The spectacular crash of US Air flight 1549, along with the remarkable, safe rescue of all passengers and crew aboard, has captured the imagination of the public this week. Since 9/11, air disasters have taken on so many different meanings in our culture, and to have such a "successful" one occur in New York offers not only a chance to celebrate real heroism, but a dose of symbolic remedy as well.
One of the questions we can always ask about disasters is this one: "What would it have been like to be involved?" In most cases, it's a question we direct at victims or survivors. But in the case of US Air 1549, the stand-out figure is the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, whose masterful and exacting water landing has earned him all measure of praise, not the least of which includes dozens of Facebook fan pages.
As reported by game news blog Kotaku and others, BBC News took advantage of this pent-up yet unserved interest by airing footage of a recreation of the flight and landing in a flight simulator.
Just Flight, which created the popular and sophisticated Flight Simulator X, whipped together the scenario over the weekend, and BBC aired it today. It's coverage that gives a sense of what it might have been like to be there in the cockpit as Sullenberger made the quick decisions necessary to save US Air 1549. Presumably the physical and geographical accuracy of the flight simulator product itself would testify to the accuracy of the experience it creates.
But there's a problem: the BBC only aired a narrated account of part of the flight plan, arguably the part all of us already knew from reading news coverage over the past few days. The footage offered only brief glimpses into the cockpit, and it didn't address the key decision points Sullenberger and his copilot had to make, and what it would have felt like to make them. In short, the flight simulator was used as fancy 3D footage for a news story rehash, rather than as a new kind of news story itself.
What could the BBC have done differently to take advantage of the Flight Simulator X scenario? For one part, narrating a complete fly-through of the flight from inside the cockpit, outside the plane and (if the simulator allows this) from a passenger's seat inside would have made an interesting and novel account of a now familiar situation.
But for another part, offering the scenario as a download for people to run on their own would have allowed the news consumer to become an active participant in the scenario itself, to understand better that question with which I began: what would it have been like to be involved. Games allow role-played action within a situation. That's what the story promised ("Here's Captain Chesley Sullenberger's view from the cockpit") but didn't deliver.
I don't know whether or not such an act is feasible: did Just Flight provide the scenario in a format that could be easily shared? Do enough news viewers own the Flight Simulator X program to justify it? If not, could a "lite" or trial version be provided? (Certainly it seems reasonable to imagine that many people would consider buying the program just to experience this event.) Can the average news viewer even operate a flight simulator, or is it too technical? Certainly, overcoming these challenges is the stuff of the near future.
While it's certainly interesting to see a real-time 3D rendering of one part of the flight, that interest soon turns into curiosity. There is no invitation to dig deeper, for example to understand the background of the event or how it might have turned out differently. A game scenario might have allowed such a thing, given the right circumstances. Maybe sometime in the future we'll see such a thing
There are two more important, implicit facts about the BBC/Just Flight 1549 scenario that must be made explicit.
First, the very fact that such a scenario was possible at all, let alone in a single weekend, comes thanks to the very existence of consumer flight simulator software, which has a history many decades old. There are no ready tools for other kinds of news events, be they disasters or not. This is a problem to which I'll soon return, in another post.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, mixed public perception of games still makes using them in news a risk. Do you think that BBC or anyone else would have felt comfortable running a game level of flight 1549 had there been casualties? Perhaps so, but I'd guess that editors and the public alike would have found such a thing (wrongly, I should add) disrespectful or inappropriate.
