How To Build a Time Machine

Maurice Suckling, Assistant Professor of Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic and author of Paper Time Machines gives a short TED-style talk on game design. 

Designers of historical games built machines capable of transporting users into a sense of a different time and place. The five ingredients are a suitable traveler, and four different rhetorical approaches – aesthetic (how things look), procedural (how systems function), discursive (how systems are tied to thematic content), and experiential (how systems and other rhetorical approaches combine to make us feel).

I think I really don’t understand what I am doing, so I am glad he does.. after referencing a short Kafka story “The Top” he concludes:

The point here is this: that if we think of simulation games as a process we must bear in mind that these are processes in action. And if we think of history as a complex series of enmeshed processes we could say that a relatively poor way of attempting to model history would be to write about it, whereas a relatively more fidelitous way to attempt to model history would be to make games about it. Because when players are playing history they’re experiencing processes in action, they are experiencing the spinning of the top when the spinning of the top is the most essential thing about it.