Mechanics Follow Metaphor?

Recently I discussed the challenge of ensuring that a game's metaphor reinforces its mechanics. An easy way of ensuring that this is true is by selecting a metaphor first and modeling it mechanically. This approach may be called simulation. While selecting the metaphor first may be a useful source of inspiration, that is not simulation, strictly speaking.

Certain considerations must be taken when using a simulative approach to game design. Simulation tends to be typically computationally expensive, which is prohibitive when not using a computer. It can be difficult, at times, to present information about the state of a simulation in a manner befitting a game (that is, clear and unambiguous, except where it needs to be obscure or unknown). Certain simulations' unique behavior comes from their subtleties, and inaccurate modeling may completely invalidate them, unless you so simplify them that it becomes pointless to call them a simulation any longer.

These technical and logistical risks are great, but they are negligible next to the psychological risk. If you are making a game out of a simulation, the process you simulate must be worthwhile as a game. Simulations proper have myriad uses throughout business, education, and science - but how many of them are really entertaining? However you define fun, a game has to have it. A person wouldn't play a game if they could get the exact same kind of fun from real life. This is why a game needs to differ from a person's real life in some significant way - and why it is so dangerous to make an accurate simulation that is also worthwhile as a game.

The real value of a simulation-game, I propose, is as a provider of vicarious experiences, be they of somebody else's mundanity or of a fantastic but internally consistent setting. The player of a simulation-game seeks novelty, which is a kind of fun. The difference between a simulation-game and a purer game with an exotic setting is that the simulation-game tells the user what it's like in lots of little ways, whereas the game proper asks the player to fill in the experience with his imagination. It's a blurry continuum, but the accuracy and detail of the presentation is the axis along which it is measured.