The latest iteration of the video game, first released in 1982, reveals the hubris of a company intent on dominating the digital infrastructure of the future
In the heavily branded and marketed world of modern consumer technology, every product seems intended to express the philosophy of its maker. Apple pairs high-end user experiences with sleek, minimalist design. Amazon promises cheap accessibility through its website, the Kindle and Firestick. Microsoft errs towards utilitarianism. Its suite of Office software – including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook – are straightforward and unfussy. Yet a glimmer of utopian possibility occasionally surfaces through the software that facilitates the work of over a billion users worldwide, operated by the world’s second most profitable company. This glint manifested as the harmonic rush of Brian Eno-composed music which accompanied the Windows 95 start-up screen. The video game, Microsoft Flight Simulator, which debuted in 1982 and whose most recent entry was released on PC and Xbox consoles this November, expands on this emotion of promise: It grants the player a practically endless horizon of azure-blue skies; a series of never-ending orange sunsets; a sense of unfettered, technological possibility obtainable from the comfort of a reclinable office chair.
Microsoft Flight Simulator has previously offered a smaller toybox version of planet Earth; rebooted in 2020, it now offers a 1:1 recreation which players can theoretically navigate in a single, unbroken session (although they would likely run out of fuel trying to do so). Early promotional material promised the ability to ‘fly anywhere,’ and that tantalising promise, at least in ‘free flight’ mode, was duly delivered upon. It’s made possible by Microsoft’s growing stack of ‘next generation’ services, a combination of satellite imagery and 3D photogrammetry from Bing Maps transformed by the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning services into a playable 3D world.. As a product of such tech, Microsoft Flight Simulator isn’t just a video game: it almost functions as a glossy marketing tool for Microsoft’s ambitions in the realm of digital infrastructure (which has seen it already score it a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon).
As a showcase of such ambitions, Microsoft Flight Simulator captures the imagination in a matter that is frequently sublime. In first-person, I glide through the mountain pass which leads to Lake Como, peering out of the window while twiddling knobs of the immaculately rendered cockpit, all while wrestling with the wind that is buffeting against the valley’s ridges. Approaching the glistening body of water, I shift the camera to a third-person view of the glider, bringing it as close to the lake’s surface as I dare before skimming the aircraft across the water like a stone. In the background, a swelling Max Richter-esque score dares me to shed a tear.
This straightforward evocation of reality lacks the subversive thrust of art projects which have interrogated images of either digital or analogue infrastructure. In manipulating Google Street View images, Doug Rickard’s 2010-12 photoseries, A New American Picture, revealed both the unbound, panoramic sense of space in the US’ impoverished hinterlands and, naturally because of the source material, the queasy voyeurism inherent to Google’s mass photography and mapping project, captured without consent. In his 1989 film, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, German filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki examined the military aerial photography used to make pinpoint bombings of German targets. Despite the Auschwitz concentration camp complex being clearly visible in some of these shots, nothing was done to destroy it and free its prisoners until the end of the war (by which time over 1.1 million Jews had been murdered at the site). Farocki seems to paradoxically suggest we see so much and, conversely, so little, when the world is mediated and abstracted by imagemaking technologies.
Microsoft Flight Simulator possesses no narrative to speak of beyond a rudimentary ‘career mode’, in which the player can take the role of anything from a private pilot to a commercial operator, yet the rawness of its satellite-derived images occasionally inspire moments of solemnity (like artillery craters in the Donbas and Uyghur camps in Xinjiang China). Elsewhere, it can be more visually cinematic, like charting a real-time flight through the volumetric clouds and plane-shaking turbulence of Hurricane Laura. Yet one of the defining emotions I find the game imparts has little to do with flying its virtual aeroplanes at all. Microsoft Flight Simulator is a comforting experience; there is something reassuring knowing that a plethora of real-world, infrastructural systems, and those of third parties like Meteoblue (which sends real-time, real-world weather data to the game), are whirring in concert to deliver this interactive experience.
The game chimes in this sense with another meteorologically-inflected work, George R. Stewart’s landmark 1941 book Storm, regarded by some as the ‘first ecological novel’. In rhapsodic literary style, Stewart delivers a cosmic view of a one-in-a-generation storm before zooming in to focus on various characters preparing and responding to it: a junior meteorologist, snowplow drivers, dam operators and airport service officers. The ecosystems Stewart is concerned with are human as much as animal, and infrastructural as much as natural. In the age of climate crisis, Stewart’s depiction of society’s (mostly hidden) cogs turning in response to a gigantic, external threat, also feels strangely comforting. The impression Stewart imparts is of a wartime marshalling of forces to keep the lights on.
But these workers can’t keep everything perfectly aligned, and Microsoft’s own infrastructure has similarly broken and buckled while rendering Microsoft Flight Simulator. In the 2020 version of the game, the opulent neoclassical design of Buckingham Palace became a drab 2000s office building; while in Melbourne, players discovered a gigantic, 212-story obelisk. The 2024 version is so glitchy that when some assets load into the game incorrectly, they are automatically replaced by a figure dubbed by the internet as ‘red error guy’ (literally a red figure holding an error sign) Players have also reported long load times, aeroplanes crashed into flight schools and teleporting helicopters.
One of the reasons the latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator is profoundly busted is because of a remarkable overconfidence by Microsoft in its Azure data center network. Rather than making players download most of Planet Earth to their home console or PC, developer Asobo now requires that they mostly stream it to their computers (the install size of the latest version is just 30 gigabytes compared to the 150 gigabytes of its predecessor). Microsoft’s servers cannot deal with the demand of so many wannabe pilots, nor can their increasingly dated internet connections handle streaming such a realistic facsimile of our planet’s terrain.
When it works as intended, Microsoft Flight Simulator is miraculous precisely because it is so uncannily real. But its ambitions suggest a darker desire to master the planet: dominance through mapping; subjugation through machine-assisted recreation. The game’s foundational elements diffused across the globe – a network of data centers and satellites; the extraction and refining of rare-earth minerals (at significant environmental cost) – reflect this domineering mission that is nonetheless unstable. The game’s wondrous display can be fleeting, like a spectacular mirage, concomitant on a reliable, working internet. As much as Microsoft has created a showcase for its digital infrastructure, it has inadvertently delivered a meditation on the precariousness of these services in an era when we have never been more reliant on them, nor has their potential to fail, because of climate breakdown and war, been more likely.
A world of borderless travel; aeroplanes seemingly free of environment-wrecking baggage (literally and figuratively): Microsoft Flight Simulator feels like a fantasy of the twentieth century. But now, with each glitch, bug, texture pop-in and protracted loading screen, the game feels as fragile as the real world to which it has materially tethered itself to.
Lewis Gordon is a UK-based writer on technology and culture. His writing has appeared in New York Magazine, The Verge and The Nation, among others.
