ABSTRACT
This essay examines the relationship between narrative and interactive elements in Microsoft’s Combat Flight Simulator 2: WW II Pacific Theater (2000). I will argue that this game and this game genre, the flight simulator, are most valuable in this light for what they can tell us about a central question concerning the electronically mediated cultural milieu in which computer games are increasingly prominent. This question concerns the nature of computer interactivity and its transformative potential in contemporary audiovisual culture. While critical work on this question must address games as one of the major forms of computer usage, I will argue further that computer games such as Combat Flight Simulator 2 crystallize a key tendency of the wider audiovisual entertainment culture. What we will see is that in the process of superseding narrative form by rendering it secondary to the prerogatives of interactive interface design, computer-mediated interactivity tends toward a construction of temporal experience that can best be understood as a transformed narrative operation.
