The Precession of Simulacra

Orders of image: good, malefice, sorcery, simulation.

“This imaginary world [Disneyland] is supposed to be what makes the operation succesful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks […] digest of the American way of life, panegyrics to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality […] Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland”

“capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public morality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the order of capital”

“Capital doesn’t give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it: it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more.”

“Capital in fact has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates. It is a sorcery of the social relation, it is a challenge to society and should be responded to as such.”

On Simulation and Skyrim

Reading Baudrillard I couldn’t help think of Skyrim (a massive, open world role playing video game for those who haven’t heard of it) in his discussion of Disneyland. Just as Disneyland offers an alternate reality to its patrons, Skyrim offers an alternate reality to its players. One is immersed in the world of Skyrim as one is immersed in the Magic Kingdom; it supplants the reality, the life, of the participant, with a simulation of a reality, a life. The longer one spends (totalling days for Disney-goers and many Skyrim-players alike), the more the simulation absorbs the participant. You wake up and enter Disney, you enter Skyrim, and you lose yourself. Giant playgrounds, limitless options, infinities of choice. Perhaps Skyrim, too, like Disneyland, “is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country”—the real reality, better than reality, becomes reality, even though it is functionally a cage, its boundlessness an illusion. The role playing game as a genre, in all its diversity of form (the Sims, World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, LARP: all realities, all simulations), is more popular than ever. The more mainstream gaming genres (the first person shooter comes to mind) are beginning to adopt features of the RPG—custom loudouts, character skins, branching story lines—and table top games like Dungeons and Dragons are experiencing a resurgence in popularity. Is the media, as Baudrillard argues, the cause of such a proliferation of simulated realities? Or is it something else? Why do we forego our own subjective realities for the imaginary realities of a constructed world?

The RPG simulates, subsumes, and supplants reality.