Playing in Miniature Gardens
Through the ginko leaves of a japanese garden, a lesson on simulations
Gonzalo Frasca
I was about to entitle this article The city and the Japanese miniature garden but I stopped myself, probably out of shame. After all, Japan has become the ultimate in cool clichés. Certainly, the Japanese archipelago is not as exotic as it used to be. You still get lost in its culture, but in a much more friendly way. Think about it for a second. In the eighties, it was Harrison Ford who would roam the Japaneesy Los Angeles’ streets in Blade Runner. Now, dark film-noir cops have been replaced by down-to-Earth Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson. Japan is still the ultimate labyrinthic Disneyland, but it is now much more open to pathetic characters, like Murray, you or myself. Exoticness has been democratized. The seas where Sandokán and other pirates roamed have become vacation spots served by cheap airlines. Satellites offer us pictures of every place in the planet. Imperialism does not require armies anymore, but battalions of tourists.
The virtual tourists visiting Sim City bring back home strange souvenirs. Not postcards, but rather sociological and urban rules. You learn about crime rates and urban planning, where to build schools, about the need for green spaces, taxes and the challenge of creating a network of highways
Lost in Translation is probably one of the last travel adventures, the end of the mysterious and glamorous Far East. Nevertheless, Japan will not become mundane before putting up a fight. Its influence on our culture particularly in entertainment – is growing. Isolated from the rest of the world, the Japanese have spent centuries perfecting systems for creating alternative worlds. Now, we witness this in their amazing capacity to create the best videogames and simulations on the planet. Japan may not be exotic anymore, but it is still a factory producing virtual exoticism in the fictional worlds of every videogame that they put on the market.
The relevant issue here is not to point to all-things Japanese as the über-trendy fashion statement, but rather to try and understand why this is happening. The answer, my friend, is blowing through the ginko leaves of a Japanese garden.
The professional tourist knows that there is only one true way to apprehend the essence of a city: by getting lost. This is the only way to avoid the classic tourist traps: once you’ve seen the Eiffel Tower (or the Godzilla statue in Tokyo’s posh Ginza district) there is not much need to see it again. The real pleasure of travelling resides in finding gold nuggets scattered through the everyday lives of the city inhabitants. If you are lucky, you end up with your very own set of Pokémon cards that you will later be able to trade with your loved ones. This anecdotal approach is what scientists call the bottom-up. You start with a series of incoherent, diverse images until you construct your idea of the city. Of course, another path is also available: the top-down approach. Rather than paying attention to the small details, you focus on the big picture. You create a metaphor for the city, a simplistic model that may not deliver accuracy on the micro level, but provides an overall truth on the macro one. Before videogames, the classic top-down metaphor for the city was the anthill.
CHAIM GINGOLD, a game researcher who works at Maxis -the company behind Sim-City – has analyzed our fascination for these self-sustained portable worlds. He argues that they have been around long before Sim City changed the rules on what a computer game was to be. Snow globes, fish tanks or model trains are some of the examples that he provides. To these, we may also add the dollshouse, a traditional game that WILL WRIGHT, lead designer at Maxis, has repurposed into the best-selling PC game ever: The Sims. Wright is not the only game designer obsessed with little worlds. SHIGERU MIYAMOTO, the Nintendo Japanese game designer who created Mario, shares with Wright the small Olympus of most influential game designers on earth. Miyamoto, not surprisingly, also looks for game inspiration Japanese miniature gardens.
Real cities are imagining fictional ones and more and more citizens feel at ease switching between them in the same natural way that you change your clothes after work, before going to a party
Tiny little elements are only one part of modeling micro-worlds. Miniaturization is extremely important: we love scaled-down models because we can approach them with more freedom, from a much more powerful perspective. It is not surprising then that tourists always want to visit towers, hills or tall buildings in order to have a view of the urban organism that they are infiltrating. To see is to conquer and you never own a new city until you can view it from the top. Certainly, there are different ways of owning it, but the most popular one is to capture its roofs on the chemical or digital film of your camera. The loot of your triumph will later be stored in your photo album, as a proof that you had the whole city at your feet. However, small is not enough. A miniature world is more accessible than the normal one, but we still need to capture its essence. Behaviour patterns, those are the key to the urban living organism. Sim City may be the classic example of a virtual city, but there are many more. The violent urban jungles of the Grand Theft Auto series offer a much more grim perspective of metropolitan social interaction. Massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft include not just one but several cities and towns, each one with their own economy and features. As happens in reality, virtual real estate within these game spaces can be extremely attractive to players and many are willing to pay real-world money in order to buy it. Right now, maybe a few blocks from your house, a team of game developers may be designing the next virtual environment where hundreds and thousands of people will spend their leisure time. Real cities are imagining fictional ones and more and more citizens feel at ease switching between them in the same natural way that you change your clothes after work, before going to a party.
The Japanese were creating virtual realities way before the invention of computers. The ultimate power of these machines is to simulate systems: modelling complex realities into simple organizations that we can interact with. Then it is not by accident that this culture has excels in creating videogames: they acquired the required skills ages ago. Simulation is simply another way of looking at reality. It may not be new but it had to wait until the invention of computer science in order to flourish.
Simulation differs from the alternative way to view and structure our world: narrative. Stories are good at showing only a few paths of cause and effect relationships. In a movie, we can usually follow two, maybe three, simultaneous plot-lines. Narrative is a bottom-up approach: we learn through a series of anecdotes, like the adventurous tourists that we described before. On the other hand, simulation works in the inverse way: it provides us with dozens, maybe hundreds of variables working together simultaneously. The big picture. The abstract approach that focuses on behaviours. The city as anthill. You do not read simulations: you experiment with them. Experimentation involves taking risks, making mistakes, testing the boundaries of the system. By playing Sim City, I do not learn anything about a specific city, but rather I explore the behaviour patterns that make all cities work. The virtual tourists visiting Sim City bring back home strange souvenirs. Not postcards, but rather sociological and urban rules. You learn about crime rates and urban planning, where to build schools, about the need for green spaces, taxes and the challenge of creating a network of highways. Sure, these rules are usually incomplete stereotypes, abstractions, simplifications, but still the videogame player as a virtual tourist approaches the subject with an inquisitive, critical attitude. In other words, she learns about the mechanics of the place she just visited, rather than returning back home with yet another cheesy watercolour depicting the New York skyline.
Videogames are a new way to recreate reality. They create microworlds that we can experience by ourselves. We do not get lost inside a story anymore, but we create our own anecdotes by exploring the simulated virtual countries inside our computers. The city becomes a laboratory for experimentation and the player is the mad-scientist in charge. Games can teach us things that cannot be written down. They encourage us to ask questions, to share our findings with friends, to see how far we can go. Little cities populate our game machines and that is why we enjoy visiting them so much. There is life inside the computer and, as it happens, it is quite exotic. Even more than Japan.
