Over lunch a few weeks ago, a friend of mine confided that a casual relationship he'd been having had gotten serious. He was both embarrassed and thrilled. It had started out so innocently—just for kicks—and he'd never imagined the initial attraction could grow into such a passion.
We'll call him Silas.
For months now, he'd been occasionally heading over to a friend's house to play Xbox. He's a professional musician living in the Pioneer Valley, and he's never much cared for games of any variety. But Peter Smolenski (his real name) had invited him, tempting him with the promise of racing games. Silas was curious, and thought it might be a diversion. Nights when he wasn't playing or teaching, he'd head over late and play until even later.
It was a sometimes thing.
Back in late October, though, a few weeks after it was released, knowing Silas' preference for realism in his car racing, Peter bought Forza Motorsport 3.
"We've been playing it a lot," Silas told me, emphasizing the last word with a smile. "But we've gotten good. Really good. Car companies are giving us vehicles to race because they want them to be seen online with us behind the wheel. It's crazy. We've got nearly 4 million bucks and dozens of cars."
He was palpably excited: "The game's unbelievably realistic. You know me: I've always had a thing for cars. All kinds of cars. But it's unlikely I'm ever going to drive the ones I most drool over. But this game—it gives me a taste I never thought I'd get."
I asked if I could watch him race sometime, and he thought it could be arranged.
*
I arrived at 9:30 and was welcomed into the game den. We sat upstairs at Peter's house, in three comfy chairs directly in front of the large high-definition television. Silas offered me a bottle of water as Peter tore through the final laps of a warmup race.
If it weren't for Peter hunched forward in his easy chair, engrossed in working the controller, I might not have registered instantly that what I was watching wasn't actual but simulated. The roar of the engine and squeal of the wheels were pitch-perfect, as were the sumptuous visuals. The light gleamed off the cars and twinkled in the brake lights. Details blurred by in my periphery but were crystal clear in the distance: when the car went over a hill, I could see a painterly vista of some place in Germany.
All the cars and all the tracks, I'm assured, are painstakingly modeled on reality. The many different car companies represented worked with Microsoft for accuracy in how the cars' exteriors and interiors looked, and the engine sounds are recorded from actual vehicles. Real-life race car drivers who have driven on the tracks represented in the game have verified the accuracy of the look and feel of the virtual version.
More importantly to Silas, though, is how distinctive each car feels when he's driving it. "No two feel the same," he said. "When you make improvements to your car—buy new tires, put in a new suspension—the car drives differently." And there are many different kinds of cars to drive. Dozens of makes and models from the 1950s onwards are represented, with new ones being regularly released.
In addition to striving for a realistic driving simulator in Forza Motorsport 3, Microsoft has also gone to great lengths to simulate the economics of motor racing. To gain access to all the cars available, players must buy them by winning races to earn virtual game cash. While this might seem like a standard game technique, they've also developed a market, available on eBay, where players can auction off vehicles they've driven and tuned themselves. They can also sell tuning sets custom-designed for specific cars. Advancing in the game depends on making these kinds of virtual transactions with fellow players online.
Peter and Silas are proud of the cars they've accumulated, and when Peter finished his race, Silas took over the controller and gave me a walk through the virtual garage. "I'm a car freak who has no [real] cars, but here I've found the ultimate Hot Wheels collection," he said, explaining the significance of each of his dozens of vehicles and the modifications he'd made to all of them.
"You can even build cars from scratch," he said, "take parts from all different cars and try to build something that's all your own." They tried doing this once, assembling what they thought would be their dream vehicle. "But it drove like shit. We managed to auction it off. It had all the right ingredients—it sounded like a good deal—but it really dragged its ass."
Silas finally settled on a black racing car, a Peugeot Sport 908, that looked like Darth Vader's helmet on wheels. He'd painted it a custom chocolate brown. "It also sports ultralight Konig race wheels that were powder-coated a stunning racing red, if I do say so," he said. It hugged the ground like a trilobite. He decided to try a 10-lap race.
"That's a serious race, man," Peter said.
Silas sat bolt upright and became absolutely focused. "Serious fucking race," he said, and he was off. At times his car got over 170 miles per hour on the straightaways.
"At first," Peter said as we watched Silas slam his car around turns and fend off his closest competitors, "I was semi-afraid about asking him if he played video games, and he wasn't so sure at first. But this is right up his alley, and he almost instantly surpassed me."
"Oh, no way," Silas insisted, not taking his eyes from the road.
"No, really," Peter said. "I thought I was really good at this shit, but I keep my settings on automatic all the time. Right away he's got it on manual shifting, and taking it off traction control. I handed him over the belt, and now I'm just the guy who owns the machine."
"I'm not shifting this car, though," Silas said. "I can only shift certain classic cars. When the performance gets up too high, I can't deal with them. They really are uncontrollable beasts sometimes. The cars are so light that it's really easy to flip them or slide right off the road if you're not careful."
As he explained this to me, he shot me a quick glance, and next thing I knew his car was careering across the pavement to an embankment of piled rubber tires. Silas turned hard, but he lost traction and the car began to skid. Seconds before smacking into the wall, the car stopped and began to go backwards.
"If you're playing against the computer and you're about to crash," Peter said, "you can rewind to an earlier point and start over."
While in other games crashing your vehicle is part of the fun, in Forza Motorsport 3 repairing your vehicle costs cash, and neither Silas or Peter were as amused as I was when I later caused a massive pileup. There were other games for that kind of behavior, I was told, but not here.
*
"We don't play every day," Peter said. "And I try to treat it as a reward for doing something worthwhile, like putting in a full day of painting."
Peter is an abstract painter (see related story on p. 16) who has shown his work both locally and online, and while he enjoys Forza's realism, it's the artwork that he enthuses over the most. Unlike Silas, he's been playing computer games since their inception and is utterly delighted by the advancements he's witnessed. In his closet, he tells me, he's got a prototype for an Atari game system that was never produced. It was the first system ever to employ holograms, another interest of his. But he himself is not a closet gamer, and he's happy for the world to know his Xbox identity is Defiant Nun.
"I thank God I've lived long enough to see games come this far," he said. He points out that games these days, like feature films, incorporate all kinds of artistic disciplines—traditional two-dimensional art, 3D modeling, animation, audio, music, storytelling—and he marvels at how well integrated and executed the work can be. He fantasizes about being part of such a creative team.
Some games employ as many people as work on a movie, and games released as movie tie-ins often go into production simultaneously with the film production. Peter Jackson has already begun work on the Hobbit game, though the script apparently isn't done yet. In a recent interview to promote his most recent movie, The Lovely Bones, he said, "I'm enjoying [online computer] games more than I am enjoying films at the moment."
Peter Smolenski also enjoys a fine sense of irony about the games and how they're marketed. "I bow down to the guy at Xbox who came up with achievement points," he said. "You get them playing different Xbox games and achieving different goals they set for you. I've got around 11,000. It's a modest amount. They mean nothing: they're basically just boasting rights. But the thing is, I never now want to play a PlayStation game or a Wii game because I won't get the points. Even though I know they're utterly worthless!"
We played until the wee hours of the next morning, and as I left, I asked if there was anything they thought was missing from the experience. They agreed they both had their eyes on the steering wheel controller. Not only did it allow you to steer and use the pedals like a real car, but it simulated the response of the tires against different surfaces.
They both wanted it badly, but it cost $80, and they're not certain they're ready for that level of commitment.
