Virtual Road Tripping in Forza Horizon

I've been playing a lot of the Forza Horizon games lately. I'm not quite sure why I'm so taken by them, so consider this an attempt to figure that out.

For the unfamiliar: Forza Horizon is a series of driving games set in various locales: Colorado, Italy, Australia, etc. They're the Cool Dad derivative of Forza Motorsport: a simulation racing series for real-deal car aficionados. To use a pretentious analogy: Motorsport is The Economist. Horizon is 1843.

The premise of each game is straightforward. The "Horizon Festival" (think Coachella, but also with cars) has just setup for the year and you're a nobody driver ready to prove you can make it to the big leagues. Or something like that.

Pretty soon you'll be cut loose on some 100kms of road to do effectively whatever you want. Take a road trip, do some races, upgrade a 90's station wagon, or off-road in a dune buggy. If it involves cars, you can probably do it in Horizon.

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The real star of these games are the worlds they're set in: each a sort-of "greatest hits" version of its real-world counterpart. It's like a road trip where the area you had to cover was the size of Singapore and there were no long drives between the good stuff.

The goals come quick. There's races to win, leaderboards to rank on, and cars to upgrade. These are the "moments" the game manufactures for you: conceivably what it's "about". You break, you accelerate, you turn left, you turn right, you shift gears. Occasionally you'll do all this while racing others. But, anyone who has reverence for the series knows these things barely register emotionally. They're the set dressing.

The real moments are the ones the game creates seemingly by existing: cresting over a hill and seeing a vast vista in-front of you. Having your tires slip on an icy back-road. Feeling barely (but, totally) in-control as you take a perfect turn. And a 1000 others I've forgotten, but viscerally felt.

They are not accidental: Horizon puts a lot of effort into making these moments work. They're the accumulation of dozens of systems refined over a decade interacting with each other: physics, light refraction, dynamic weather, surface simulations, day/night cycles, and others I probably don't even notice.

These systems are often so perfected that they end-up creating what I can only call "2-way Deja-vu". In one direction, evoking feelings from many drives you've taken in the past: family road trips, travel adventures, and maybe even your commute. But working in reverse too as you feel the shape of Horizon's worlds occupying the same grooves in your brain as the shape of the real worlds you've driven. It's that good.

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Forza Horizon isn't a political series: it doesn't outwardly say anything about how we should think about the world or the cars within it. Nor do I need it to have a point-of-view on the matter.

But, it's hard to consider what people 3 generations from now will think of it. Will it seem like automotive hubris? A relic from an era where people had reverence for cars the way people used to have reverence for horses. Or will it be seen as essential documentation? A way to feel what it was like to just drive a car on a open road with nowhere to go.

Horizon is great because it seems to achieve both of these things. It bathes in the hyperbole of car culture with it's 400+ vehicle rosters, endless customization options, and thumping in-game radio stations. But, it also takes seriously the task of making driving feel real.  Not just as a realistic simulation, but as an invocation of the feelings we have when we drive. I think there's a virtue in preserving that feeling.

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Horizon is about driving. Driving as freedom, driving as expression, driving as lifestyle. It reminds us of what cars mean to us now. Even if you're not into cars the way people who are into cars are into cars, Forza Horizon gets the feeling just right. And that's all I need from it.