Super Nerd Sundays Presents: I Wasn't Aware of That!

As a young man I used to play a lot of flight sims. I would spend hours and hours memorizing keystrokes and craft details in Janes before settling in for a four hour session of escorting C-130s to supply drops and rationing my missiles, praying that my Pheonixes would connect with incoming MIGs. When games like X-Wing and Wing Commander entered my sphere of awareness I was blown away. Flight sims were cool, sure, but space sims? The coolest.

Why fly a boring old F-14 Tomcat when I could hop in my A-Wing and dogfight in a way cooler interceptor? What was the point in spending thirty minutes dogging one MIG so I could get a missile lock in cloud cover when I could blast through streams of TIE fighters and drop the shields on an Imperial Star Destroyer so that my B-Wing allies could drop torpedoes on it. This is to say nothing of the excitement of running the Death Star’s trench or weaving in and out of the gun fire of a Kilrathi corvette’s batteries while grooving to the voice of Mark Hamill. By the time Descent: Freespace came out I was a space sim vet. If it flew in vacuum I knew how to handle it. I could eyeball my radar while dog fighting and rebalancing my power configurations even though I couldn’t drive or talk to girls and damned if I wasn’t the last best hope for the universe when the Shivans rolled around. I knew which way was up, where my carrier was, where the nearest jump node was, the bearing of those incoming fighters and just where that missile making alarms go off all over my cockpit was coming from. I was constantly aware, twitching and sputtering, a paranoid little pilot too young for caffeine.

This isn’t an essay about the death of the space sim genre. There are better essays by people much better at researching topics like that than myself, and a quick google search will no doubt turn up a gamut of them. Likewise this isn’t an in memoriam of a storied and awesome genre that used to captivate and capture my attention as a gamer and a person. This is an essay about the skills those games bred, skills that come in handy in more recent games but have, of late, become less and less of a focus and, as gamers become lazier, less and less of a perceived ability. This is an essay about situational awareness.

Situational awareness is something most people use in their daily life. They use it when driving, when reading, when looking for objects in the super market. Games rely heavily upon it, your ability to monitor changing situations based on visual or aural cues. Some games, like Left4Dead, are keenly aware of its impact and attempt to simulate certain elements of the way our actual situational awareness functions. Real time strategy games make situational awareness key by making it something of a resource. The way you focus your attention in most real time strategy games has a tremendous impact on the way the game plays, and decisions about where and how you direct your attention are every bit as important in a game of Starcraft as how you choose to spend your Vespene gas.

But no genre of games has ever made situational as important, as key to your success as a player, as flight and space sims. In sims you would live or die by your situational awareness. An inexperienced pilot in a Janes game could easily stall their engine by attempting to ascend at too great an angle mid dogfight or crash their plane into the sea because they hadn’t paid attention to their altimeter, instead relying on the primitive horizon for guidance. And in the X-Wing series it was all too easy to lose track of the greater battle in combat and allow a critical objective to fall to enemies or be overwhelmed by an approaching wave. Freespace was especially unforgiving in this respect, with space rendered with painful accuracy and your insignificance as a pilot reinforced by the sheer scale of both the capital ships engaging in battle by your side and the number of enemies attacking you.

These titles, which defined a generation of gamers the same way adventure games and JRPGs did, instilled skills in the gamers who came into the medium through them. Just the way that Counter-Strike players assess resources at the drop of a pin and exercise caution and boldness in equal turn in order to wage psychological warfare against their enemies flight sim gamers came to regard situational awareness as a sort of holy grail, a reason to take speed and pound coffee aside from the wonderful impact of drug product on our minds.

Some of us still carry the scars of this situational awareness training to this day. Left4Dead, with its aforementioned shifting perceptions and insistence on constant vigilance, is as close as mainstream gaming comes to the old school reinforcement of these principles that flight sims insisted on. And the new generation’s lack thereof shows in contemporary game development. The radar of Halo and Modern Warfare is a holdover of these flight sims, neutered to a single panel and reduced in importance by a combination of visuals intended to draw the eye and hacks in equal turn. Haze, a game few people probably remember at this point despite its hype, went so far as to make situational awareness a game mechanic and to control it through simulated drug use. Portal is built around reshaping the situational awareness of player so that they examine areas they normally ignore. So both developers and players clearly recognize the importance of situational awareness in games.

But its no longer considered the personal responsibility it once was. In a Heroes of Newerth game it is considered the most egregious of offenses to fail to call a missing hero from one’s lane, despite the prominent mini-map which displays such information. Being shot from behind in Call of Duty warrants cries of bullshit, and melee attack to the back of the head in Halo receive much the same treatment, despite the fact that, when you come down to it, it’s mostly the fault of the person who isn’t paying attention. In a way the death of flight sims has had the strange corollary effect of reducing the importance of punishing players for not paying attention. I could never have watched movies while playing games previous, but with current generation titles I have little trouble. Mass Effect 2 takes it a little farther, making their game a little bit boring if I don’t pop a DVD into my laptop while I play it.

And in the end this bleeds into the way games tell stories. Half-Life wanted us to pay attention to minutia so that they could tell their stories. Wing Commander and X-Wing both insisted on it. Myth required this attention to get the “most complete” picture of the story. Old games, the best of them, relied on players keenly paying attention in order to tell their stories. As a result their stories were difficult things, things that baffled the old and slow (Robert Ebert) and the young and dense alike. They begged a keen mind, one willing to insert and infer text to find profound things, one willing to deal with punishing conditions in order to gain something from it.

Sims were punishingly hard, and the attempts at resurrecting them show that they simply cannot co-exist with the current gaming trend of avoiding difficult games. Demon’s Souls is easily the “hardest” game published in recent memory which actually sold well, and this fact is telling. Demon’s Soul caters to an old school audience, an RPG audience already willing to commit massive amounts of time and effort to games. The fact that more mainstream genres have largely shied away from this tradition is hardly surprising. But it is a bit sad when we see dull, brainless games which force story upon their audience rather than allow them to make it like Heavy Rain hailed as the new means of telling a story in games. These games, which actually insist that situational awareness is not importance, are a direct effect of the medium’s attempt to break into the mainstream, and they’re not particularly good for games.

They’re not particularly good for games not because they divert sales from better, smarter games (The Path, for example, forces you to play a murderer without ever explicitly telling you you are doing so, and is all the better for it) but because they promote schlock and draw attention away from these smart little games at a time when they need it most. Games are budding as a medium, and the attention they are receiving as they become an acceptable means of entertainment is defining them. Things like Heavy Rain, which show none of the medium’s strength and instead show the power of a branching DVD menu, aren’t the items that show the power games have to tell immersive and engaging stories. And its because they fail to grasp the fundamental idea that games require your full attention in order to be effective, and that this is less a matter of showing you something interesting and more one of asking you to find something interesting, something flight sims grasped almost instinctively over a decade ago.