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If you aren't able to read it right now, the (overly) short summary is that she discusses playing video games as a child, ignoring the rules and intended gameplay in favour of exploring and observing the worlds they portrayed.
Reading this essay resonated strongly with my own childhood computer experiences. I'll talk about this more generally later on, but the first thing it brought to mind was the 1999 PC game "Mobil 1 Rally Championship", so I want to focus on that.
For the rest of this post I'll just call it "Rally Championship", as that's how I've always known it. The official title is apparently "Mobil 1 Rally Championship" and it's also commonly known as "Rally Championship 2000" (or "RC2k") by fans. The game was the last one developed by the British development studio "Magnetic Fields". I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there's still a small community of people playing it today (based on Discord), holding competitions, sharing race times and creating mods.
Rally Championship was released in European territories in November 1999. I'm not sure when I first played it (most of the games I owned back then were budget re-releases of older games), but I don't think I was any older than maybe 10. The game is a faithful recreation of the British Rally Championship, with impressively photorealistic graphics (for the time) and long stages that mostly take 15-25 minutes to complete. I played it a lot with my younger brother, taking it in turns to play or watch.
Nether of us was very good at the game. I personally refused to use the brakes (except for the handbrake, which I used on most corners) and took every opportunity to take shortcuts, ignoring the fact that the grass slowed you down far too much to usually be worth it. We usually finished each track (if we finished at all) with steam billowing out of the engine and lots of warning messages flashing up about damage to various parts of the car.
Quite often though, we didn't care about getting to the finish line, or doing so faster than the AI drivers. The tracks in the game are narrow linear paths, mostly through forests, but occasionally widen out. In the below screenshot, you can see the road, with green areas to both sides, bordered by an impenetrable wall of sprite-trees.
We enjoyed deliberately driving off-piste to explore these grassy areas, seeing whether we could drive up the often steep hills to jump back off them again. Some tracks go past houses and farms, with open driveways that allow you to turn off the track and drive around tiny courtyards and outbuildings. In a lot of cases, these are blocked by a gate, but we always took the time to explore the ones that weren't. There was no in-game purpose to this, no secrets or Easter eggs to be found, but there was an enjoyment in exploring areas that you "weren't supposed to go". Later rally games we played (e.g. in the Colin McRae series) had better graphics and did away with the artificial walls and 2D trees that Rally Championship used to limit the game world. They rendered huge plains, distant terrain and small towns worth of buildings. But if you tried to explore them, as soon as you drove a few metres off the prescribed track (or even just drove in the wrong direction for too long), your car would be "helpfully" automatically reset back to the track. We hated this! Obviously I now understand why this was done, but I think I would still prefer Rally Championship's unrealistic hard boundaries, to being shown an expansive world and then forbidden to explore it.
More exciting than the semi-open green spaces were the junctions and side roads. The game is quite faithfully based on real rally stages and uses real Ordnance Survey (OS) maps in the in-game HUD. This means that the track isn't usually just a long path from A to B, it's actually a set of turns along a realistic road network. The correct turns are signposted in the game world, marked on your map, displayed as symbols on screen and read out by your co-driver, but that doesn't mean that you have to take them. If you ignore these instructions, your co-driver will tell you "we're going the wrong way" and you will usually quickly run into a fence or barrier:
Some of these "wrong way" roads are much longer than they strictly have to be though. Coupled with the appearance of the OS maps, familiar from family holidays around the UK, each time we took a wrong turn and didn't immediately encounter a barrier, there was a moment of excitement. Maybe this time we would be able to keep driving and explore the whole area/island/country/world? Obviously we were disappointed each time, but that didn't stop the excitement the next time we found a potential escape route into the wider world. I have a strong memory of a specific junction where we really though we had found it, but it doesn't accurately correspond to a location that really exists in the game. Before writing this, I drove through most of the tracks and inspected them in a fan-made level viewer/editor to try and locate it, but couldn't find anything that perfectly matched the image in my head. I did get to relive some of those childhood emotions though, each time I explored one of the many much-longer-than-necessary side routes I felt the rush of "this could be the one", followed by the same brief disappointment! I think the picture in my head is an amalgamation of several locations in the game, but one contender is the following corner, very close to the end of the Pundershaw track, stage 4 of the Pirelli International Rally (located in Kielder Forest, Northumberland):
In this case, you can't see very far ahead of your car, but, despite this, the roads all continue for a long way before reaching a barrier. The junction located outside the bounds of the actual track further cements the illusion that this is somehow more than just a straight continuation of the road for you to drive down if you accidentally miss your turn.
I doubt the developers intended for these off-track areas to be explored so avidly, but they provided countless hours of enjoyment for me and my brother back then and have provided further enjoyment to me recently. Much like the games Emilie mentions in her essay, this secondary use of the game world as a space for exploration was essentially an accident of the game's design, a combination of gameplay features, technical constraints and emergent behaviour that hit the right notes in my childhood imagination to allow me to enjoy the game in a way that its creators never envisaged.
