Most video games that I played growing up, and continue to play now, are about progression. In some cases, its progression through a narrative, in other cases its progression through the achievement of hi-scores. The Last of Us, Pac-Man, and Gran Turismo 7 are profoundly different video games that are intended to evoke different feelings within the player, yet the concept of progression is one of the unifying threads between the three.
Flight simulators stand in a different category. I guess one could argue that you're progressing in a flight simulator -- you're moving further from your point of origin and closer to your destination -- but I think that would be a bit obtuse. Through that lens, everything is progression. Through that lens, I'm progressing through the energy drink that I consume as I write this. Through that lens, you're progressing through this essay.
But, that type of progress differs from the type of progress imposed by the deliberate construction of game mechanics that culminate in some type of completion -- achieving a new hi-score, unlocking everything, reaching the end of a story.
And, given how I've written in the past about my desire to disrupt my default desire to progress, complete, and exist in structures that objectively showcase achievement, you'd think that flight simulators are perfect for me. And you'd be right! I spend a hell of a lot of time inside of flight simulators. I'm not sure how to describe it -- not a great trait for a writer -- but there's just something that is profoundly cool about learning how to fly a plane and traveling between any two cities on the planet. There's a freedom there.
I first came across flight simulators in the fall of 2003. I was at school on a Saturday -- the ultimate insult to a thirteen year old -- taking an entrance exam for magnet high schools in Chicago. I'd finished early, but the exam proctors didn't allow early finishers to simply head home and, instead, shepherded students who'd completed the exam to the school's computer lab. As I was killing time, messing around on the school's computers, I stumbled on a folder that contained games. This was a huge find for thirteen year old me and, in that folder, I found a game that I had never encountered before.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002
I'd never heard of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Prior to this, I didn't even know about the existence of flight simulators. Despite this, I clicked on it. I can't remember why, but it must have been out of a sense of curiosity. While I didn't know about flight simulators, I knew about planes. And planes were cool.
In fact, as I'm writing this, I remember being invited into the cockpit of a flight that I took as a child, which is one of those stories that can only take place prior to 9/11. I remember being struck by how different the view was from the cockpit, compared to the view from my window seat; you could see the clouds coming toward you, rather than drifting by you. I remember being gifted a set of pilot's wings from the captain.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 contained a surprise that I remember to this day; the default airport for the sim was Meigs Field in Chicago. I grew up in the Loop in Chicago, which felt normal as a child but which I now know to be a bit strange as an adult. I think my parents were enamored with the idea of living in a big city and so decided to settle in the city-est part of the city that they could find. And right next to the city-est part of the city, there was a tiny airport called Meigs Field. And as someone who grew up loving airplanes, despite his fear of flying, I loved that little airport.
Growing up in the Loop meant that I grew up in a high-rise. Specifically, I grew up on the 34th floor. The 34th floor was so high that on days with low cloud cover, we couldn't see out of our windows; you'd just see this gray outside, like when you're descending on an airplane into cloud cover. My parents made friends with a couple who lived on the 48th floor and we'd sometimes go up to their house for lunch, dinner, or just to hang out. What I remember most about their apartment was the perfect view of Meigs Field.
I would sit by their window and watch these single-propeller airplanes take off and land at the small, single-runway airport. It was the coolest thing in the world.
That is, until I stumbled on this video game that dropped me into the cockpit of one of those very planes. That is, until I found myself at Meigs field, rather than looking out on it.
I remember playing with the keyboard to figure out the controls -- I wasn't really a kid who messed with reading instructions -- until I discovered the only six controls I needed: accelerate, decelerate, turn left, turn right, go up, go down. This was all that I needed. All I needed to leave the airport I'd spent so much time staring at in real life. All I needed to fly over my home.
This is the first time in my life that I was captivated by a video game. Don't get me wrong, I was obsessed with Halo and stayed up way too late playing Age of Empires 2. This was different, though. Now I was the one sitting in the cockpit. I was the pilot toward whom the clouds were now drifting. And there was this magic that stemmed from seeing this city with which I'd come to be familiar from above, rather than from ground level.
To see my genuine, real-world apartment building extant in a virtual environment was revolutionary to me. I spent the rest of the exam period exploring the city in my Cessna -- making my way over to O'Hare before turning south and heading to Midway. I stayed up in the skies until it was time to go home.
Surprise, thirteen year old kid with a new obsession can't shut the fuck up about said obsession. I remember talking my parents' ears off about this new flight simulation video game that I'd discovered. Fortunately for me, waiting under the tree just a few months later -- on Christmas Day 2003 -- were a joystick and a copy of Flight Simulator 2004.
Christmas 2003 was over twenty-one years ago now, and some version of Microsoft Flight Simulator has been a part of my life since. First, Flight Simulator 2004, followed by Flight Simulator X, Flight Simulator 2020 and, most recently, Flight Simulator 2024.
I'm thirty-four now. I've spent two thirds of my life inside of these simulators and it isn't particularly difficult for me to understand why. There's a personality to these games. They read like love letters to aviation.
