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January 2005
This month marks the beginning of my fourth year of writing for Collectortimes. You'd think by now I wouldn't be a newbie anymore, but some of us are just destined to be perma-noobs, I guess. I hope someone is still coming over here each month and reading.
One of my long-time computer gaming favorites has always been flight simulators. Like many young boys, I dreamed of someday learning to fly and winging all over the world at the controls of a wonderful flying machine. Like most young boys as well, I never did.
Gaming, however, is often rooted in dreaming. One might say that many of the role-playing games are, at the core, a guided daydream. I believe it takes the kind of person who has imagined his or her self as something else to be able to adequately play the role in a game. After all, if you haven't the imagination to fantasize about being a barbarian warrior, or a powerful sorceress, or an elven archer, or whatever, how can you imagine what one would do in a game scenario? The very heart of gaming is to suspend the reality we know for the fantasy of the game, whatever that game might be. Barbarian warriors don't pull out their cell phones and call for the police when an evil horde of orcs appears; even if the police were to respond to such a call, by the time they arrived the warrior would have dispatched all the orcs to whatever afterlife an orc can look forward to. The point is to think as the character would think, not as we would think in our everyday lives.
Flight simulators offer a different kind of "role playing"; that of the private or commercial pilot. The earliest flight sim I ever owned was "Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer", which I ran on a Tandy 1000 computer. It was a big jump when I replaced the monochrome monitor with a simple color one. The graphics on AFT were simplistic; world "scenery" was simple geometric shapes scattered about a "globe" that was a mere 180 miles in circumference. Yep; fly 180 miles in one direction from take-off, and you'll find yourself right back where you started. I still had a blast with it.
By comparison, the flight sim I picked up this past month is nearly "virtual reality". The scenery is programmed so well that one can navigate by familiar landmarks from real life. A player can set the simulation to access the internet and load real time weather information for the location they're "flying" in. One can even apply to be a pilot for a "virtual airline", flying scheduled routes through the internet link, all while dealing with other traffic being flown by other virtual pilots from around the world. Today's flight sims offer more than just flying against the computer in a world where the player is the only traffic; players get to role-play the situations of real pilots, dealing with air traffic control, unpredictable weather, schedules, and maybe even a cranky passenger or two.
For those of us who never realized the dream of piloting a high performance jet around the world, games give us a taste of what it must be like to take the yoke of a jumbo jet, or a business jet, or even a historical aircraft like the DC-3. Flight sims let the average person pilot a front-line fighter jet into combat, or for those who prefer history, many of the aircraft of World Wars I and II. The United States Air Force will never allow me to so much as taxi an A-10 Warthog, let alone fly one; yet on my computer I can imagine myself doing what I see the pilots from Davis Monthan Air Force Base doing in the skies over Tucson every day.
Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." Knowledge tells me that the screen in front of me is just the glass front of a cathode-ray tube computer monitor. Imagination tells me that it's the windscreen of a Boeing 747 as I'm climbing to 30,000 feet out of Phoenix Sky Harbor with a plane load of passengers. Incidentally, according to the flight sim, the 747 does a very nice barrel roll at 30,000 feet. In my imagination, I can even hear the passengers screaming and cursing at me for trying it.
Perhaps it's just as well that my dreams of being a pilot remain unfulfilled except on the computer . . .
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