SIMULATIONIST'S MANIFESTO

- simulation is impossible. simulationism is about cramming reality into smaller corners of reality until they break and enjoying the breakage

- simulation is about pointing to the screen when you recognize a trope even if the trope is tired, because performance of a known quantity is still pleasurable. (A implies B, A is not equivalent to B; plays aren't 'solved' when put on)

- simulation wants drama to be emergent, because violent extrusion through a rules matrix leaves scars on recognizable phenomena that are notable, and worth examining

- simulations are phenomenally deficient. they arrive in disrepair and require your subjectivity to fix (this is also true of reality)

- a simulation encodes an ideology regardless of what its designer intended. it's okay to hear the simulation out and go "huh"

- the effort of simulating provides specious rhetorical cover for reproducing the ideology of past simulations

- simulation has a brand identity of authenticity when it is actually caricature

- simulation is an aesthetic (and so historically situated) independent of its own internal mechanisms. machines have a distinctive hum even if you don't know what they do, or why

- the simulation aesthetic can/should be leveraged to say something weird in the convincing language of the simulation's physics (note: the designer needn't be in *full* awareness of what's being said & can leave elaboration to other parties; this is perhaps a weaker formulation of 'procedural rhetoric')

- it *is* really funny when the little guys do the things

- simulation is ritual in observance of a universe that is locally coherent but macrocosmically unfinished