Flight Simulator 2004 was a celebration of a century of flight, allowing you to go so far back as to fly Wilbur and Orville Wright's invention at Kitty Hawk. Flight Simulator X introduced me to the famous approach over Maho Beach at Princess Juliana International Airport in Sint Maarten. Back then, these games were wondrous.
In addition to the magic of getting to explore aviation, what I remember most about my experience with these Flight Simulator games as a young teen was the way in which they, ironically, helped me to feel grounded.
My family moved around a lot, another thing that felt normal as a child but that has come to feel a bit odd as an adult; by the time I left home to go to college, I'd lived in eight homes in five cities. Some of these moves were easy adjustments, but some were challenging. My family moved from Austin, Texas up to Chicago, Illinois when I was ten, an age at which I, at least, had just developed my own concept of friends and friendship. It was an age at which spending time with my friends wasn't something that my parents arranged, but something that I chose. And, just as I came to develop my own relationships with people at my school, they were gone.
Actually, I was gone.
But I remember those relationships feeling like something that had been taken from me. Being ten years old was the first time that I remember missing other human beings. And, despite so many memories of my childhood feeling elusive and almost entirely faded, I remember these people with stunning clarity. I remember my friends Kurt, Billy, Daniel, Courtney, Holly, Erica, Dana, Kapil, James, Natalie, Travis, Allison, Kirsten, Rebecca, on and on and on. Even now, as a thirty-four year old who is almost a quarter-century removed from the last time that I saw these people, I find myself wishing that I'd been able to spend more time with them.
One of the routes that I flew most frequently in FS2004 was KORD to KAUS -- Chicago O'Hare down to Austin-Bergstrom. And I flew this route because I desperately missed these friends. Being able to fly between two real cities on planet Earth allowed me to process the first sense of loss I'd experienced in my life. Those flights that I'd pilot in the simulator allowed me space to think about those friends. Cruising at 34,000 feet for a couple of hours gave me room to revisit memories with them, to daydream about what it'd be like to find myself back in Austin and back with them, and to feel sadness over the knowledge that a chapter in my life had reached its end. Truly, I think this is a gift. My memory of those people was not something that I unconsciously shuffled out of my mind -- a protection mechanism from my brain to my body to keep me from feeling something unpleasant. I wasn't consciously aware of this at the time, but FS2004 gave me an avenue to feel those feelings for no other purpose than to feel them. Perhaps that's why I remember them so clearly when so much of the rest of my childhood is missing from my memory banks. Perhaps that's why I have an affinity for sitting with and exploring my feelings now.
Given how much of my life I've spent with the various entries in the Microsoft Flight Simulator series, I don't think you'll be surprised to know that my relationship with these games has evolved. My relationship to these games has become colder and more robotic compared to the flights that I'd undertake to "see my friends."
Don't get me wrong, I am certainly not dissatisfied with my contemporary experience with Microsoft Flight Simulator. It's just different. My approach to the game now is one that's predicated on realism. I load into the game with the airplane cold and dark and I manually start it up by flicking on the batteries, turning on the fuel pumps, firing up the APU. This is a far cry from the Ctrl + E shortcut I'd used to fire up the Boeing 737 back in 2003.
I no longer load in on the active runway and, instead, load in at a gate. I no longer choose between Pacifica, World Travel, and Global Freightways. Instead, I've downloaded liveries so that I can choose between Delta, American, and United. I've installed mods so that real world liveries are featured on AI-controlled airplanes as well; I no longer taxi for departure behind an Orbit Airlines flight and, instead, find myself following Frontier Airlines flights.
I now look up real-world airline schedules and simulate those routes so that I can headcanon as an American Airlines pilot flying a 737-800 between Dallas and Los Angeles, a far cry from the kid flying from Chicago to Austin to see his friends.
This way of playing satisfies an itch. The reality is that I find all of this to be profoundly fascinating.
But it's also awful, isn't it?
There's a loss of magic there. There's a loss of romance there. I now judge my flights in the sim based on how closely I'm able to create a facsimile of the real world. This is a criterion that didn't cross my mind on Christmas 2003. I don't know that I can tell you the first time I used realism as my internal yardstick.
The solution to this is simple. Just fly in the sim wherever you want, however you want. Who cares whether Southwest Airlines doesn't actually fly to this airport, who cares whether United Airlines no longer operates this plane? This is virtual, baby, and that means that you have freedom.
But, I don't have that freedom. I don't have that freedom because I can't access it. It has left me and I worry that it has left me permanently. Microsoft Flight Simulator is no longer a wondrous world for me. That's not a reflection on the game and is, instead, a reflection on its player. Now, to do something that "doesn't feel real" sets a part of my brain ablaze in a deeply unpleasant way.
Loading an American Airlines flight at gate C15 at O'Hare, surrounded by United Airlines planes? Disgusting. Flying from San Francisco to Phoenix using the A320, when I really should be using the 737-800? Impossible.
I worry that this is diagnosable.
FS2004 was, unbeknownst to me at the time, a space in which I grieved something that I'd lost. FS2020, by comparison, isn't a space in which I grieve. And yet, it still feels heavy. It has brought a version of myself that no longer exists back into focus. I want to load into the sim and just fly like I used to.
I want to, but I can't.