ancient times. Cultures often attempt to explain the world and
human beings' place in it by means of complex mythologies or etiological fables
(Carruthers, 1998). Such mythologies are essentially abstractions that allow complex
and inexplicable phenomena to be understood in terms of a more accessible set of
characters and stories set around them. Very often the underlying explanation of
natural phenomena will map onto supernatural beings and phenomena which thus
replace an unfathomable cause with a commonly held narrative. These are theories
explained in terms of stories and pictures, which are models of explanation. Theories
can work regardless of how true they are. Better, perhaps, to feel you understand
rather than be terrifi ed by knowing you don't.
With time, more rigorous forms of theorizing were invented. The ancient Meso-
potamians developed sophisticated mathematics as a technique for modeling trade
involving large numbers of items and customers (Davis and Hersh, 1983). Mathe-
matics was thus being used to build a model of trade and stock control. The ancient
Greeks, and following them the Arabic world, continued to develop theories and
models—mathematical and otherwise—for a variety of phenomena ranging from
cosmology to music and poetry. Meter and rhyming schemes for poetry, for example,
are models which facilitate the construction of new poems within established forms.
We use theories to try and express how we think bits of the world work. Some
theories are very specialized and diffi cult; quantum mechanics, for example, can be
a synonym for “diffi cult.” Other theories are less formidable.
As we already observed, theories may also be quite instrumental in the sense
that their application as an analysis technique—and the results obtained therein—
may be more important than the degree to which the model accurately refl ects reality.
Psychoanalysis is an obvious example because no one has yet established whether
the theory of psychoanalysis corresponds to the way our minds are structured and
function. Yet many people have been helped by psychoanalysis.
Semiotics, the study of signs and the way people construct meaning out of
them (e.g., Chandler, 2002), is perhaps another case in point because it has never
been ascertained whether or not signs as defi ned by semioticians actually represent