ABSTRACT
The computer game and special venue attraction – particularly the so-called ‘ride film’ or ‘motion simulator’ – are certainly among the most recent of the visual forms under consideration in this book. Indeed, it is only the computer or video game that issues directly from or with the new technology itself. Still, it would be highly misleading to attribute the character of the genre itself solely to digital techniques: it owes much to prior and adjacent cultural forms (traditional games, animated film, cinema, certain modes of literary fiction and so forth). Indeed, this fact seems all the more apparent in this case given the remarkable facility of the computer itself to modes of imitation and simulation; indeed, it is tempting to see this as the computer’s destiny or apotheosis. Imitation and simulation are vital to any understanding of computer games. Though, even here – as we shall see – the upshot of such efforts in the sphere of games involves more than a mere procrustean aesthetics of uniform substitution.
