Simulation, history and experience in Oshii’s Avalon and military-entertainment technoculture

Crogan, Patrick

Abstract

This essay takes Mamoru Oshii’s Avalon (2001) as a starting point for consideration of the impact of simulational interactive media on contemporary technoculture. The connections made in the film between virtual reality games and military research and development, and its quasi-simulational modelling of various historical ‘Polands’ in re-sequencing a dystopian end of history are the most valuable resources it brings to this study of how simulation’s predominant development represents a major challenge to the forms of critical cultural reflection associated with narrative-based forms of recording and interrogating experience.
Analysis of the methods and rhetorics of simulation design in the military-industrial (and now military-entertainment) complex will elaborate the nature and stakes of this challenge for today’s globalising technoculture of ‘militainment’.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Nov 30, 2010
• Deposit Date: Jan 27, 2011
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 15, 2016
• Journal: Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media
• Print ISSN: 2043-7633
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 4
• Pages: 99-113
• Keywords: simulation, videogames, anime, war, history, technoculture, militainment
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/973373
• Publisher URL: http://www.digitalicons.org/issue04/patrick-crogan/
• Additional Information: Additional Information : First published in Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, Volume 4. The original article can be found at: http://www.digitalicons.org/issue04/patrick-crogan/
• Contract Date: Feb 15, 2016