Possible split: Simulation Game

In my personal experience, simulation games were always about vehicles (and car racing games, unless they were actually more into simulation than racing, were separate). But that may just be regional naming variety.

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

Not exactly; it depends on the sim in question. For example, IL-2 Sturmovik and the DCS series are most certainly simulations, but they merely focus on military matters. They're some of the "geekiest" (in regards to fidelity/realism) games I know, so I'm not sure why they aren't sims in your opinion.

If you feel that they still absolutely cannot count as pure sims, then may I suggest the creation of a generic "milsim" trope of sorts?

Also, where would things like Operation Flashpoint and ArmA fall on the simulation band?

EDIT:

Whoops, am I misreading things? Are you saying that sims that prioritise combat over simming aren't sims, or not?

edited 17th Feb '12 4:31:13 PM by Flanker66

Locking you up on radar since '09

So in this regional/personal variety I speak of I'd call them shooters, the city sims — strategies, and vehicle sims (save for racing games, which are just that) would be the simulations. So that's me.

edit to clarify

edited 18th Feb '12 3:50:34 PM by lordGacek

"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"

Generally speaking, the idea is that a Simulation Game is more simulation, less game. If it gives you a set of tools to mess around with and lets you do whatever you want with them, then that's a simulation game. If it gives you a series of levels with set missions and the like, then that's probably not a simulation game.

The biggest misconception is that if a game is "realistic" (ie, it simulates real life), then that makes it a simulation game. It doesn't. A first person shooter that very realistically portrays combat is still a first person shooter, not a simulation game, regardless of how good a simulation it is. You mostly run into this problem with air combat games that blur the line between Flight Sim and Action Game (but generally fall under the latter).

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Bump. I'm willing to start sandboxing these things, but it's a fairly large project, and I want to make sure everyone's okay with the general outline before I start putting that much effort into it.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I am worried that there isn't a universally accepted definition of "simulation games." Even the wikipedia page seems unsure. It says on one line they have no goal, but also says they can include games made for training (which can certainly have a goal) and even war games. Also that page does not look very authoritative.

I've seen games like X-Wing, which makes no attempts at realism and is mission-structured, referred to as "sims." That's taking it too far, I'd agree, but it does show that there's generally some uncertainty about the term. And intuitively, games like Il-2, which I've very briefly played, seem like they should count as sims, fighting or no fighting, mission or no mission, because their main point is, well, to simulate something in great detail; there are missions, but then, that's an accurate simulation too, of actual missions in actual war.

When merely figuring out how to get your fighter plane off the ground and pointed in the right direction is a major achievement because the game works so hard to make it as authentic an experience as possible, I don't think the fact that you then fly that fighter plane in a combat mission should disqualify the game as a simulator... I mean, power-ups and banana peels are one thing, but a painstaking simulation of actual air combat, where merely finding and keeping up with your opponent, never mind out-manoeuvring them, can be a challenge, is quite another.

Anyway, I like the breakdown proposed in post 12, with the caveat that I think combat-focused games can count. I think it'd be great to see basically all of those split off, but a crowner could be good too. I think maybe we should note the ambiguities about what is and isn't a simulator somewhere, clearly.

edited 1st Mar '12 12:18:16 PM by girlyboy

I suspect it's because fighter jet games are thought to be part of flight simulators.

Fight smart, not fair.

I agree that having combat shouldn't immediately disqualify something for the "sim" label, but when the focus is on the combat rather than anything else, then that would be an Action Game, rather than a Simulation Game. Something like Ace Combat, for example, has fairly realistic flight physics (eg, your flight controls consist entirely of pitch/roll/yaw/throttle, you have to worry about stall speeds, etc) but you have unlimited fuel and dozens of missiles and the focus is clearly on destroying enemy targets, not simulating realistic flight — so that wouldn't count as a Flight Sim.

