Showing posts with label racing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racing. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

"Press Forwards" and the pleasing death of agency



Trackmania games have very robust track editors that let the community build and share custom tracks very easily. This ease of use and immediacy allows new track genres to emerge organically from "grassroots" player communities, a practice that I've characterized before as "local level design" -- it is not just new ways of using the game's building blocks, but it also suggests entirely new ways of thinking about the game itself.

The "press forward" genre (or "PFs") is one of my favorite examples of emergent level genres. Instead of challenging players to hone reflexes and maneuvers on a track, a PF beckons the player to simply hold down "forward" as a mindbogglingly complex track swirls around them. Through no skill of their own, a player ends up executing amazing stunts -- spinning 1080 degrees in the air before barely grazing a ramp in just-the-right-way to land perfectly on the track below. If the player makes any kind of choice, like letting go of the "forward" key, or (god forbid) turning left by 0.1 degrees, the consequences are often fatal.

There's a famous saying that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." PFs are maybe the closest thing to actually dancing about architecture. Sometimes it feels like the track architect wanted to impress you, sometimes they are making a joke, sometimes they want to scare you. The PF frees us, to be more open and receptive to the ways that architecture speaks to us as we traverse it.

Notably, this is a track type that resists the dominant mode of playing Trackmania. It is a video game world that basically punishes you for even trying to wield any agency or control. When virtuosity is guaranteed, how many humans can resist the urge to fuck it up?