Games People Play: Metafiction, Defense Strategy, and the Cultures of Simulation

This essay situates the American metafiction produced in the 1960s in relation to contemporary defense strategy and war-gaming. As critics have noted, metafiction about games and gaming is a particularly rich site for thinking about metafiction more generally, and I argue that these metafictional texts reveal a profound skepticism about the value and efficacy of simulation. This skepticism should be understood, I argue, in relation to the problems of defense strategy in the thermonuclear age.