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Games People Play: Metafiction, Defense Strategy, and the Cultures of Simulation
- ELH
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 78, Number 3, Fall 2011
- pp. 507-532
- 10.1353/elh.2011.0027
- Article
- Additional Information
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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.