In this episode, we talk about social simulation in games, taking as our starting point Mitu Khandaker's talk ‘Thinking about people: Designing games for social simulation’. Hosts Dr. Ibi and Dr. Joe discuss:

• What’s a social sim?
• Autonomous behaviour versus authored branching stories
• Social simulation in tabletop games
• What are NPCs for?
• The multiple functions of communication and interaction in real life and games
• Games such as The Sims, Baldur's Gate 3, Skyrim, Dragon Age, Redshirts, and Ctrl.Alt.DEL

Contains some strong (and other type types of) language.

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📚 Resources:

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. ‘Linguistics and poetics’. In T. Seboek (ed.) Style in Language, MIT Press, 350-377.

Available at: https://www.academia.edu/download/33061075/Jakobson_Eks_15_F12.pdf

Khandaker, Mitu. 2015 ‘Thinking about people: Designing games for social simulation’, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco.

Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haNy1kSHMt8&t=2591s

Mathiot, Madeleine & Garvin, Paul L. 1975. ‘The functions of language: A sociocultural view’, Anthropological Quarterly, 48(3). 148–156. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3316921

Searle, John R. 1975. ‘A taxonomy of illocutionary acts.’ In K. Gunderson (ed.) Language, Mind, and Knowledge, University of Minnesota Press, 344–369.

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