simulation fibrosis

I was listening to a podcast the other night where one of the hosts complimented Tim Urban on his knack for defining conceptual structures that help clarify a confused subject. Unfortunately, the given example was Tim adding Up-Down to the Left-Right political spectrum, where "up" is being educated and rational, and "down" is being primitive and emotional.

As far as poltical compass memes go... pretty bad.¹

Still. Love a good model.

Here's one I've been thinking about recently: in fiction, there's a tension between maintaining the consistency of the universe's rules, and having the flexibility to create suspenseful drama. Call it the Simulation-Drama axis.

A fictional work high in Simulation is Band of Brothers - a TV series about World War II.

A fictional work high in Drama is Dragon Ball Z - an anime about alien warriors battling one another with magic.

Band of Brothers is tightly constrained by its commitment to historical accuracy. It's based on real events, which were highly documented, and highly familiar to its audience of war history buffs. Dragon Ball Z has its own constraints, but there's no objective truth like the laws of physics or diaries of soldiers forcing the writers to keep any of their promises. If the plot needs it, a character can come back from the dead, or do a special move that previously only one of the other characters could do. You could argue this dynamic is even the central promise of the show: watch DBZ to see our characters do unbelievable things and defy expectations over and over!⁴

Dragon Ball Z gets away with it because people aren't watching it to see an accurate portrayal of a Saiyan invasion of earth. They watch it to see good guy Goku triumph over evil, understanding that it unambiguously occupies the Drama end of the axis.

Shows get into trouble when they exist more fluidly in the middle.

Take Star Trek.

Is Star Trek a speculative stab at humanity's best future? A stage on which to perform 21st century morality plays? Trick question, petaQ! It's both, but its writers over the last 60 years have all had different ideas on what the exact split is.

This is hard to swallow if you're into the show for the Simulation: shown in one episode that a technology works one way (which is why the episode's obstacle is difficult to deal with) then shown in the next that it works differently, because it would otherwise be inconvenient to the story that the writers want to tell.⁵

Shields are the worst for this. Sometimes a ship can withstand multiple ships' attacks, giving the crew time to formulate a plan and cleverly escape danger. Sometimes they take a single shot and need to immediately surrender. There's no consistent and satisfying explanation for why this is, leaving the audience to invent their own reasons. In severe cases, this can stretch the imagination so much that it rips: fans admit that it happened because the writers needed it to, and simulation fibrosis sets in. The characters become a little less relatable, the lessons a little less legitimate.

Because how imitable are the crew's decisions if their risk calculus is completely random? Is it even possible to strive to be like someone who is only alive because of plot armour? If Star Trek says we should have principles, then I think the right way to argue this is by showing characters who exhibit these ideals navigating difficult situations and succeeding because of them. The self-defeating way is by showing us that these ideals are only viable in a world that doesn't have real consequences.

Maybe this axis isn't useful. You could argue there are dozens of other, better binaries to grade our fiction on. You could definitely argue that nitpicking dumb plot holes in Star Trek is as much a part of the tradition as techno-babble, and that I'm taking this way too seriously. And, yeah, sure, but I really, really like Star Trek and it disappoints me when an episode fell short of greatness because the writers couldn't manage to tell a story without cheating themselves.

I don't think it's easy to fix this, but one not-actually-practicable idea I had would be to create a computer game that simulated a galaxy with Star Trekkish rules, play it for a while, and then write your show based on developments that actually happened in the game. That way you're pre-committed to a consistent, high level set of rules, but you've still got a lot of freedom to work out the details.⁷

I say not-actually-practicable because I don't think any high budget TV production would want to bind itself so tightly to such a gimmick, but maybe it's the sort of thing that we'll be able to experiment with more as generative AI brings the costs of animation down. Nothing, Forever but earnest and with warp drive. Or maybe we'll be able to bend existing scripts with our own events and reanimate them to tell ourselves the stories we want to be told.

There's a poetic kind of irony to that. It'll probably happen.