I would also agree that narrative and gameplay structure do present difficulties to space and flight sims, but at the same time I would point out that we’ve been conceptualizing these things for years. Ender’s game was written in 1985 and it described a space sim that alternated between first person controls, squadron view and controls, and even overall strategic command of a battle group. It involved the same kind of base attacks and battle group defense that some WW2 sims use or more potently that EVE online uses. Now I’m not saying I really expect a developer to actually do that, but I am saying that we’ve been conceptualizing these things for years so it’s hard to fathom why we can’t have our resurgent space sim with at least optional first person controls. I mean Starcraft’s revived fame alone should have somebody clamoring for first person space flight.

I honestly do think that the way it will have to be brought back will be some kind of amalgamation of either fps base combat with first person space combat traveling between bases or some kind of combination battleship with first person fighters kind of space game. Hopefully someone will resurrect the genre soon.

in the gaming world, new games are covered as technical marvels, never as creative entities. We’re bound to see a flood of “powered by” titles following in DOOM 3’s wake – while in Hollywood, we often see “From the Writer of,” or “From the Director of,” instead. You’ll never see “Shot by the Same Camera that Shot Serpico” in a movie commercial. In gaming, design and creativity often wither on the vine because of the industry’s technology fetishism.

I suspect that part of the reason is because genre thinking is one of those areas of critical thinking that many people are just really bad at. I don’t know whether they used to be better at it or not, but I’m noticing this semester that even with a bunch of students who are news junkies, they have little to no awareness that there are story genres in the news, which is to say simply that there are patterns across stories. People seem to prefer the patterns provided by conspiracy theories or cynicism to noticing the patterns that are really there.

But with regard to space sims, the more I read your comment, the more I found myself still asking the same question: why did they go away? You make a number of excellent points as to their possible ongoing appeal. I covered this in part in the original post but it could do with expanding.

1) As the “realism” of simulations rises, so does the cost. The niche-sourcing campaign seems to be going really well for Star Citizen, but I still have a sinking feeling that this is a much more expensive undertaking than either Roberts realizes or he is admitting.
2) It is a self-reliance genre. Narrative and even gameplay structure have been notoriously difficult to graft onto the sim genre. Tie Fighter and the Wing Commander series did it about as well as anyone. But even then, narrative always looks like a thin pretext for shooting things. Isn’t that true of most games? Well, yes. But somehow it just, I don’t know, seems so much more visible in the sim genre (and especially the flying/space sim variants); maybe because there is so much less to distract you out in space? Even gameplay structure tends to be difficult. Aces High has complex base capture and RvR dynamics. But the WWII flight sim genre is heavily reliant on players who don’t wait for the game to tell them what to do but either organize their own fun or organize their own fun in parallel to the game (flying as a squad, tactical considerations, etc).
3) The kind of difficulty that is embodied in a well-done sim is challenging because it isn’t predictable. And players tend to hate things that aren’t predictable.

I agree however that we currently seem to have a “big ship” imagination. We want to be Kings rather than pawns. But there is no reason why you can’t have both in a game; Aces High, in the WW2 world, did this really well. In order to invade bases you could fly aircraft off carriers, but other players could control the guns and even the ships of that fleet to stage coastal bombardments or put up an anti-aircraft screen to ward off attackers.

I, too, am much saddened by the demise of 1st person space sims. The thing with Space games is that the potential is infinite. You can always create a new ship design, impractical or unrealistic as it may seem. Space games capitalize on this all the time from Eve to Star Wars. As long as you can create a culture, you can create a new game or premise around it. So I find it sad that the idea of applying this to 1st person flight sims has died out.why is a fighter design necessarily less cool because it’s first person? It is something of a contradiction. 1st person sims in general have not died out. They provide one of gaming’s most popular genres so much so they they have blurred the line between genres. This brings me to the second Extra Credits video I want to share here http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/aesthetics-of-play This video discusses how we as gamers are fundamentally defining genres completely wrong. We define genres by mechanics instead of aesthetics which Extra Credits equates with defining movies by “close-up Kissing” or “steady-cam running”, but that’s an argument for a different time. I don’t really understand why the desire for heightened realism and a first person camera doesn’t translate into space flight sims. Is it the desire for something more? I don’t really think so because modern warfare and such shooters survive on little more than a leveling system and unlockable guns which could easily translate to space. This is of course not at all to say you couldn’t do more with it. Why wouldn’t a battlefield style game be fun in space? Obviously certain modifications would have to be made, but the space battles were one of the more engaging additions to Star Wars: Battlefront 2. I’d say maybe part of it comes from the fact that we now equate space with capital ships the way we equate the sea with battleships or galleons. I do think this shift is somewhat misguided though. If there’s anything we should learn from the history of space across the arts, it is that it doesn’t have to be locked into one or the other. It can be both at the same time. Why can’t we have a game with some people manning the capital ship and others as the away fighters? It would be difficult but not impossible. In any case, I hope we see a resurrection of the space flight sim genre.