“What’s the big deal? It’s just a game.”

If I had a nickel….

It occurred to me last night that to understand why so many people are so upset about the recent announcement regarding the future of Flight Simulator, you need to understand what Flight Simulator is. (Note that I say is, not was. In spite of the events of late, Flight Simulator X is still spinning on hard drives around the world, and will continue to be available in stores for years to come.)

Flight Simulator is both a game and a platform, and I suspect that the delta between the two is at the heart of the sense of despair some of us are feeling.

Flight Simulator is a game, it’s true. It’s marketed like one, and … well … it’s fun to use! You open the box, install the software, and play with the included aircraft, scenery, and missions. There’s lots of gameplay to experience, and we designed it that way. But admittedly, while Flight Simulator X has more overt gamey elements than previous versions, it’s a strange game … because there’s no real way to “beat” the game, let alone “finish” it. Where’s the fun in that?

Realizing this, you either eventually move on to other games (because you’re a gamer), or begin to explore the world beyond the game. Your geek quotient goes up, and you become a simmer. Flight Simulator now becomes the hub of a hobby: flight simulation.

Flight simulation aficionados (and there are many of us), view Flight Simulator as a platform. It’s a software platform in the literal sense, in that we need it to run and experience other software: the aircraft, scenery, missions, and utilities that we add on/in to the core simulation software. It’s also a software development platform for the developers who create these add-ons. And, it’s a platform for those who use it as the simulation and visualization component of a home cockpit environment, integrating it with hardware (ranging from joysticks, yokes, rudder pedals, and radio stacks to full-blown cockpit replicas).

I should also mention the fact that for many of us, Flight Simulator is a personal platform for the simulated component of real-world flight training and proficiency. I can’t even count the number of real-world pilots I know who started their flying careers in Flight Simulator. Many now fly for airlines. And the whole Microsoft ESP initiative (using the same technology but intending to reach beyond just aviation) was originally based on the proven efficacy of PC-based simulation as a training tool.

It’s the extensible, platform-like nature of Flight Simulator that gave birth to a small industry composed of the companies and individuals who make stuff for it. From this perspective, it’s easy to see why so many people are so upset. While certainly on a vastly different scale, the dynamics at play here are really not so different from the dynamics of what would happen if Microsoft laid off the Windows team to better align resources with strategic priorities. People would freak. Why? Because it’s a platform.

And so, simmers are freaking. It’s not the end of the world, it’s true. Nobody’s dying, and we’ll all stop whining eventually. But if you’ve invested hundreds or thousands of dollars in software and hardware that works with this particular platform, and if you’ve invested just as much time learning the ins and outs of how the platform works (mastered the user interface, memorized key commands, etc.), if you use it as a training aid to supplement your real-world flying, then it’s … well … pretty annoying to even think about having to make a change. Even if that change is years away for you.

If you’re a simmer and you’re looking for an easy way to explain your mood to those around you, to explain why you’re losing sleep over all this, look no further than this…

blast from the past

… brought to my attention this morning by my esteemed and now former Aces colleague Hal Bryan. It’s an audio interview that Aero-News Network publisher Jim Campbell did with Hal, Brett Schnepf, and me back in 2006—shortly before Flight Simulator X hit the shelves. While the three of us weren’t really the “designers” of FSX (we were in fact 3/4 of a then recently-formed Community team), we did have a good understanding of what FSX was to be, and I think we did a fairly good job in the interview of explaining the broader context in which the product exists. I’m the voice that talks about the missions and multiplayer features, among other things.

One person’s game is another person’s platform. Facebook … fun and games, or a development platform? You decide.