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Those detailed simulations are out there, though. The rather expensive-to-make military flight simulation games are getting rarer, but Falcon 4.0, ILM Sturmovik and DCS did, or do, have sizeable niche followings. Fairly detailed car racing simulators (Assetto Corsa, Dirt:Rally, iRacing) are also fairly popular. Board-style wargames remain a small niche, but they do exist - I remember the early iterations of Close Combat being particularly good (real-time platoon-level engagements with well-modelled soldiers that had a propensity for panicking under fire, or perhaps displaying extreme bravery). Detailed simulations of fictional entities are a bigger thing - Prison Architect, Kerbal Space Program and Dwarf Fortress are all popular games, each of which simulate complex interlocking systems (the Prison Industrial System, Orbital Mechanics, and an entire fantasy world, in amazing detail), and all of which are starting to pick up imitators. Then there's the Paradox series of big historical games - Crusader Kings II, Europa Universalis IV and Victoria 2, among others, let you pick any country you like in their given time periods (medieval, early modern, 19th century respectively), and attempt to model a sort of alternate history through gameplay, with war, economics, politics, diplomacy, religion being part of the systems at work. If you want to try your hand at the Swedish colonization of South America, or to halt the Protestant reformation in it's tracks, or keep Byzantium alive into the 18th century, these games are what you after. There's sports management games too - the likes of Football Manager and Out of the Park baseball model much of the entire professional range of their sports (OOTP Baseball has more or less the entire history of the top US Baseball Leagues in it's database) in considerable depth. Games are a very broad church, and complex, detailed, simulations are very much a part of it. A lot of the future you're wondering about actually happened; they just formed into various subcultures and coexisted with the shinier, simpler games you're thinking of. |