Given that you commented in the MoT Slack that you were thinking about both simulators for commercial pilots, and sims for āJoe Publicā to try out the feel of flying an airliner, Iāll add my own experience, which is very slight, and definitely towards the latter side. I have never even sat in a real airliner cockpit, or a simulator for commercial pilots, but I have a little recreational flying experience and have tried two different recreational flight simulators. (Looking forward to reading Alexandreās update in a couple of days time to hear about the commercial side).
I used to be a pretty keen glider pilot up until I ran out of the fairly significant time required to stay current about 6 years ago (stupidly, I had completed all of my bronze cert reqs except for a written test, which I then let lapse w/o doing the test). I canāt find my logbook, but I had something like 200+ hours of flying logged which involved hundreds of landings and takeoffs in varied airfields. So, beyond complete beginner level, but quite some way off expert. Experienced enough that a fair few normal flying tasks had become unconscious for me.
Despite this, when I tried out a home-built simulator (built by a member of my club) with controls, seat, cockpit etc from a real glider, I was completely unable to even get the virtual plane off the virtual ground with it - I crashed on takeoff repeatedly. The physical feedback on the controls was missing, the visual input was limited to a couple of screens directly ahead rather than wrap-around, and I just could not get past that. The cognitive dissonance was too strong so I was unable to control the aircraft sufficiently through one sense alone.
Flying a small glider, of course, is going to be pretty different from flying a huge airliner - in a glider, Iām used to receiving a lot of physical input (when people talk about āflying by the seat of your pantsā, this is a real thing in gliding - you are looking for rising air, and you literally do feel a bump through your seat when you fly through a thermal, the sound you are hearing is a very important cue to your flying speed etc) plus the movements you make are way more extreme than in an airliner (much sharper angle of bank, for one, and I know glider pilots transitioning to power tend to overuse the rudder). But I would presume that movement and pressure from your controls is still important. Iāve tried a ācommercial-for-Joe-Publicā airliner simulator (the software they used was Microsoft Flight Simulator, but built into a mocked up cockpit - not full motion, but force feedback on the controls etc) and I was able to actually fly that, because I had enough feedback to trigger my reactions appropriately.
The BGA apparently has a gliding simulator that they loan out to clubs, but Iāve never had an opportunity to try it. Itād be interesting to contrast it with the other two. I would note that I am not a gamer - I wonder if I would have found the home-built sim easier if I was, which makes me think about selection of user groups and how you might not be testing for what you think you are testing for.