What is a sim, what is not...

[Madfish]

I believe anything can be a sim if you allow the bending of real world laws of physics etc.

However, the way I define a sim is this: A simulation follows real world mechanics as closely as possible.

This means that for example Flight Unlimited isn't a sim anymore to me as the flight model is now arcade. The same goes for many older games and even IL-2 1946 will lose it's "sim" status at some point. This is simply because these games cannot simulate flight in the highest achievable fidelity anymore.


Many other games are following a different approach though. For example simplifying the flight models on purpose. Those are clearly arcade.

So my definition for arcade is clear. My definition for a sim changes over time.



Battlefield 3 is clearly arcade to me though. Too many shortcuts were taken that prevent the game from actually simulating - it's more of a fantasy demonstration if you will.
ArmA3 is a simulation in the genre of military shooters - for the flying part I don't know (yet) but ArmA2 is clearly not a flying sim.