Cory's Reads #2: American Truck Simulator and The Silent Rebellion of Playing Video Games
Leisure, labor, and the love of the game
Exciting news!
I have a new job. I’m a truck driver. I’ve already made a few deliveries, and I’m loving it so far. I’ve seen so much of the beauty that the United States has to offer, and I’m making really good money, which I funnel right back into my trucks, of course.
Don’t worry. Cory’s Reads isn’t going anywhere. We’re just getting started after all! Besides, my new occupation is purely virtual. I’ve driven all across the Western United States from the comfort of my own home via SCS Software’s American Truck Simulator.
I am absolutely obsessed with this game. I’ve mentioned it to just about everyone I’ve come into contact with over the past couple of weeks. Don’t believe me? I was prepared to make this week’s newsletter about my predictions for tomorrow’s Oscars Ceremony (my head says Nomadland, my heart says Sound of Metal) or next week’s NFL Draft (Sorry Jets fans, Zach Wilson will be a huge bust) but instead decided to dedicate Cory’s Reads #2 to a video game whose sole objective is to deliver cargo across the country.
With that being said, I still have plenty of coverage planned for next week’s events. Be sure to follow my podcast It’s All Film and Games, where my co-hosts and I will be reacting LIVE to the 93rd Academy Awards. And for paid subscribers, I will be sending out a 3-round NFL Mock Draft early next week. I used to make one of these bad boys each year as a high school student, so I look forward to revisiting the project this year. You can click below to subscribe for 25% off and get the mock draft sent right to your inbox.
The rest of you will have to tolerate my long rant about what should be one of the most mundane video games ever created, but has instead cemented itself as one of my life’s most profound gaming experiences.
American Truck Simulator is exactly what it sounds like. You own your own trucking company, and carry out deliveries for clients across the country. The base game includes California, Arizona, and Nevada, but players can purchase additional states. In addition to the original three states, I have access to Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah. Developer SCS Software also offers a New Mexico DLC, and is working on a Wyoming and a Texas expansion as well. SCS also makes Euro Truck Simulator, covering parts of Eastern Europe and extending westward towards the Iberian Peninsula, then north towards Scandinavia. Ever the patriot, I opted for the American version, mostly so I could revisit areas in the American Southwest, where I visited several months ago.
Indeed, American Truck Simulator is a highly detailed rendering of the United States. I can’t quite articulate what makes the game so immersive, but I truly feel as if I have traveled across my game’s eight states and taken in their diverse landscapes. My first delivery began in Las Vegas, NV, where I cruised down the same Las Vegas Strip that kicked off my real-life vacation back in September. I recognized the Strip’s famous hotels and casinos, hilariously renamed so as to avoid any licensing issues. Of course, this is where American Truck Simulator rams into the confines of its own immersion. BP gas stations become GP gas stations. Chevron becomes Chemron. AutoZone is now CarZone, and the ubiquitous Love’s Travel Stop is instead Heart’s. These changes do not break the immersion of playing American Truck Simulator, but they do remind you that you are playing a video game, experiencing a strictly virtual world.
There are other indications of the environment’s virtuality. Driving through Moab, UT, I was disappointed to find that I could not drive towards Canyonlands National Park due to a barrier on the road, represented by a series of X’s hovering above it. The road continues in the distance, but it is not accessible to the player. SCS blocks off several roads and highway exits throughout the world. Obviously, the studio did not render these areas of the United States, but they do exist in real life. There is a strange friction between the knowledge that Canyonlands rests just beyond American Truck Simulator’s virtual barrier, and the awareness that, as far as the game is concerned, the park might as well not exist.
Of course, SCS does not claim absolute authenticity. As the game’s title suggests, American Truck Simulator is only a simulation, an approximation of what it might be like to drive cargo across the county. Signs line Moab’s roads, suggesting both Canyonlands and Arches are just a few miles away. These signs help maintain the player’s faith in the world of American Truck Simulator, even as we become increasingly aware of its constructedness. But for all the ways the game might simplify certain locales or block off others, American Truck Simulator remains an uncannily authentic experience.
