Have you considered though that we might all be living in a game in which case MSFS would then just be a game within a game or a simulation of a game within a game? 
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It’s turtles all the way down. 
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It depends on one’s ‘play’ style. This is a tough one. I dated a United 320 pilot for a bit during the last four years with this title. She got on it. She agreed, if ‘played’ without assists using a study level plane, it’s much closer to a simulator than a game. With that said, it’s not like the sims they use in training.
ha… lol
quality stuff
I would say no, but you can make your own game of it in a multitude of ways.
One thing I’ve never understood with comments like this I’ve read on this forum over the last 4 years is that there’s always very much an implication that games are some sort of lesser form of enjoyment. Whats wrong with it being ‘just’ a game?
So much of what makes life enjoying could be considered ‘just’ a game. I take huge delight in enjoying flight simulator because for me I’m playing at being a pilot. I’ve got no hope of ever flying a Eurofighter Typhoon in real life but I can pretend I can fly one in flight simulator. Isn’t playing and pretending pretty much the backbone of all the enjoyment flight simulator has to offer?
I just don’t get the whole derogatory its ‘just a game’ mentality whatsoever within the flight sim community.
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As long as I’m enjoying it, I couldn’t care less WHAT it is…
The whole ‘sim vs. game’ thing is just semantics.
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I would say it’s a simulation (with limitations) which can be played either as a simulation or as a game. The ‘player’ can decide which of the two options he/she prefers at each session.
These aircraft are high fidelity enough so you could probably fly the real plane and at least do an autoland. But certification is the line between game and sim in my opinion. I believe the PMDG could be used for training but it just isn’t.
Just like Euro truck simulator isn’t used by driving schools so it’s a game in the sim genre but not an actual simulator.
The only question more likely to start a flame war is…..“which is better…MSFS or X-plane??“
I say it is to each user what ever he believes it to be. Since you can not log time flown on MSFS officially and count it towards maintaining a rating etc, it is at best a personal simulator. Given the right setup and use it can be a great training aide and I firmly believe it is a great tool to maintain certain skills and even prepare to some extent for a flight to an unfamiliar airport.
Since you can fly with damage disabled and pause and reset any situation as you need or fly with total disregard for operational limitations of an aircraft it is also very much a game.
Oh no …
Not a new thread on this please
Actually there is no real answer to the question.
In a way it is an enigma wrapped in that question.
You see it is YOU who decides what it is.
It all depends on how you use the program as to what it is to you.
Is my Ferrari a fun toy or is it just a car?
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Well as long as a current F1 Champion participates in certain SimRacing games, I guess they can’t be all bad 
it’s a screenshot generator
and a fairly reliable bank account reduction enhancer
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Is a car a vehicle since it can transport people?
Or is it instead a weapon since it can be used to hurt people?
Or is it an entertainment area since you can sit in it and listen to music?
Or is it a dwelling since you can sleep in it?
Or is it an office since you can work on your laptop in it?
if you ask me, a car is a car
if the manufacturer starts removing wheels one by one, and then adds a desk, a waiting room and a philodendron, at some point it will become an office,
is it wrong? of course not!
but you are kinda choosing a different audience, and the first ones will go “hey.. whats going on here”
i know im stretching it, im just making a point
Hello @TOLOWTERRAIN723,
If I’m understanding your metaphor above correctly, you appear to be implying that MSFS2024 is removing the aspects of core simming you personally enjoy so that other features can be added and the product dramatically transformed into something altogether different designed to appeal to a different audience.
If that is actually your intention with this car metaphor, then you can rest easy because that is absolutely not the case. New features such as the Aviation Activities system are being added to MSFS2024, but that doesn’t imply that other functionality is being removed. In fact, just the opposite is happening – almost every component of MSFS (2020) is being upgraded and improved in MSFS2024 in addition to new features being added.
Here’s a direct quote from Seb at last year’s FSExpo presentation:
And so, we also have a lot of – we have a lot of requests on all the other systems. So I’m not gonna go into deep detail right now on all this, but we have the teams working on pretty much every system to make them better. And so, yeah. Quickly gonna [go] through them, but:
- Electric, pneumatic, fuel, hydraulics.
- Important we have a failure and wear and tear system. So planes get dirty and all that stuff.
- Payload, passenger.
- A lot of deeper and wider avionics packages.
- Important, at the last, EFB: Cockpit tablet by default on all aircraft. That’s really cool.
And yeah, so in order to do all that, Jorg showed a team photo. Our team grew really big. We had a lot of specialists, pilots, and even an excellent aerodynamics engineer who worked on one of the best simulators there is out there. Andrey [Solomykin], who is going to help me more and more on all these systems. And so, yeah, we’re doing a lot of stuff and a lot of improvements in this new sim.
Thanks,
MSFS Team
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Seriously I don’t know what is the validity of this entire thread, it was posted many time, people can search on it, you will get all the same old post, why even post again. Why ever generated this type of post will simply lead to NOTHING.
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This is the point. It’s the player who decides the rules they wish to play by.
What troubles me in this discussion is the sort of knee jerk reaction from som that game = trivial or bad. Perhaps if you just associate the word game with a certain kind of play.
But it’s well accepted that play is an essential part of human psychology and is present in nearly everything people do. It’s a big part of how we learn and understand about the world around us which doesn’t cease at childhood but carries on through all our lives.
The problem is that we find other words instead of ‘play’ and ‘game’ to mask the true nature of what we are doing because there is a certain stigma associated with them.
But as any student of game theory as pioneered by Von Neumann knows, games provide essential tools for understanding all sorts of scenarios and challenges and offer excellent training methodology.
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