tron - Do you think this is air you're breathing?

Please excuse the misquote from another film but reading this question has inspired me to ask if the Grid simulates air and the quote is kind of related as both movies share a similar concept of a simulated world within the real world.

There are several pointers to say that it does: the light jets have wings and execute aerial maneuvers, Sam appears to be breathing heavily after exertion, and Sam's blood is bright red when he bleeds.

However all those could be seen as part of the individual 'programming' of the vehicles or programs/users rather than part of the environment.

So does the Grid simulate an environment with air, do the individual programs simulate the effects of air, or is there some other explanation?

Answer

No. It does not make sense that the Grid would be simulating air.

The Grid is a virtual environment that mediates control of machine resources through the visual metaphor of combat games. Two types of virtual environment exist:

1. Bottom-up simulations, where there are low-level universal rules of interaction and everthing that exists in the simulation is built atop those rules. Our universe seems to be such a simulation, with quantum theory and general relativity providing the low-level rules that govern the existence of stars, atoms, life and everything else.


2. Patchwork virtual reality, where the goal is to be simulate some environment accurately enough to convince some privileged observer. Rules are local and ad hoc, "reality" may only be simulated where the observer is looking/existing at that moment. Simplified formulas replace non-linear dynamic systems. Unobserved group behaviors are modeled statistically instead of computing the actions of each group member. And so on.

Probably every computer game you've ever played that simulates some shared reality uses patchwork VR. The advantage is that complex systems can be simulated well enough to provide verisimilitude and entertainment without reifying low-level details (at huge computational cost) that the game player would never notice anyway.

The Grid is at its heart a game system and no sane 1980's game programmer would simulate air molecules. Games don't directly simulate air ever today and current hardware is at least a thousand times faster.