Simulation, Games, and Movies
Simulation, computer games, and movies have a lot in common.
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Simulation, game playing, and movies are forms of pretending, and it's worth comparing them to better understand simulation. Imagine we're viewing three television screens and that they present, respectively, a movie, a simulation, and a video game.
To draw a tighter comparison, suppose each of the three productions involves athletes playing tennis. That is, assume that the television movie, the game being played by the viewer, and the simulation all involve people playing tennis. How might the three productions appear to us, or how might they be alike or different?
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Consider movies as they might be produced for television. As a form of pretending, or simulation, movies are normally non-interactive, which means that you as an observer play no part in it.
Point of View of the Motion Picture
In a motion picture production, you could expect the camera to be at the position occupied by a spectator at the pretend tennis match: someone who might even have a personal interest in the action. Representing the view of that spectator; it could be understood to be what the spectator sees of the game and how he or she feels about it or the players.
The camera could otherwise be positioned to represent what a player might personally see. Supposedly this would show the player's subjective view of the ongoing events -- a video that could consist of the court and any of the other players, linesmen, and spectators, as well as visible parts of his own body and racket. This would be the player's personal virtual reality.
The picture might, again, be taken from an arbitrary location in the tennis setting -- from long range, say -- and therefore understood to be an objective view of the events of the court, showing what's "really happening" in the game. This is a common technique in story telling. Anyone could be part of the presentation, depending on that person's role in the movie.
In either instance, we, as general observers of the movie, would only be passive participants, in the sense that we couldn't affect the action in any way. The movie would go on as produced, whether we watched it or not. There would be no interaction between us and the tennis participants. Our observation or actions wouldn't alter the movie scenario in any way.
Nature of the Motion Picture Production
The idea behind movie production needs little comment. It is an ordered amalgamation of many camera shots of individuals pretending to be characters in a story -- like tennis players. The individuals are presumed to be acting out the part of their character, so they take on the appearance of the imagined characters and behave as expected in tennis. They run, intercept the ball, swing at it, and do all the other little things naturally involved in the play.
No matter how good or bad the actor's tennis skills are, the actor's performance is probably physically and physiologically very realistic, which is to say that the actor's movements likely match closely the biomechanics of the presumed real characters, despite a possibly large difference in skill level. . And of course the ball itself moves realistically, because it is actually hit by the participants and filmed as it flies through a real gravity field.
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Consider someone playing a game of computer tennis. As a player, you participate in an interactive contest.
Point of View of Game
In an electronic game production, the person -- you or me -- viewing the television picture is the live participant of the game. That person is playing the part of the tennis player and is competing with the simulated opponent (or opponents, as in "doubles"). So you would expect the person to observe only what's visible to him or her as a gamer -- his or her own view of the ongoing events.
Nature of the Game Production
In this event, the view would be that of the live participant and would be affected by what that person decides to do -- how he or she chooses to "move" in the court or to "hit the ball." The actions of the live gamer would be executed by means of electronic devices -- like handgrips and buttons -- that produce analogs of the running or hitting motions. The devices provide the inputs to the electronics of the game and affect the action accordingly. Just how realistic the action might be depends on the degree to which the analogs and the resulting motion of the ball reflected valid principles of mechanics.
Were the movements of the players and the ball to be constructed using animation, which relies on the manipulation of bitmaps of two-dimensional, cartoon-like figures, they would only roughly correspond to the real motions, or real biomechanics. The detailed, or local behavior, would therefore be essentially unrealistic, even though the live player's "eye" might overlook the discrepancies and "see" normal movements. The global properties might therefore be okay.
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As an assistive tool, simulation lets you study or train skills. The goal here being to study the game of tennis or to teach someone how to play, a simulation of the game could look to us either like a movie or like a video game. As a movie it would be used to examine or teach something about the game but would involve little to no practice of tennis skills. But in the game format, it could be more like a flight simulator, in which case it might involve controls that required movements closely resembling those of the real athlete.
Point of View of the Simulation
A: Treating the action in the sense of a movie -- for a computer experiment, say -- the picture could reflect the view from any point in the tennis environment. The choice of viewpoint would depend on the nature of the experiment, which could be to examine either perception problems or motor problems, or both.
If there is no provision in the design for dynamic inputs by the investigator (one of us) during the screening, the movie would only provide a passive experience, as in an ordinary movie. We as viewers of the tennis action would have no control of ongoing events once the action began.
Even if dynamic inputs are allowed, however, the movie would still be controlled in part by initial inputs -- the initial conditions set for the game. What actually happens is determined by the values chosen for these conditions -- the parameters of the court situation and the starting conditions for the participants. To get a different "movie" it would only be necessary to change the conditions. (See Developing Equations of State for details.)
B: Alternatively, taking the action in the sense of an electronic game -- for computer-based training -- we would observe what only one of the players might actually see in the course of the game. This player would be the one being trained, as in a flight simulator for airline pilots.
Just as in an electronic game, too, that picture would no longer be passive. What would occur in the game would depend on how the players reacted to game situations, what action both the live (trainee) and the simulated player(s) would take -- how they would run, intercept the ball, and hit it. For the simulated players, the moves would depend on built-in rules of action or by decisions made by a trainer controlling the simulated actions.
Simulation Production vs. Game Production
A major difference between simulation and the typical electronic game is that the movements in the simulation would likely be represented by means of mathematical equations, whereas the movements in a (computer) game would probably be obtained by manipulating bitmaps -- the normal practice in computer animation, putting more emphasis on science than on art. At least this was an important difference early on. Now, though, with games become more and more complex, mathematical modeling is becoming more important, and art has to make room for more realistic realism through science.
Equations define the real biomechanics more tightly than does animation, so local actions in simulation, though graphically more complex, would be more realistic than animation-based activity but still be less realistic than the detailed behavior of real actors in a movie.
Also, because the computations are more complex than bit manipulation, the action will likely be slower in real time compared to that generated either by animation or by actors -- unless an adequately powerful computer is used to process and display the data. Multiple computers working in parallel could provide even better animation.
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