Of a few thousand feet up in Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator 2020, Bing Maps’ real world map data appears on the horizon. The Pyramids of Giza are hourglass pillars of sand. Hong Kong is a strip of urbanity that snakes around the coast. A baseball field outside Yokohama, Japan, forms a lime pastel smudge. As I flew, my computer extracted 3D map data from the cloud and created it with stunning precision, but I found that I needed these metaphors to really do it.
There has been a gap of 14 years in between Flight Simulator X, the previous entry in the series, and Flight Simulator 2020. Flight Simulator X mapped the positions of the stars and most important landmarks, allowing players to explore everything from a glider to a 747. Flight Simulator 2020however, the entire globe – from everyday suburbs to the private island of Jeffrey Epstein – encompasses like a snowball of $ 60. At a pitch for mainstream appeal, it takes its cues less from the hardcore, low-poly sims pilots for months as if from a little demo software called HoloTour made for Microsoft’s augmented reality headset.
“I remember the first time I put the headset on, the views and sounds were so real,” Flight Simulator 2020 lead Jorg Neumann told the Verge. ‘I mean, I’ve never been to Peru, but it was really for me. And even then, in early 2016 or so, I just thought to myself, ‘Man, if we could just do this all over the planet, wouldn’t that be something?’ ”
It’s something. Flight Simulator 2020 is a tourist game that includes both maneuvering a virtual plane and a detail-rich platform for escapism. It certainly came at the right moment. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, 100 percent of global travel destinations as of April had some sort of restriction. Italy, Japan and Spain are among the dozens of countries that have barred American tourists from entering. For the most part, the architecture I see is limited to my neighborhood, mediated by a face mask.
Flight Simulator 2020 is positioned to fill that void, at least a little. However, falling off the Tokyo Narita International Airport – where I would have landed later this year that things were different – I felt absolutely nothing swooping over the blocky sprawl. Even with an ergonomic joystick and throttle, pilot a plane in Flight Simulator 2020 is like driving an eyeball around Google Earth. I begin to wonder what it would take to approach ‘immersion’, a term so often equated with fidelity to life. Wood panel textures? Kanji text on backlit billboards? A higher-end gaming PC?
There is certainly no lack of data. Mapping tools like Bing’s and Google Earth have long been faithful enough that an artist can rely on them to record distant city scenes. My childhood friend Ellie Doughty, an ‘urban illustrator’, is one of them. In her college years, Ellie escaped suburban Virginia and traveled to Germany and Austria, where she parked in advance of what old buildings inspired her, and painted her small sash windows and roofing. Back home, to capture that sense of serendipity, Ellie’s art practice shifted to ‘random’ hitting Google Street View. What surprised her was what struck her. “Of course it’s pretty different,” she says. ‘It’s flat. It does not live like the city. However, it is the next best thing. ”
In quarantine, Ellie has taught a distance class for city sketches about Zoom with Google Street View. The students drew cinderblock structures in Puebla, Mexico; a charming church in the Czech Republic. “It’s easier to draw because things are already flat,” she says. “Street View omits many details that may be of interest to IRL but are not ultimately important to capturing the whole scene.”
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