By adopting the “simulator” moniker, the game wears its intentions, perhaps even its ambitions, on its sleeve. It aims to model the real-world experience of trucking on a virtual scale. Of course, every video game is a simulation, albeit to varying degrees. The Call of Duty franchise may be highly dramatized and largely unrealistic, but it is still a war simulator. Early first-person shooters like Medal of Honor strove for a particular degree of realism, although whether or not that categorizes such games as simulators is a separate debate unto itself. The Solitaire app on your computer is a simulation, perhaps the most accurate one imaginable. Sports games like Madden or MLB The Show simulate their respective competitions, while similar games like Skate and Forza Horizon simulate skateboarding and driving, respectively.
The Forza franchise offers a particularly interesting foil for American Truck Simulator, as does just about any video game with a driving component. In a game like Forza or Grand Theft Auto, players almost exclusively drive with reckless abandon. In those games, we run red lights, smash through fire hydrants, and go 80 mph on a 35 like it’s second nature. What I find fascinating is that we could do exactly the same thing in American Truck Simulator, and a select few players just might. But by and large, American Truck Simulator encourages you to obey the rules of the road. You get fined for speeding or disobeying traffic laws, and reckless driving will likely damage your precious cargo, forcing your employer to dock your pay. Even so, these are all virtual ramifications. Games certainly compel us to succeed within the confines of their worlds, but they can also provoke us to push the boundaries of what is permissible, especially when those boundaries may be impermeable in everyday life. We could disregard the rules of the road every time we go out for a real-life drive, but we don’t. We buy into these norms for our own safety and the safety of others, but that is not a concern in American Truck Simulator. No real damage stems from our in-game decisions, yet we comply with the game’s objectives and regulations anyway. I didn’t purchase American Truck Simulator during a recent Steam sale so I could live the life of a truck driver. I bought it so I could explore a richly realized environment. So why am I suddenly so invested in my second life as a trucker?
For starters, the game is incredibly calming, much like going for a drive in real life. A fortunate side effect of this calming quality is how it reduces the significance of skill in playing American Truck Simulator. Games are a unique art form in that, beyond their artistic value, they have worth as a piece of technology, as well as an avenue for ability. Players can be better or worse than one another at any given video game, injecting the medium as a whole with a competitive spirit that can, at times, be translated into a closed-mindedness of sorts. American Truck Simulator can be challenging at times, but it remains a welcoming gaming experience. Players can adjust the controls to better adapt to their skill levels — this is the closest I’ve ever come to driving stick shift — and are even encouraged to take pictures along their journeys and upload them to the online “World of Trucks” community (all of the pictures in this article are my own.) Gaming can often be seen as inaccessible or restrictive, but in lowering the stakes and emphasizing participation over competition, SCS Software has rejected the insular nature of the gaming industry with the most unlikely of games.
Indeed, American Truck Simulator is a wholly enjoyable experience. It’s fun to play! But as Jamie Woodcock points out in his book Marx At The Arcade, “play is an interesting and difficult concept to try and understand under capitalism.” It is inherently unproductive. It runs counter to everything we are told about work, about how we have to use our time responsibly and constantly develop our sense of human capital. And because play is most commonly associated with childhood, its role in our lives wanes as we grow older. At best, play is encouraged as a form of recovery, allowing us to return to our work refreshed and renewed. But what does that say about American Truck Simulator, where our play remains a form of work? Where it is modeled after the labor of others? Does our play remain unproductive? Without meaning? Is playing American Truck Simulator still time wasted according to the capitalist conception of play?
Woodcock identifies playing video games as a nearly rebellious act. In sitting down to play a video game, one “is no longer a worker, but free to explore new worlds outside the drudgery of capitalism.” This definition of play really resonates with me, but it can be a difficult one to embrace. As if it is beyond my control, I am overcome with guilt every time I load up a video game or turn on a movie. I tell myself that I should be writing an article or applying for a job. By not developing my own capital, the thinking goes, I am wasting my precious time. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Play is essential, and engaging in it can become an increasingly vital form of rebellion in a world continuously clamping down on its very existence.