Something like Pilotwings, however, I would argue does count as a sim. It's got levels and even some combat, and in a lot of ways it's less realistic than something like Ace Combat, but the focus is clearly on the flying itself rather than anything else, making it as much a "toy" as a "game".

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Alright, let me explain what Sim Earth and Sim Life are about. I'll try to explain Spore, though I've never played it.

Sim Earth and Sim Life (both by the same company as Sim City) are where you control an entire planet. It's a sandbox with whatever goals you make up for yourself. Sim Earth has pre-set animal evolutionary lines and you get to rearrange the continents, blow stuff up, place animals or plants on the surface, etc. When something evolves intelligence, you get to muck with their civilization or just watch them go. Eventually they can achieve spaceflight and abandon the planet en masse, so you can start over. Or you can start with an inhospitable planet (like Mars) and try to terraform it. Sim Life is more about inventing your own plants and animals from scratch and trying to create a balanced planetary ecosystem, while intelligent life is just an obstacle that can kill your stuff.

In Spore, you guide the evolution of one species (or evolutionary lineage, I suppose) in detail from microbial size, into an animal that goes around the various ecosystems for a while, until it evolves sapience. You end up deciding along the way how many limbs and stuff it will have. Then you guide their civilization, architecture, and behavior until they get spaceflight, then you control whatever it is they do in space (invading other planets that other players uploaded to the server? I'm not sure.)

In all three, things on your planet change dramatically over time, especially in Spore which has different modes of play in different phases, while in Sim City the city gets bigger but doesn't change fundamentally. All four are distinct from games like Theme Park which you could call business simulation, where you're trying to run a company and make money doing whatever.

Maybe they are the same sort of game as The Sims. I don't know anything about Farm Ville. Anyway, I wouldn't put the above games in the same category as a flight simulator or fighter plane game at all. Whichever category gets the word "simulation," the other needs to be named something different, because they aren't similar.

edited 2nd Mar '12 5:38:00 PM by ArcadesSabboth

Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.

I've heard things like The Sims and Sim Earth as well as games like Black And White all put in the category of God Games. Basically games where you play god over the lives of people and place either figuratively or literally.

edited 2nd Mar '12 5:39:14 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Yeah, you're basically God. You aren't omnipotent, but basically this entire planet is your toy and there are no pre-set goals.

In Sim City, you're more of a dictatorial mayor who controls every detail of a completely communist government/command economy, or something, but that's kind of like being a god. Like Civilization, without the RTS part.

Actually, the way God Games are defined on Wikipedia excludes these, because what you can do isn't related to worship points or mana. In Sim Life and Sim Earth you never see individual people at all. I guess they fit under what Wikipedia calls Biological Simulations" although the description there looks more like Pokemon breeding, honestly.

There's Sim Ant, too. That's probably more comparable to Sim City, except with an anthill instead of a city, and you can direct individual ants. There's an RTS aspect to it, too, that I forgot about, with fighting the other ant colonies.

edited 2nd Mar '12 5:51:02 PM by ArcadesSabboth

Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.

I agree that a high level of realism, i.e. no unlimited fuel and ammo, is important, but, a combat focused game doesn't necessarily have to have unlimited ammo and fuel, etc... I don't remember too well any-more, but to use the example of IL-2 again, I am pretty sure it did have limited ammo and fuel. But it was definitely combat-focused. That is, flying itself was definitely a challenge and a focus of the game, but still, it was about flying a combat aircraft, and fighting other aircraft.

I think it was still a sim. Then again, maybe I'm biased... I just remember that when I tried playing it, it took me ages just to figure out how to take off without my plane flipping over and crashing in flames a second later. The only time I came close to combat before sort of giving up on the game, I could barely keep up with the enemy bombers I was supposed to shoot down. And it took so long just to find them that I had to use the game's time-compression feature, because it was realistic about the distances you have to cover when flying air combat missions... Lots and lots of realism. And yet, it was definitely combat-focused.

