Sometimes when I'm out walking my dog I wonder at how differently we experience the world. I’m out walking cocooned in my own personal miasma of bluetooth and notifications and muttered imprecations; for me the walk is somewhere between a necessity and a challenge: I walk not because I want to but because I should and she, the dog, must.
Lucy, my dog experiences her umwelt through her nose, a tool that is several orders of magnitude more sensitive than my paltry human senses of sight and hearing combined. For every step I take, she takes four and for every detail I notice, she finds a thousand1.
We experience our walk simultaneously and yet wholly apart; were she a person we might consider this a kind of parallel play, the two of us engaging in tasks that may seem similar to the impartial observer but that are radically different from the inside. It’s kind of like college.
This is what I remember: I had an apartment with three of my friends. Thursdays were the big night because most of us didn't have classes or work and we could meet up at the bar fairly early and then get home to watch t.v. together2. But there were other nights where I would come home to find a half-dozen other people in the living room. These would, somewhat ironically, be the quietest nights as everyone studied alone, together.
During the early days of the pandemic, I, like everyone else, bought Animal Crossing and spent hours playing it. It gave me something to do that wasn't doom and gloom and it was a lot of fun to have my daughter sit on the sofa next to me and act as a miniature art director, stage manager, and master of the wardrobe. This was decidedly not parallel play as I did not dare deviate from the directors’s directions without risking dire consequences.
When I came to Japan, one of the smaller and yet harder-to-adjust to cultural differences was that of occupying the same space as everyone else in the household even while we engaged in different tasks and activities. What I mean is, houses in Japan tend not to be very well insulated or heated, and so heating (or cooling) more than a room or two at a time is expensive and impractical. So everyone ends up in the same room, doing their own thing.
Recently, my daughter called me out on a different kind of simultaneous. She’s not allowed to use more than one screen at a time. No watching t.v. while playing an iPad game; no scrolling through photos on her mom’s phone while watching YouTube on mine. So when she came home from school the other day and found me with three different screens open, I hastened to explain just what I was doing in an attempt to justify why it’s okay for me to have simultaneous screens but not her. It went over as well as you might think.
Simultaneous shares a history and a root with simulation. For a long time, I would have said that simulation games were my favorite genre. I’ve certainly played enough of them over the years. Build a city, colonize a planet, design a railroad, a rollercoaster, or a zoo. Even Animal Crossing is billed as a simulation game of sorts.
Over the winter break I got a new (old) game, another simulation game, called Cities Skylines. It’s fun. Once again, I am building things and designing and generally using the game as a salve for the frustrations of the real world. The trouble is that I don’t really want a simulation game. I want a building game. I don’t want to deal with traffic and pollution and all the other crap. I just want to design really efficient, clean cities. This has happened to me before, with other games, most notably the Sims. I really like building houses in the Sims, I hate actually playing the game. I don’t care what the little sim people get up to or whether they have their needs met. Just want to build houses. But I digress.
These two words, simultaneous and simulation, are kind of vying with each other for space in my head at the minute. They stem from the PIE root sem, meaning fake or imitation and then evolve through Latin into French into English. I'm not sure when, exactly, the first syllable shifted sounds and split into the s-ai-mu vs. sim-yu variations; not that it really matters.
I think a lot about the idea that we might be living in a simulation. In my head, a being who looks a lot like one of us is sitting back in an easy chair, snacks and drinks to hand, staring at something on a screen while our chaotic little sim runs on, parallel, simultaneous, and utterly alone.
And she's not even voluntarily diminishing her own senses by wearing sunglasses and earbuds!
This was during the early seasons of Friends, Seinfeld, and ER during their original broadcast runs.