Playing Through: The Future of Alternative and Critical Game Projects

Patrick Crogan's DiGRA 2005 paper, "Playing Through: the Future of Alternative and Critical Game Projects," examines experimental games that disrupt the usual virtuality of play by making its physical and political stakes visible. Works such as Tekken Torture Tournament and the Painstation consoles are read as "theatres of cruelty" that stage computer gameplay with real bodily consequences, such as electric shocks and whips, to provoke reflection on the technocultural conditions of gaming. Drawing on Samuel Weber's theatricality and Bernard Stiegler's mnemotechnics, the paper treats these projects as speculative engagements with the future while exposing the military techno-scientific lineage of computer games. Its central critical target is Gonzalo Frasca's assertion that simulation is "the form of the future," set against narrative as the past and drama as the present.

The argument's core claim is that simulation is valuable but insufficiently understood when framed as a purely future-oriented form. Because computer simulation grows out of military-industrial technoscience, it shares with narrative a mnemotechnical, future-directed character rather than standing apart from it. Crogan critiques Frasca's rigid temporal schema and examines critical projects such as September 12th: A Toy World, Donkey John, and Under Ash/Under Siege, which appropriate simulation for political critique. Simulation is thus proposed as a new mnemotechnic that inherits narrative's orientational function and can prompt players to engage critically with the future.

The paper's final section extends this reasoning through works such as Mixed Reality Lab and Blast Theory's Desert Rain (2000–2004), which pairs a VR military-style simulation with testimony rooms to prompt historical reflection on the 1991 Gulf War and its mediated representation. Crogan contends that simulation's pre-emptive, projective tendency stems from modern military-calculative rationality, the same lineage from which wargaming and computer simulation emerged. The conclusion is that this heritage must be acknowledged, not set aside, when assessing simulation's critical and alternative potential.