In his book Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, media scholar Marshall McLuhan observes a just as potent yet even more practical impact of play: “games as popular art forms offer to all an immediate means of participation in the full life of a society, such as no single role or job can offer.” McLuhan’s characterization of video games may seem absurd when applied to American Truck Simulator, a game that adopts a laserlike focus on one very specific profession, but it remains surprisingly useful. Indeed, American Truck Simulator has granted me a wonderful degree of empathy for our nation’s teamsters. Even driving down a real-life road in my small sedan, I feel a sense of camaraderie with the operators of the tractor-trailers chugging alongside me. It sounds silly, I know. After all, what would they think of American Truck Simulator? Sure, the game’s driving mechanics have been praised for their mimicry of real-life trucking, and the game does feature an extensive catalogue of real-life trucks for players to purchase with in-game money (“I’m currently saving up for a Volvo VNL” is not a sentence I ever expected to type.) But it’s not like SCS Software’s loyal customers actually have to trek 10+ hours from city to city; time moves much quicker in the game. When an icon of a red bed begins blinking in the bottom right corner of our screen, it means that our avatar is tired and must rest. We, on the other hand, are wide awake. American Truck Simulator cannot replicate the exhaustion and the loneliness of its subject. Drifting down the Pacific Coast Highway en route to Bakersfield, CA late at night may be a powerfully calming experience for the player, but it could be a burdensome slog for a real-world driver. As I complete my deliveries, I have no family to miss, no concern for my physical, mental, or financial wellbeing. The game does do a great job of simulating the financial pressures of the profession, forcing you to take loans out from the bank and pay them off over time. Of course, the money you make in the game is only good for things like gas, repairs, or more trucks. There is no option to send checks home to your family or to negotiate with your employer for more time off. To set these expectations for SCS Software would be rather ridiculous, but American Truck Simulator's relative simplicity does serve as a reminder that a simulation is only an approximation. Taking a real-life example as its model, a simulation creates a scaled-down representation, molding its referent to fit with the conventions of its new medium. Still, media scholars like McLuhan and Woodcock seem comfortable with these limitations. The very act of engaging with American Truck Simulator — of playing it — is a profound gesture. Playing the game is a rebellious act, and yet it’s also an informative one.
Nevertheless, so long as we are not living “the full life” of a trucker, are our interactions with the game truly rooted in a sense of compassion and identification? Or is my playing American Truck Simulator a selfish act, an attempt to escape my home in Newtown, PA, and find myself over 2,000 miles away? I posed a similar question regarding Florian Zeller’s The Father in a piece for Film Cred. The film encourages us to “play” as we watch it, unpacking its chronology and separating its fact from its fiction. Plenty of media employs this kind of interactivity as a means of bringing us closer to its subject, but often runs the risk of distancing us instead. I like to think American Truck Simulator has granted me a greater appreciation for the truckers of the world, but is converting their labor into my leisure really the best way to do so? In truth, I don’t know the answers to my many questions, but I do believe that games and play will remain vital in generating more of them, maybe even some answers as well.
We all feel the pressures of productivity. Even as I work to justify my obsession with American Truck Simulator, I remain conflicted every time I boot up the game. In playing it, I am carrying out the virtual responsibilities of a profession that has become synonymous with America’s blue-collar work ethic, yet I am not working at all! Of course, one of the nice perks of writing about various forms of media is that I can justify every game played and movie watched as “research.” And what makes American Truck Simulator such an anomaly is how it simulates productivity on a virtual level. Investing hours into the game feels worthwhile in that you are carrying out labor, reaping the benefits of a beautiful view and decent pay. I’ve driven over the Hoover Dam! I know what Idaho looks like! I made $25,000! But none of that is real. Playing American Truck Simulator is unproductive, although it is not fruitless. When we play, we create and we imagine and we think critically in ways we would never dare to do in the other areas of our lives. Having recently graduated from college, I feel particular pressure to be productive in the capitalist sense — hence why some of you are second-guessing that subscription money you gave me — and perhaps one day I will be.
For now, I’m a little busy fighting a rebellion.