There’s a new flight simulator game for iOS, but instead of simulating you flying the plane, it’s a simulation of “the best part of air travel: peaceful solitude.” You launch the app, switch your phone to airplane mode, choose a destination, and then for however long it takes to fly to that destination, your phone shows a representation of sitting peacefully in silence staring out the window of the plane.
It’s got 15 reviews in the App Store and all of them are 5 stars, including: “A flight simulator unlike others. Meditative and surreal. A flight simulator for the trip report crew” and “My best work is done on an Airplane & Now I can be on a plane anytime I like.”
Where would you fit such an app in the videogame ecology? If you were a media ecologist and set out to “reveal the unseen purposes” of this “decomposing log” of a game in that biome (Bogost 7), what do you think you would say about it?
Work Cited
Bogost, Ian. “Media Microecology.” How to Do Things with Videogames. U Minnesota P, 2011.
