If all civilizations that develop computation and simulation capabilities converge to the development of high fidelity simulations, then it's highly likely that they would create simulations of interesting periods of history, such as the period of time when computers, the internet, AI, and other technologies were developed. We just so happen to be living through that - I still put my odds of living in base reality somewhere above 98%, but there is a distinct possibility that we're all being simulated so that this period of history can be iterated and perturbed and studied, or some such scenario.
Maybe someone ought to start studying the science of universal adversarial simulation attacks, to elicit some glitches in the matrix. That'd be one hell of a paper.
Until 'they' restore the checkpoint and arrange your teams plane to fall out of the sky.
I would argue this is actually consciousness also. If (and yea, it's a big if) consciousness is an internal model/simulation of how we experience reality, then a simulation of a simulation is still a simulation.