Spaceships and Simulations

It’s that Jorge Luis Borges thing, but backwards and in heels.

Simulation has a purpose. The purpose need not be a capital-P Purpose, but the reason you simulate is to make the unmanageable manageable.

Simulation always ignores something. Everything is not equally important. The simulation is doing something.

This leads to interesting results. A stock market simulator does not need to predict accurately the price of a given stock on a given day if the purpose is to make money, and you do make money, using it.

More particular to TTRPGs, this is the essence of the Fantasy Heartbreaker. People see something “unrealistic” in D&D and think “I Can Fix It!” when it was not broken in the first place.

Or they fix it without a theory as to why it was broken, and why the now fixed set of rules work to make the rest of the rules less broken. It is an excusable mistake, however, because of how poorly games express their intentions, and so there is no theory that works to fit as a matter of definition.