Welcome to the inaugural issue of Simulation & Society, a student journal born from a USC course (CORE 499) and a growing sense that something fundamental is changing in our world.

At the heart of that change is the rise of simulation technologies—tools and environments that are increasingly reshaping how we experience, interpret, and engage with reality itself. In the history of technology, there are some developments that appear near totalistic in the way they remake how we think—they permeate everything, including deeply rooted perspectives about knowledge, politics, society, and even reality. Simulation is one such set of technologies.

So what exactly is a simulation? For our purposes:

This definition embraces both the immersive—such as virtual reality and gaming—and the abstract—such as machine learning models, predictive analytics, and generative AI systems. What unites them is their tendency to act in place of the world, often in ways that are more compelling, more efficient, or more profitable than the messiness of actual lived experience.But this growing reliance on simulation also raises urgent questions about its consequences. What’s at stake with the rise of simulation technologies is nothing less than our grip on reality itself. As simulations become more advanced and immersive, their ability to influence how we think, feel, and act grows exponentially. Simulations approximate aspects of the real world in ways that feel convincing—but that very closeness can introduce serious risks. Simulation technologies carry the risk of oversimplifying complex realities and being mistaken for the real world—leading to distorted understanding, misplaced trust, or false equivalence between simulated and actual outcomes. As simulations grow more immersive, they may also become preferable to real experiences, shifting our values and relationships toward artificial alternatives

At the same time, simulation technologies offer powerful opportunities for insight, exploration, and growth. In healthcare, for example, simulations enable safer surgical training and more accurate diagnostic modeling, reducing risk to patients. In other domains, simulations are being used to visualize climate futures, recreate inaccessible historical environments, and support mental health through therapeutic virtual spaces—expanding what we can learn, imagine, and empathize with beyond the limits of the physical world.

These themes animate the work featured in this first issue.

In this issue, contributors—all students from Simulation and Society (CORE 499) held in spring 2026—explore how simulation technologies are transforming not just the way we represent reality, but the very terms by which we come to know, feel, and act within it. Across domains as varied as healthcare, scientific research, disability support, digital intimacy, and algorithmic media, these essays reveal a common tension: simulations promise enhanced efficiency, personalization, and insight, yet they often do so by flattening complexity, displacing human judgment, and obscuring the line between the fabricated and the real. Several pieces trace how predictive systems—whether in clinical diagnosis or social algorithms—prioritize correlation over causation, surfacing a broader anxiety about the decline of interpretive frameworks in favor of data-driven output. Others interrogate the emotional dimensions of simulation, from chatbots that mimic companionship to virtual environments that offer therapeutic or rehabilitative experiences. Still others show how simulations increasingly shape physical space and human behavior by embedding themselves into our daily life. Taken together, these contributions suggest that as simulations become more immersive, more affective, and more ubiquitous, they will also demand new forms of critical literacy—ways of seeing not only what simulations make possible, but also what they render invisible.

IN THIS ISSUE