Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning by Scott Magelssen (review)

As Scott Magelssen describes in his meticulously researched and wide-ranging book Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning, “simmings,” or “simulated, immersive, performative environment[s...] in which participants [play] out a scripted or improvised narrative in order to gain or produce understandings of a situation and its context,” can be found in a wide variety of educative and entertainment settings, from scientific labs to high schools, living history museums to Army training camps (3). At the same time that these types of representational activities are becoming increasingly prevalent in ever more diverse locations, simmings are also becoming more influential, affecting the ways that people understand and conduct education, business, immigration, and warfare. Magelssen makes the stakes of these performative phenomena plain when he asserts that these events do not simply educate or entertain, but rather “purport to save the world” or, alternately and even simultaneously, “function as intensive propaganda” toward cynical and partisan ends (3). In light of the powerful pervasiveness and potential influence of these representational practices, Simming provides both an essential overview of the wide variety of simulative events now occurring and a trenchant analysis of their efficacy in various situations.

Foregrounding his own experience as a participant in a variety of simmings, Magelssen leads the reader on a pleasurably dizzying journey through embodied simulations of car crashes, border crossings, growing old, and even being dead. Engaging with both Jill Dolan’s concept of the utopian performative and José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of queer futurity (Dolan 2001:476–77; Muñoz 2009:1, 4), Magelssen deftly weaves the narrative of his travels with a trenchant analysis of how simmings can work both to imagine a new and better future and to revise an unsatisfactory past (9). Magelssen establishes that sponsors and creators of these events cannot, however, fully anticipate the outcomes of the events, because those outcomes always rely on collaboration between the creators and the participants to produce meaning.

Simmings, though often utopian in intent, do not always remain so in practice. Indeed, it is when Magelssen is exploring the potential distance between expected and actual outcomes or experiences that his most compelling ideas emerge, particularly in his attention to the difficulties inherent in a situation when the “unmatched body” of the simming participant “witness[es] another’s histories and cultures” (25). The disorienting difference that participants sometimes experience is made particularly clear in “This is a Drama. You Are Characters” (chapter 1) and “Senior Moments” (chapter 7). In the former, Magelssen ruminates on the possible experiences of non-black participants in Conner Prairie’s “Follow the North Star” program, which allows visitors to simulate fugitive slaves seeking freedom in the North. Most of the participants in this program are white, leisure-class tourists; Magelssen wonders how the curators of and visitors to such events can work against body “type” — in this case, racial difference — to “negotiate historiographic and representational boundaries” (34). Magelssen worries that perhaps having white tourists pretend to be black fugitive slaves might be doing double violence to those whose lives are represented. On the other hand, he argues, following Rebecca Schneider, perhaps these castings against type can be a way of “getting [history] right through error” (Schneider 2011:70).

In “Senior Moments,” Magelssen examines so-called “empathy” training used mostly by businesses and medical schools to encourage younger product designers and would-be doctors to gain an understanding of the daily difficulties faced by aging persons. In spite of the good intentions demonstrated by organizations such as Xtreme Aging and the AgeLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, donning an elaborate simulative suit that forces participants to physically feel the difficulty of being an older person in the United States can back-fire by actually causing participants to become less empathetic. As Magelssen explains, it can be a “catch-22 of sorts: try to build empathy by putting a...