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Comment by hypertexthero | Hacker News Reader

Here’s another challenge:

Create fun games to play in these flights.

The games available are usually poor and slow.

Is it a technical limitation such as too many screens and not enough processing power to go around?

Or maybe no good HID (Human Interface Device) controllers? Touch-screens should be okay, especially for turn-based games, but maybe continuously pushing your finger against the screen would make the person seated in front angry after some time?

Perhaps Management doesn’t realize that video games are a popular thing?

Or is this just too much of a first-world problem and not worth the effort from the airline companies?

I’d love to see games like Rogue, X-Com, Sopwith, Jagged Alliance, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Myst, Vampire Survivors, and so on, available to play at 30,000 feet.

Maybe the airline could have these games hosted on their wifi network for downloading and playing in the browser of your personal pocket computer instead?

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Back in the day Virgin Atlantic (and others?) hosted a version of the SNES. I played Link to the Past on a flight from London to Cape Town and, as the first long haul flight I'd been on, I thought it was normal. By far the best in-flight gaming experience I've had [0].

Pretty much all carriers have D-pad controllers, though the inputs tend to be very spongy. I don't think people use them much anyway because the touch screen is more intuitive and orienting the controller with respect to the screen is a surprisingly bad user experience (some are vertical, some are horizontal, wrapping never works well).

The games are improving a bit because the hardware is actually quite good now (some of the newer aircraft even have per-seat bluetooth). American has Plants vs Zombies, for example. I've played Luxor somwhere, and there are occasionally good puzzlers like Sokoban which I rarely play anywhere else. Annoying that the game has to cache and reload every time there's an announcement. The mid 00s systems are pretty terrible, but newer seat back displays are pretty great in terms of resolution/quality for what they are.

[0]https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_Gateway_System

I was on a Japan Air flight about 10 years ago that had Street Fighter 2. It was on a crappy remote controller with vaguely SNES colored buttons. It was alright but your finger would inevitably slip and hit a game exiting button by mistake.

Still, it’s got to the be the most niche SF2 port ever made. Probably easy openings for the top spot.

Compete with fellow travelers. Game players and observers.

Travel socially+locally connected.

I remember being on a long haul with a colleague, and playing a trivia game on the inflight entertainment system, with other flyers. It was fun to hear the roar of victory from another passenger

It probably was a SNES: https://snescentral.com/article.php?id=1019

The trend is just to have you use an iPad or iPhone with local video and games available from the plane's Wifi. This pretty normal on US shorthaul US flights now, since those things are way better than anything built into the headrest.

The trend is to cut costs on domestic carriers; what you describe is just the excuse. When a flight has both IFE and this "iPad experience," I almost never see anyone using their own device. Even without the IFE, when people are entertaining themselves on their own devices, I'm skeptical that many of them are actually using whatever WiFi-driven entertainment monstrosity is available, as opposed to e.g. predownloaded Netflix content or Kindle books. In my experience it has never worked very well.

Watching TV/movies on the airplane screens is better than your phone/ipad because the screens are sometimes bigger, the content may be different (sometimes newly released movies show up earlier than netflix), and the screen is positioned in a more comfortable place for viewing while leaning back into your seat.

Playing games on those screens sucks: the controls are bad, the input latency is bad, the screens are usually pretty low fps (30 in the best case), and the hardware running the games is underpowered.

Playing games on your phone is better than the screen, watching stuff is better on the screen, so while this may be a cost cutting measure I'm fine with it for the most part.

> When a flight has both IFE and this "iPad experience," I almost never see anyone using their own device.

I don't like the IFE screens because of terrible hardware (unresponsive screens) and software. I always use my own device.

But you're right -- I generally don't even want to interface with the IFE and either leave it in map mode or off, if that's possible. Occasionally there's a film I'd like to watch, but never enough to watch on the seatback. On my ipad, OK.

Built in IFE's are pretty expensive, due to the required certification for each a/c type, periodic checks and fixes, and eventual need to be removed or replaced. And most of that has to happen with the plane not making money, in a hangar. Then also weight + fuel burn. It seems like a reasonable excuse to me.

I think portable gaming has been available for so long that as far as airplanes are concerned, people who want to play games on the flight will bring their own.

Longest Flight I was ever on was Toronto to Munich, but my travelling was from Victoria.

I brought my 3DS with Zelda Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons installed. Beat one on the trip their, one on the trip back. It was great for keeping myself entertained on the flight.

Nowadays I travel with my Switch

Chances of someone not having a screen with them on a plane these days are slim. I'd rather they used whatever budget they have for this into better in-flight internet speeds with lower prices. Then there's almost zero need for screens behind seats as everyone can just use whatever they prefer to consume whatever media they normally would.

I mostly agree, but I still use the in-seat screen for the flight map.

You could have that available on the inflight wifi would work fine, local image/tile server to a certain level globally, cache the area under the projected flightpath before departure, then update the cache as time goes on.

Some planes have external cameras too which can be interesting - you could have those on the inflight wifi too.

I’m sure that’s exactly the sort of complicated technology product that airlines would excel at delivering.

For the first part you can also just go on flightradar on your phone on the flight wifi.

Flight Map, movies and better/bigger screen a right position. Or chit-chat with a stranger, enjoy the view or read a book ;)

I could use my laptop but it is better suited for other tasks.

> maybe continuously pushing your finger against the screen would make the person seated in front angry after some time

The tech crowd here is stuck on the technology limits, but this right here is main reason. It would drive me nuts if someone was trying to play a fast interactive game on a touch screen behind me while I was trying to sleep. It’s bad enough when people jam the screen when picking a movie.

I don't think adding a nice controller and cool games to play would be prohibitedly expensive. But it is an investment and someone needs to take the risk. It's entirely possible that they spend all this money creating this thing and no one uses and just watch films the whole trip.

You're probably better off getting a switch or a steam deck. It has the added benefit that you can finish your game afterwards, after the flight.

> I don't think adding a nice controller and cool games to play would be prohibitedly expensive.

Yeah, but it would be more expensive than dirt cheap.

I see it all the time; you wouldn't think a huge company would have a problem spending money on something. But, at the end of the day, it's all about that department's budgets and priorities.

>I don't think adding a nice controller and cool games to play would be prohibitedly expensive.

Everything like that on an aircraft (nice controller) has to be certified for every specific type, etc. Lots of process, paperwork, testing, etc.

I used to fly on planes that had “fancy” controllers - they had lots of buttons (full QWERTY keyboard, ABXY and d-pad, special buttons for controlling the lights and calling the attendants, etc.) and slotted into a latched recess right below the IFE. Something like this: https://www.vecteezy.com/photo/11024929

There’s no analog stick and the ergonomics aren’t that great, but it’s definitely usable as a controller.

Yes, it used to happen. I think though, that the trend of providing just wifi and the customer supplies their own device will spread. It's cheaper.

I was once on an international flight which had an endless trivia game, where the questions were broadcast to every seat. You could pick a name, and there was a flight-wide leaderboard.

I think that could be a good direction: simple shared experiences that you can drop in and out of. Airlines are too cheap to spring for fast hardware, and the touch displays are chosen for durability more than responsiveness.

It would be neat if you could play small "MMO" games with the other passengers on the flight. Or just a chat room or Twitter clone. I suppose it wouldn't get used all that much.

Myst would be a perfect game to play on a long flight. Sorting the right controller setup might be tricky though.

played full on modern Tetris (probably an ipad port) on a flight recently, it was pretty decent

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