I imagine also some games have different difficulty settings with different levels of realism. For example, maybe an air combat game might have unlimited ammo and fuel on the easy difficulty levels, but on harder levels these things are limited. Or the plane's flying characteristics could be "easy" and arcade-like on the lower difficulty, but sim-like when it's cranked up. I think that has to be considered too: if a game is capable of high levels of realism, I think it should still count.

I'd basically like some flexibility on this. I don't think being combat-focused disqualifies a game from being a simulator, even if it's definitely the combat, and not just flying around in a sandbox, that's the focal point. Also, a game can fit into multiple genres. Just because it's a combat game of some sort doesn't mean it can't be a simulation game as well, at the same time.

Also I think the very fact that there is (I think, as near as I can tell) some disagreement in general (I don't mean here, but... in the world of computer gaming at large) about what is and what isn't a simulation game indicates that maybe we should be somewhat flexible about this. That's my view of it, anyway.

The thing is, in real life, nobody will give you dangerous machinery to mess around with and lets you do whatever you want with them. Nobody gets to fly a fighter jet in a sandbox. Real soldiers have orders, so military sims must try to simulate them, too if they want to be realistic.

You misunderstood — I was saying precisely the opposite. People make the mistake of thinking that "simulation = realistic, so realistic game = simulation game", but that's not right. A simulation game is actually a toy — something you play with to see what happens, rather than a game with a distinct victory condition that you play to win. A set of scenarios or challenges being presented is fine, but a linear progression of levels like a campaign mode or something wouldn't really be a sim game anymore.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

n/o intended but that's a rather silly and nitpicky distinction to make. From what I've seen, "simulation" when applied to video games really is used to say "This game is a very realistic representation of X activity, and thats the clear intend" (key word bolded) and game structure has nothing to do with that. The distinction you make would mean MS Flight (which is not very realistic and bills itself as a "casual" flight experience) would be classified as a "simulation" while IL 2 (which is very accurate and definitely does bill itself as a sim of air combat) wouldn't because one mode has typical game structure and a clear "win" condition. And that definition would mean Nintendogs is a "sim" of dog-raising, which is just... yeah.

At any rate, I'd support making a separate index for Flight Games because seeing Ace Combat and Crimson Skies lumped in the same "genre" as IL 2 and DCS Blackshark is just totally wrong. If anybody cares, I can cook up categories and an example list : ).

edited 19th Mar '12 8:11:38 AM by Glowsquid

Silly and nitpicky or not, that's the distinction that is made. The second paragraph on our current Simulation Game article says "the term Simulation Game usually refers to a genre of program for which the term 'game' is really a misnomer: a Simulation Game is really a 'toy', by the definitions used by those who study such things academically, more akin to an Erector set than to a chess set." and the Wikipedia article on simulation games says "Usually there are no strictly defined goals in the game". Realism (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with it.

I wouldn't be opposed to having a "flight game" index, but it would be completely separate from the entire Simulation Game family.

edited 19th Mar '12 1:54:14 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

otoh, the Wikipedia article on combat flight simulators only list relatively realistic flight games (like Falcon 4, Il2, Lock-On etc.) in its example list, though the history section mentions After Burner (WTF) and Ace Combat for some reason, and another page makes a distinction between "arcade flight" and simulators. so yeah, defining what a sim is using purely "objective" criterias may be a bit of a mess.

edited 21st Mar '12 5:33:31 AM by Glowsquid

We already have a consistent, objective definition for "simulation game": the one I've been using for the last few posts. Stuff like IL-2 would go under a "combat flight game" category or somesuch; there isn't currently one on the wiki, which we should fix regardless of what we do with Simulation Game.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Where to put Fate Of The World ?

I'm not familiar with it except from what I read in the article itself, but it looks like it'd go under City Sim, since you're responsible for the planet itself. (City Sim would consist of anything involving "here's a plot of land and some resources, do stuff with it". It might need a better name.)

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Clocking due to lack of activity.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

Locking.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.