Fixing The Sim

You are not so much a part of the machine as you are the reason the machine runs at all.

A.J. Marini spent thirty years building video games (boss fights, difficulty curves, exploits). Then his own game glitched. A studio collapsed, a career trajectory crashed, a father died. He started wondering if the rules he'd been coding into other people's worlds were running quietly underneath his own.

Fixing the Sim is what came out of that. Part physics, part philosophy, part the true story of a life that crashed and reloaded, it asks a simple question with enormous stakes: if reality behaves like a simulation, is it? And how would you play it differently if it were?

Marini alternates plain-spoken chapters on game design such as the grind, the hook, the boss fight, with harder chapters on relativity, quantum mechanics, and consciousness, building toward what he calls the Causal Sphere. A space where living things originate choice from the possibilities before them.

He's not a physicist and he's not a philosopher. He's the only person writing about the simulation who has actually built one. That's the whole case for reading this book instead of the next one.

Pick up the controller. Let's begin.