Microsoft Flight Simulator The Kotaku Review
One of the first places I wanted to fly in Microsoft Flight Simulator was the Grasberg Mine, an open pit mine high in the Sudirman Mountain Range of Indonesia.
That might seem like a strange destination. But when Microsoft Flight Simulator was announced at E3 in 2019, it came packaged with a signature promise: the ability to “fly anywhere” on the planet. Yes, the trailer for the latest installment in one of gaming’s longest-running franchises was plainly gorgeous—wide vistas, sparkling cities, and gleaming aircraft, all rendered in crisp 4K—but so were all the other flagship titles debuted at gaming’s biggest show. What made Microsoft Flight Simulator special was the scale of its world—our world, a frankly Icarian bit of posturing that, if somehow true, signaled an evolutionary leap forward for games, built on and out of Microsoft’s suite of “next-generation” services. And when journalists and YouTubers received alpha access to the game earlier this year, many of them fixated on calling Microsoft’s bluff by finding their houses–which was really falling into its trap by looking towards the densely populated areas the game’s designers likely assumed they’d want to visit.
(Correction, 7:20 p.m.—An earlier version of this review mistakenly stated that the Grasberg Mine was not in the game. The article has been updated to reflect that it is, with text changed throughout. Kotaku regrets the error.)
It’s a delight, to be sure, to see one’s house. But a game that lets you fly anywhere also lets you see places that are easily forgotten. And one of those places is the Grasberg Mine, an open pit mine on the isle of Guinea, wider than a mile and deeper than the World Trade Center, that happens to be one of the world’s largest sources of copper, silver, and gold ore. And while these elements have always had a range of industrial applications, they have been in particularly high demand over the last 30 years to manufacture computer hardware, including, one presumes, the cloud computing infrastructure that makes Microsoft Flight Simulator’s to-scale simulacrum of the world computationally feasible. Mines like the Grasberg Mine, in other words, are funded in considerable part by the developed world’s endless appetite for new computing hardware to power (among other things) increasingly elaborate games. In a strange way, then, this makes them feel like a kind of point of origin for Microsoft’s latest game.
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It would have been wholly understandable for the remote mine not to have been included; despite the role its real-world counterpart plays in the existence of a game like Microsoft Flight Simulator, it’s not a tourist destination. And there are plenty of oddities and absences in Microsoft’s to-scale model of the world. By any reasonable standard, Microsoft Flight Simulator wouldn’t be a different game if those minute errors were resolved.
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But there isn’t anything “reasonable” or “standard” about a game the size of a planet. And the points where the simulation breaks down, as in the bizarre texture mapping of Buckingham Palace that makes it look like a drab, postwar office building, are a reminder that this virtual world is not given, but made. When the game’s illusion of completeness fails, it raises the question of which “anywheres” get to be a part of everywhere. Here, the illusion of the game as a hyper-realistic recreation of the real world falls away and we can start to see the technology and motivations of the people and businesses behind it.
The first iteration of Microsoft Flight Simulator, in 1982, was intended to showcase IBM’s 16-bit processor, an upgrade against the newly-released Apple ii. Subsequent versions of the program added texture mapping and true three-dimensional graphics, slouching towards photorealism as computers grew in sophistication. In the 1990s, recognizing the potential emerging modding communities built up around games and the ease of digital distribution, Microsoft began packaging tools with Flight Simulator 1993 that allowed players to create airports and upload them to the internet for free, massively increasing the amount of content available to players at little to no additional cost to Microsoft. Most recently, 2006’s Flight Simulator X (and its subsequent, interminably wacky Steam Edition) marked the transition of Microsoft’s venerable franchise to a bonafide game-as-service, a platform for would-be pilots and ATCs to sim, role-play, and build lucrative YouTube careers.
The latest iteration of Microsoft Flight Simulator continues this history by suturing itself to the services Microsoft now sees as its most valuable assets. Today, the novel technologies include photogrammetry, high resolution satellite imagery, and machine learning. At the center of the new Microsoft and its latest Flight Simulator is the “cloud”—so much so that CEO Satya Nadella devoted a considerable chunk of his 2017 book Hit Refresh to the origins, success, and future of the company’s “cloud strategy.” And it’s primarily that kind of cloud that ties the Grasberg Mine to the design of Microsoft Flight Simulator and its picture-perfect clouds, a game whose existence, in this form, would not be possible without the minerals extracted and refined, at almost incalculable environmental and human cost, in Indonesia.
Intense breakdowns of the technical wizardry that powers Microsoft Flight Simulator are readily available online, and I encourage you to check them out. But a short version of what makes Microsoft Flight Simulator into the earth-striding marvel it is goes something like this: satellite imagery from Bing Maps forms the basis for an enormous, AI-managed photogrammetry project, transforming digital images into three-dimensional objects. Photogrammetry isn’t new to video games—it was used to create Death Stranding’s gorgeous, haunting landscapes, as well as the uncomfortably real meals in Final Fantasy XV—but the scale of its use in Microsoft Flight Simulator is. This all makes for some extremely impressive numbers—millions of cities and towns, billions of buildings, and trillions of trees—along with making good, more or less, on Microsoft’s promise of being able to “fly anywhere.” Microsoft’s proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning services are key here, automating the heavy-lifting of photogrammetry and texture mapping billions of buildings worldwide.
