La « Ludo-simulation » : étude de la simulation comme matière créative dans la construction d’un jeu de survie
This master thesis aims to study the survival game genre through the prism of the simulation.  Most of the computer games published today present atypical game structures with a tendency  to liberate the player from any prescribed constraint for the benefit of a more expressive play.  Minecraft (Mojang, 2010) is a prime example not explicitly offering “modalities of play” to the  player, confronting most of the more traditional ludic forms, like game or sport, in which  objectives are usually more convenient to determine. This tendency of games to develop complex  agencies without necessarily prescribing an associated “must do” is the basis of several ongoing  questions. Imposing a simulation perspective for the benefit of game studies makes possible to  answer several of these questions by focusing research attention on the broader “modalities of  doing” rather than on the prescriptions of uses which tend more and more to disappear.   The objective of this work is to reflect on the contributions of simulation in a corpus of six  survival games in order to study the crossing between game and simulation to understand how a  game perspective increases the creativity of a simulation which, in turn, increases the practicable  complexity of the game. In order to achieve this, we first develop the necessary theoretical  foundation to tackle the question of simulation. Then, an exposition of survival in games is offered  in chapter 2 in order to fully understand how the subject is modelled inside the medium. Our  methodological presentation in chapter 3 aims to develop a descriptive introduction of the results  and an interpretative analysis of the survival of the corpus in chapter 4. The objective of this work  is to advance two new concepts for video game studies: Ludic-simulation as a research posture  and the Videogame survivalist as a player posture. These two concepts are further defined in  chapters 1 and 2 and questioned in chapter 4.
ludic simulation simulation survival video game videogame survivalist