antoine bousquet, wargames – discourse
antoine bousquet, wargames
2025 · 530 wordsthis shows how, in the epistemic dimension of navigation, what matters more is the normative dimension, not exactly the actual description of the world.
prompt simulation → intensified reality-production · turn productive site → recurring site · residue normative navigation
- prompt
- simulation → intensified reality-production
- turn
- productive site → recurring site
- residue
- normative navigation
- scale
- source → 530 words
bousquet appears first because he appears to be the one with the most refined and concentrated point in this compilation, which allows me to actually produce an interesting and not overdrawn comeback to his own point - the idea that simulation overproduces and intensifies lived realities rather than representing or merely capturing them, and the particular ways in which fields of views and their assorted maps allow for a re-normalization of ontic focus-points.
it is abundantly clear, and a good point, that simulation doesnt merely represent reality, nor that it produces hyperreality by losing all similarities with the original representational field, but that it is its intense site of production, and it is true that it can be said to be ‘realer’ or a contingent fold within said reality, and, challenging the relationship between the virtual and real without comprehending their mutual interaction is indeed contextually antiquated for us without newer anthropological basing, however, it is a case of finding the crucial point where the systems of value that allow the outcomes to be generated in the first place, not the case where we prioritize which intense field can generate the most efficiently navigable landscape, but which one creates occurrences that can at any point distort our field of vision.
it is still true, no matter the unreliability of external reality, that it largely produces the consequences to which virtual reality is supposed to be a solution of. however, in the moment where virtual reality creates external problems through the use of its own internal framework, partially divorced from direct causality to the real landscape, we may in fact find ourselves required to return to the value systems and causal relations of the real (to virtualize the real) in order to figure out where exactly the virtual (now real) site of production messed up.
in that sense also though, maximally productive value is generated not by the current most reliable site of production, nor by the most consistent one or efficient one, but by the most recurring one. the most recurring site shows us that it has the most potential for messing up the conditions that make navigations possible, which is far more important than what or how something is presented. if i wanted to create false information, and the primary navigation was a virtual map, i would naturally create a physical obstacle. if the priorities are rearranged with maximal efficiency aimed towards navigating the real world, i would however not attempt to engineer a false mark in the virtual map, since the navigator would have already presumed its unreliable.
this shows that the real world is simply more occurring, therefore more valuable. however, if in any case, the virtual map started to prioritize different targets, and our value metrics were adjusted to it, or it somehow began to matter to us what happens in the map more than it actually does in the real world, then suddenly the virtual map would be more valuable, and it wouldn’t matter as much what’s happening in the real world. this shows how, in the epistemic dimension of navigation, what matters more is the normative dimension, not exactly the actual description of the world.