This is mostly unrelated to my points above, but I do want to say that I'm grateful for the prompt this essay gave to re-play Rally Championship. My love for this game isn't just based on nostalgia, it's genuinely a good rally game and well worth the (small) effort required to get it running on a modern system. The graphics hold up surprisingly well when rendered at high resolutions and I would have no problem paying full price for a modern game that used the same art style. I like cutting-edge hyper-realistic graphics as much as the next person, but the budgets and team sizes required to reach those levels are extreme and at the end of the day it's gameplay that matters more, to say nothing of the environmental cost of the constant push for better graphics and faster hardware. If more players were accepting of games that primarily target the hardware of the late 90's/early 00's, we would have more games to play, more people would be able to play them and small teams of developers could focus more on innovations in gameplay and storytelling. I love playing games made by very small teams or solo developers, and find that these days the majority of the big AAA releases don't appeal so much, but I do find myself longing for more games in the vast gulf between those two extremes, games developed by medium sized teams, with reasonable, but not excessive, budgets. This paragraph is all a very long-winded way of saying that I like and recommend Rally Championship and I agree with @Jordan_Mallory's semi-famous Twitter post:
i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i'm not kidding
https://twitter.com/Jordan_Mallory/status/1277483756245442566
Another game we played a lot of as children was Driver. Emilie mentions playing SimCopter exclusively with cheats enabled and that matches our experience with Driver. Driver has a large story mode, but also allows you to freely drive around the game's open-world maps based on Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. The only real traditional gameplay element in these free-drive modes is getting into police chases and sustaining damage, both of which can be disabled via cheats. We always had these cheats enabled and just drove around exploring, unbothered by the police, until we inevitably flipped the car over (which counted as being destroyed, even with the invincibility cheat on). Unlike Rally Championship, it was actually possible to escape the confines of the roads - on the Miami level with a fast enough car you could jump off the road and into the sea, which was actually just bumpy grass terrain coloured blue. We weren't under any illusions about exploring all of the USA though; you very quickly reached the edge of the map and fell off into the void if you weren't careful where you drove.
More generally, at the time, the first thing we would do on receiving a new video game was to print off a list of cheats from GameFAQs.com. We had so many hours of enjoyment from playing games with almost all of the challenge removed via cheats, such as The Sims and Age Of Empires 2. Tomb Raider 3 on the PlayStation was another good example. We mostly just ran around exploring Croft Manor and our only interaction with the main story was using the level skip cheat to see bits of the levels (and to occasionally go to a level that let you drive a quad bike close to the starting point).
One final thing from Emilie's essay that I want to refer to is this:
[...] file folders and menus that also felt like a sort of castle with secret trapdoors and hidden dungeons to find. I found the tricks of sorting and searching, messing with a file by changing its extension, and rummaging through the file structure of my CD-ROM games and hidden hard drive folders [...]
I definitely did this a lot! In Windows 98, if you opened the search tool and clicked Search without typing anything, it would display a list of every single file on the computer, from documents to programs to system files. I was always fascinated by what all the files in the Windows directories did and I loved it when images or sound files for games were available as standard format files in the installation directories. I also enjoyed playing around with programs like Microsoft Word, seeing what all the different tools did. I think the main thing that enabled me to have a better knowledge of how to do things on the computer than my parents was being unafraid to click buttons to see what they did, and to experiment further if they apparently did nothing. I find modern commercial operating systems (especially mobile devices and particularly iOS) really annoying in the way they deliberately obfuscate the filesystem, hide details on how the system operates and limit options for the user. I do believe (as I've seen others write about on Gemini) that it's a deliberate attempt to tie users into expensive cloud storage and support contracts and to erode computer literacy so that users are more likely to stick to the platform's walled gardens and analytics-instrumented default apps.
This post has perhaps gone slightly beyond my original intentions and turned into a bit of a gripe about technological "progress"! Many people have already written (much better than me) about these sort of concerns (especially here on Gemini), so I want to focus more on the other themes. I think a lot of games nowadays, especially in the AAA open-world space, put too much emphasis on rewarding and incentivising exploration, which (perhaps unintuitively) can make it feel more like a chore. I didn't drive into all those driveways and side lanes in Rally Championship because a map marker told me too - in fact the main factor in the excitement it elicited was that the game very clearly tells you not to go there! The voice saying "we're going the wrong way" was in some rebellious part of my child brain a much better incentive to go there than a line saying I'd found "secret collectible x/100" would ever have been. This is perhaps something that will never have the same sense of mystery as an adult - I know now that the game developers wouldn't model the entirety of a country's road network in painstaking detail, then hide the entrance to it in an obscure side road on a rally track - but I do think it's something developers should bear in mind. If there are things hidden everywhere then finding something doesn't feel particularly special.
Finally, nostalgia is a powerful force, but don't be tricked into thinking it's the only thing that makes old games good. If there's an old game from your childhood that you have fond memories of but haven't played in a long time, why not give it another go? You might be surprised at how well it holds up against modern competition.
Invite link to the Rally Championship Discord community
Send me a message - comments/questions about this (or any other) post are always welcome!
