The Type

Type and design across cultures

Deep Simulator

£14.00

One of the protagonists of this book is you—the reader.

The story begins when the protagonist falls into an unknown space. During the process of reading/exploring, the reader will be faced with “choices” from time to time. Different choices may cause the reader to return to the starting point; to get stuck in a certain storyline and wander back and forth repeatedly; to jump directly to a later page; or even to be led to other realms unrelated to this book…

Deep Simulator is a cyber-drama novel—a book that can generate different layers of narrative through interaction. It originates from another video game of the same name, an experimental collaboration between artist aaajiao and writer Ag during the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. The novel and the video game each place emphasis on different sensory operations and details in content, yet both stem from themes of player identity, multiple realities, and the breaking of inter-dimensional walls: the exposure of causal chains, the rupture between factions, melancholy, death, the final struggle, accelerationism, the blurring of the real and the unreal, ominous premonitions—and, at the same time, a possibility of transformation hidden ahead.

Like that virtual meta-game experiment, this book is also difficult to define. Ag blends myth, science fiction, and multi-media reality into a seemingly non-ordinary spatio-temporal dimension. Open the book, and the reader becomes the player; through the experience of reading—wandering—choosing, an in-between journey with no support begins.

From another perspective, Deep Simulator is also a living long-term project that grows organically. This publication is one reincarnation of its passage back through the inter-dimensional wall—from a freewheeling script, to an abnormal indie game, and then from a virtual game to a carefully designed bilingual (Chinese–English) physical book.

Read the epilogue

Selected reviews

Perhaps only a medium like Ag could, in a text that dissolves the boundaries between novel, drama, and poetry, turn words—through an uncanny way of sensing—into a game full of uncertainty and ambiguous mechanisms… If it occasionally reminds you of Beckett, that is only because it, too, seems to carry a faint awareness of a threshold state at the edge of the apocalypse.
— Zhao Song, writer

You can always wander in Ag’s writing—absolutely free.
— aaajiao, artist

A book you can “play”. What story it tells and how you flip through it are connected. It is a game in itself.
— Mira, designer of this book

I think everyone can practise writing as an all-round awareness exercise—and reading as well. The paper of a book is like our bodies: it offers the most direct interface for such practice. The way this book is designed, produced, and read is not quite ordinary; we tried, in the process of playing together, to make the frame of reference fail.
— Ag, author

About the author

Ag is a writer and moving-image maker who describes herself as a wanderer and a dream-catcher. Her work spans fiction, art criticism, moving image, and genres that resist clear boundaries, and continually explores flows of energy between time, space, the visual, and self-consciousness. Her sharp sensitivity to everyday life—seemingly ordinary yet deeply mysterious—together with a rich nourishment drawn from literature, film, and diverse systems of knowledge across disciplines, eras, and cultures, makes her writing brimming with fresh metaphors and signifiers. Her books include Infinite Bedrooms (Mephisto Bookstore Press) and Annotated Geography of Shanghai (51 Person Press), among others.

About the book design

The materials and processes of this book are a re-simulation of the work’s connotations and imagery, an attempt—restrainedly, consciously, and as a whole—to design for it a reasonable body. The sleeve wrapping this black body is a deep abyss of colourful noise generated by a piece of code: on the surface it signifies the emptiness of a TV signal outage, but in fact it is a noisy band captured from the natural cosmos. Combined with the shifting colours produced by diffraction through laser holographic film, it foreshadows the complex qualities of “in-betweenness”: obscure and indeterminate, conjuring something out of nothing.

For the main text, Fedrigoni Arena ivory lightweight paper was chosen. In tone and touch, it subtly conveys a retro sensibility reminiscent of printed matter from the early computer era—despite its considerable cost. For the cover and interior titles, the Dingmao Dot Matrix typeface pushes low-resolution type to its technical limits. The visual character of both comes from a turning point when the printing industry underwent digital transformation—another intermediate state, full of limitations and possibilities.

