Matthew on 28/7/2008 at 16:58
I'd say so - I prefer that to 'sim', in my mind that conjures up 'flight sim' or 'business sim' or, hell, 'city sim'.
Digital Nightfall on 28/7/2008 at 17:16
I am going to cast my lot into the 'sim means a game that attempts to realistically simulate something real, such as aerodynamics combined with the mechanical aspects of a working aircraft' and not something that simply stimulates our sense of being there.
Matthew on 28/7/2008 at 17:24
It reminds me of the old joke about the 8-bit game Ninja Jet Ski Simulator; it wasn't a sim (oddly enough) put they tacked it onto the title to sell more copies - successfully apparently.
Muzman on 28/7/2008 at 17:27
I think you'll find that 'Immersive Sim' was coined by Church and Spector during the development of System Shock if not earlier.
Koki on 28/7/2008 at 17:35
"Immersive sim" is a pretty fucking stupid genre.
NamelessPlayer on 2/8/2008 at 04:00
To me, a "sim" is something that puts realism above all else, and generally pertains to the virtual representation of vehicles. Most of those games aren't so much realistic as they are believable, if you get what I mean.
(This is starting to remind me of a bad portion of my personality that says that most so-called "space sims" shouldn't really be called sims because they don't simulate space flight properly; that is to say, real spacecraft don't fly like airplanes in the vacuum of space.)
The_Raven on 2/8/2008 at 04:25
You'll get no argument from me, I too have always found the label "space sim" to be a misnomer.
Fafhrd on 2/8/2008 at 06:16
Except, one should hope, in the case of the Independence War series.
Shadowcat on 2/8/2008 at 13:34
Well, I think even I-War can only be said to have a greater verisimilitude than most other games of the genre.
Orbiter comes about as close as we've got to a genuine space sim.
demagogue on 2/8/2008 at 22:23
I've always thought of the term "sim" as applying to a game that simulates some very complex part of reality that's "behind" what you directly see (beyond just the bounding-box of the things rendered on screen, and basic physics) as part of the gameplay ... so things like market-forces, complicated physics like aerodynamics or hydrodynamics, the correct workings of a high-performance car engine, the orbital dynamics of a spacecraft, etc...
While it should be realistic to be considered a respectable sim, it's the "simulating the RL things behind what you directly see" part that seems to be the defining feature of actually being one ... e.g., a bad sim.
