Is Urban Gaming Simulation Useful?

Abstract

The authors discuss epistemological, theoretical, and practical reasons for the crisis of gaming simulation in urban studies. The enormous successes obtained by hard sciences (particularly physics) in interpreting and changing the world have driven many scholars of the so-called soft sciences to believe that the methods and tools that had proved so successful at the so-called court of the queen of science might also be successful in the drawing rooms of the social and behavioral sciences. This belief has given birth to urban models. Its terminology revealed an inferiority complex toward so-called true science. It is with this set of issues that whoever deals with social sciences has to come to terms. This applies specially to urban sciences, which must take into account the social and the spatial (physical) dimensions.