This paper discusses the educational game software, Real Lives 2004 (Educational Simulations, 2004) as a means of raising and reflecting on the relations between simulational practices and statistics. These relations animate many modes of the framing and interpretation of experience in the information age. They manifest in diverse phenomena and pose enormous questions for the analysis of contemporary technoculture. Real Lives 2004 provides a window onto key issues concerning the interplay of simulation and statistical analysis. The game presents as a “stripped back” simulational object lacking the detailed 3D interactive milieu of today’s big budget commercial games. It also promotes the educational (and implicitly, critical and ethical) potential of ludic, simulational forms. As such, the game can be read as an under-sketching of the statistical simulation of existence that looks back over the history of this key tradition of governmental and instrumental control, while proposing its continuity in the pedagogical practices of the new media age
