I’VE ALWAYS LOVED racing games. I first got addicted way back in the ’90s, when I’d jam quarters into arcade cabinets with the full-sized car seat and stick shift, and hurtle around virtual tracks. During the ’00s and early ’10s I became a narcotic partisan of the Burnout racing series on my PlayStation—games in which you drove at such a frantic pace that the landscape blurred. And what, precisely, was the allure of all this pell-mell driving? I think it activated some latent Walter Mitty mechanics in my soul. My day job is sufficiently sedate (I sit around talking with people and typing up what they say) that I needed some romantically intense escape: split-second decision-making at 200 mph.
Most importantly, though, racing games gave me a wonderful feeling of mastery. They’re hard, often brutally so. You have to learn the performance characteristics of a given car and experiment with how well it accelerates or drifts into a curve. You similarly have to learn (by merciless, crashing-and-tumbling error) the quirks of each track. Three minutes in, my dendrites are a gorgeous riot of electricity. You get a fantastic, incremental sense of progress: Each time around the track, I sharpen my skills. Eventually, I’m so good that I’m coming in first place, winning access to fresh tracks and new cars. It’s a delightful flywheel of exploration, learning, and improvement.
Getting better