Deep Simulator

One of the protagonists of this book is you—the reader.

The story begins when the protagonist falls into an unknown space. During the process of reading/exploring, the reader will be faced with “choices” from time to time. Different choices may cause the reader to return to the starting point; to get stuck in a certain storyline and wander back and forth repeatedly; to jump directly to a later page; or even to be led to other realms unrelated to this book…

Deep Simulator is a cyber-drama novel—a book that can generate different layers of narrative through interaction. It originates from another video game of the same name, an experimental collaboration between artist aaajiao and writer Ag during the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. The novel and the video game each place emphasis on different sensory operations and details in content, yet both stem from themes of player identity, multiple realities, and the breaking of inter-dimensional walls: the exposure of causal chains, the rupture between factions, melancholy, death, the final struggle, accelerationism, the blurring of the real and the unreal, ominous premonitions—and, at the same time, a possibility of transformation hidden ahead.

Like that virtual meta-game experiment, this book is also difficult to define. Ag blends myth, science fiction, and multi-media reality into a seemingly non-ordinary spatio-temporal dimension. Open the book, and the reader becomes the player; through the experience of reading—wandering—choosing, an in-between journey with no support begins.

From another perspective, Deep Simulator is also a living long-term project that grows organically. This publication is one reincarnation of its passage back through the inter-dimensional wall—from a freewheeling script, to an abnormal indie game, and then from a virtual game to a carefully designed bilingual (Chinese–English) physical book.

Read the epilogue

Selected reviews

Perhaps only a medium like Ag could, in a text that dissolves the boundaries between novel, drama, and poetry, turn words—through an uncanny way of sensing—into a game full of uncertainty and ambiguous mechanisms… If it occasionally reminds you of Beckett, that is only because it, too, seems to carry a faint awareness of a threshold state at the edge of the apocalypse.
— Zhao Song, writer

You can always wander in Ag’s writing—absolutely free.
— aaajiao, artist

A book you can “play”. What story it tells and how you flip through it are connected. It is a game in itself.
— Mira, designer of this book

I think everyone can practise writing as an all-round awareness exercise—and reading as well. The paper of a book is like our bodies: it offers the most direct interface for such practice. The way this book is designed, produced, and read is not quite ordinary; we tried, in the process of playing together, to make the frame of reference fail.
— Ag, author

About the author

Ag is a writer and moving-image maker who describes herself as a wanderer and a dream-catcher. Her work spans fiction, art criticism, moving image, and genres that resist clear boundaries, and continually explores flows of energy between time, space, the visual, and self-consciousness. Her sharp sensitivity to everyday life—seemingly ordinary yet deeply mysterious—together with a rich nourishment drawn from literature, film, and diverse systems of knowledge across disciplines, eras, and cultures, makes her writing brimming with fresh metaphors and signifiers. Her books include Infinite Bedrooms (Mephisto Bookstore Press) and Annotated Geography of Shanghai (51 Person Press), among others.

About the book design

The materials and processes of this book are a re-simulation of the work’s connotations and imagery, an attempt—restrainedly, consciously, and as a whole—to design for it a reasonable body. The sleeve wrapping this black body is a deep abyss of colourful noise generated by a piece of code: on the surface it signifies the emptiness of a TV signal outage, but in fact it is a noisy band captured from the natural cosmos. Combined with the shifting colours produced by diffraction through laser holographic film, it foreshadows the complex qualities of “in-betweenness”: obscure and indeterminate, conjuring something out of nothing.

For the main text, Fedrigoni Arena ivory lightweight paper was chosen. In tone and touch, it subtly conveys a retro sensibility reminiscent of printed matter from the early computer era—despite its considerable cost. For the cover and interior titles, the Dingmao Dot Matrix typeface pushes low-resolution type to its technical limits. The visual character of both comes from a turning point when the printing industry underwent digital transformation—another intermediate state, full of limitations and possibilities.