It was during the autumn of 1999 that I fell in love. She was beautiful, complex, tremendously high maintenance, and from the land of the rising sun. Her name was Gran Turismo, and our relationship was tumultuous, fiery, and a constant struggle for performance and power. Horsepower, that is. In a few short weeks, I developed both admiration and awe for Japanese racing cars. The game gently goaded me into learning about real-world improvements that can be made to a vehicle in order to enhance its performance. I developed a working knowledge of drag coefficients and came to understand the delicate balance that had to be attained between torque and tire traction. Every single one of GT’s 500+ vehicles came with a detailed history of its design and manufacture process, and I soon garnered a deep admiration for the racing pedigrees behind the vehicles I saw on the street every day: Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Mazda, to name but a few. My GT experience highlighted a fundamental principle of education to me: immersion is everything. Easily the most exciting part, though, were the lengthy discussions that would take place with friends also caught up in the world of Japanese touring car racing, bringing together the oddest groups of people. I recall an 11-year-old boy explaining to me how he managed to beat his father’s horrendously powerful Nissan Skyline GT in a less powerful Subaru WRX, simply because he stiffened up the rear suspension and invested heavily in racing tires. The result? A vehicle agile enough to corner at speeds that would cause Daddy to spin out in his horsepower-laden Goliath of a vehicle.
Game designers are constantly raising the bar for applying realism to their interactive digital experiences. Realism implies more that just photo-realistic environments. It implies the use of detailed mathematical algorithms to capture the realistic portrayal of sound, the collision of objects, the movement of a human being, etc. A favorite example of mine occurred to me while looking at a review of an old game I played on the Commodore 64 called Space Rogue. Essentially a space opera, you played a character who happened upon a derelict Scow-class space cruiser while on a routine reconnaissance mission. While exploring the craft, your own ship is destroyed by pirates, leaving you to start from scratch alone in a huge universe. Aside from its beautiful, open-ended game structure (you could choose your own adventures), the spaceflight sequences obeyed true physics principles, including that of gravity. While the rest of the world simply accepted the fact that Voyager Probes 1 and 2 were being slingshotted from planet to planet, I was actually experiencing it thanks to a few lines of code running on a processor with only 64K of random access memory. Vance Hill illustrates this beautifully in his review of Space Rogue:
“My fondest game play memory involved a binary star system where I was getting trashed by an alien, totally wrecked at the worst time. I couldn’t outrun it and I was far, far away from any help. I turned the nose of the ship to face between the two stars and hit full burn. As the gravity started sucking I started flying in faster than the ship could possibly go under its own power. I started to get pulled off course, towards one of the stars, and then… I shot between them and out to the other side, leaving the alien way back in nowheresville.”