Simulations & My Dream Open-World Video Game

After Mr. Musk has brought it up a few times, whether on a podcast or within a tweet, the concept of us being in a simulation is quite the conversation starter. How, all this time, humanity has been trapped in such an advanced, believable virtual world manipulated by a greater power. Like how you would control your video game avatar in his/her virtual world.

As interesting as that is as a topic, I’m going to stick to the pure video game aspect of this. After replying to Derick David’s recent tweet on the topic of simulations, it got me thinking about truly immersive video games even more.

Where will these immersive games be taking us?

Just how believable and/or fathomable can the next VR and life-like graphics become?

Will we get to the point where reality itself cannot even compete with video games?

How long will it be before we are living the everyday life shown in Ready Player One?

It’s quite the forward-thinking, and controversial, topic at this point. There could be a day where we can simulate everything to the point that there’s no reason to travel, explore or even simply go outside.

Imagine that. Having your VR headgear, full-body tracking suit and various other machines to simulate sunlight (providing your daily Vitamin D), snow, rain, wind, and other weather elements. All in the comfort of your home. Pile this on top of simulated racing equipment, first-person shooter gear and other accessories for the other gaming genres you indulge in.

Now, back to what is the true focal point of this piece.

My Dream Open-World Video Game

Cutting to the chase, the open-world game I’ve long been waiting for is a marriage of Flight Simulator 2020 and Grand Theft Auto V. Breaking it down, here’s what that would look like:

• Planet Earth map data & fly-anywhere features of FS 2020
• All and/or as many commonly known cities, towns, villages, and other points of interest completely mapped out in-game
• The ability to land my plane anywhere, get out and have a GTA-style open world interaction with any of said POIs on Earth

That’s great and all, but how will we accomplish this? Well, for starters, some breakthroughs in compute technologies will need to take place. This will be a behemoth of a video game. So, the streaming map data features of FS 2020 will need to be adapted in this IP.

Not only will we need to learn and “copy” what Microsoft Flight Simulator has done, but vastly improve upon it as well. Already, I can see an instance where you will want to fly near a POI and see all other online players within said spot appear on your map. Like GTA Online. All these instances for all the POIs for all of Planet Earth will take an incomprehensible amount of server power. Hence, why we need to wait for some technological breakthroughs.

Then, there’s the mapping of all POIs on this virtual Earth. Currently, this will take a lot of manpower and resources to accomplish. Luckily, once the tech is ready and the game servers are up for the private beta, we might have another tool: Autonomous, Electric Cars.

You think what Tesla is doing with the FSD beta is cool? Imagine a world where we’ll be able to quickly map out a newly paved city street in Las Vegas, upload the data to the game servers and have it spawn in-game on the same day or within a 1–2 days later. You can then take your avatar and visit this same brand-new street in a video game.

How would the street be captured so quickly, you ask? Autonomous electric vehicle fleets whose sole purpose is to do the following:

• Drive around their geofenced areas
• Collect current map data
• Drive back to a designated fleet parking zone
• Park above an advanced wireless charging bay that also has data transmitting capabilities
• Charge up and upload map data to game servers
• Drive away and repeat

Why would you want this? Well, the same reason anyone is drawn to open-world games. It’s an open world. You have the freedom to do/go whatever/wherever you wish. Now, take this concept and imagine an immersive, open-world game where you have an entire planet that’s completely interactive. From the weather affecting your flight path down to the very buildings themselves on city streets. Your gameplay time tracker in Steam would instantly go from showing tens of hours played to tens of days' worth of gameplay.

Wouldn’t that feel great after a stressful day at work? Being able not only choose a city anywhere on earth but the ability to drive and/or fly from city to city on a completely mapped out planet Earth? I know, The Crew 2 video game comes close to the game I’m describing but even its version of United States, only the United States, is more “dumbed down” than an exact carbon copy of every single street.

Yes… I’m going to be waiting for a while before these kinds of games appear in my library.