OP-ED: The Limits of Imagination · 7:37pm Jul 13th, 2023
So, I play video games.
This isn’t a new development. I’ve been playing video games for a long time. It’s been a hobby I’ve enjoyed for years. If you’ve been on the site Discord, The Makalay Camp, you’ll definitely have seen the discussions in the game channel about Stellaris, which holds a place as my “most played” title on Steam. It’s followed by a wide spread of titles, from Borderlands 2 (which I have talked about before) to Audiosurf.
I love games. And there’s a multitude of reasons for that. I tell you this as a lead-in. To “set the stage,” so to speak, for this post. It’s one that’s bounced around inside my head for a few weeks now.
See, lately I’ve been playing Forza Horizon 5: Hot Wheels on and off in my spare time. I was playing it in March of this year, and a bit of April, and then I picked it up again off and on after returning from that long Alaska trip.
It’s a driving game. Forza Horizon, if you’re unfamiliar, is an open-world racing title. Fairly arcadey, though you can tweak that to your liking and make it more or less realistic. It’s really a giant celebration of cars and racing in general. Hundreds of cars (I think the current count is over 600) all lovingly rendered, from modern supercars to 1950s classics (and even not-classics). You can swap out engines, tires, brakes, and then drive around an expansive open setting to your heart’s content. FH3 took place in Australia, FH4 in England/Scotland, and FH5 takes place in Mexico.
Oh, and then there’s the Hot Wheels expansion, which is what I’m specifically referring to. Forza has this thing where they’ll do one serious expansion, like Blizzard Mountain or Rally, and one goofy, for fun expansion that pushes the limits. Hot Wheels they’ve tackled twice now, and another time it was an entire world made of Lego.
This is all context, mind. What I’m getting at is that, as shown in the trailer embedded below, Forza Horizon 5: Hot Wheels is all about taking very real cars and then driving them around upsized Hot Wheels track that … Well, I’ll let the trailer do a little bit of the talking here. Oh, and there’s a point to this, don’t worry.
Frankly, if you slam your car hood-first into a solid wall at 120 MPH and the worst that happens is you have to reverse away from it and hope you can catch back up, it's not my kind of racing game. I was more of a Burnout kind of guy, although I acknowledge that their odd slingshotting AI system was a bit too obvious.
Won't deny the game looks amazing though. I've never actually met one of those anti-imagination types, or if I have I didn't know it because the topic never came up. I have met people with no imagination – my aunt and my mother are both good examples, but neither of them ever condemned imagination in and of itself. If anything, they expressed envy of it, and pride that somehow my sister and I have it in spades. All that being said, I don't disagree with anything said here.
Been playing a lot of Stellaris lately. It's on top of the list right now for achievement hunting. Which, as much as I love the game, is a bit of a nightmare, what with regularly released new DLC adding more achievements and making old achievements buggy or much harder to get. I'll probably play it until I tire of it and put it back in the list to come back to later (at which point it'll have a couple dozen new achievements because of new DLC releases).
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I understand that. Though I'm also the "let's NOT slam into a wall at 120 MPH kind of guy. I do like my clean laps.
But I get it. It is unrealistic. Forza does have a damage model you can turn on, but the menu notes that it is mostly data, with cosmetic damage being limited. Because auto-manufacturers really don't like their cars getting beat up. Which was why Burnout's games always had lookalikes with no branding. Then EA acquired the team for NFS, and all that damage stuff had to go away, because NFS had licenses.
Yeah, the more I look back at it, the stranger my upbringing looks. I kind of wonder if it had to do something with the location just attracting people of a certain mindset or what, but it was odd how many narrow-minded individuals I had trying to batter me down as a kid. Contrasted by the ones who were very supportive of imagination and trying new things. It's an odd mix.
I've been seeing you on Stellaris, but yeah 100% achievements on that game may involve downloading a save file or two, because some of those odds are really hard, like the Galatron. You've got like a 1 in 2000 game chance of getting it or something like that. And all that new DLC ...
My brother-in-law had a full sit-down screens on all sides with steering wheel and pedals game that linked in with other drivers (no idea what the name was) last year that I got to play with for most of an hour. In the real world, I would have munged about twenty or thirty million dollars worth of paint and fenders, and yes, it had realistic damage. Nothing like having a damaged spoiler screw up the way your tires grip the ground and I'm not going to make this turn.... How do I restart again?
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You wanna hear something really funny?
I got the Galatron on the first try. I was genuinely shocked.
What I did not do in that playthrough, however, was lose it and get it back in a war, because none of my enemies would ever make it a wargoal. So the fight's nowhere near over, at least in regards to the Galatron. But still, getting it on literally the first try was fall-out-of-your-chair crazy.
Also: why do you have to be the one with the odd upbringing? Maybe that's actually my position. Not that I would know, I'm just saying.
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You what? I didn't get that thing until I was over 500 hours in. And then it made the rest of the galaxy so mad they waged a war of extermination against me. Since I wasn't playing a faction I really understood ... that was that! But the nature of stats means someone is going to get it first try. Dang ... have you bought a powerball ticket recently?
In fairness, rural Alaska, without indoor plumbing for the first few years of my life, no electricity save via generator until I was eight ... I do kind of hit the envelope for most people, in the US at least. That said, I think it's a universal truth that everyone's upbringing has its own weirdness.
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I know, it was really odd. My enemies didn't get the cassus beli against me until I actually used it, but even then they just... never... did anything. Hell, I even went to war with them a few times trying to force them into it, but they never took it up.
I don't do the lottery because of my go-to premise "I can't win if I don't play, but if I play I won't win." Still, with that happening one has to wonder.
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I don't do the lotto either. Insert Axtara's discussion of "risk versus gamble" here, lol.
Still, to get the Galatron on the first try ... Dang.
Amazing game though. Got a favorite playstyle?
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Honestly, as much as I love grand strategy games I am not very good at them. I avoid going above 'normal' difficulty. I've been experimenting with different races though. Just started a lithoids playthrough. My last game was a pacifist run (which didn't do my war effort for the Galatron any favors), but the game before that I went Hive Mind and spent an everlasting eternity wiping out all other life in the galaxy.
I tend to play most of it by ear, but there are some things I do regularly. My first course is always to expand as rapidly as I can, operating under the premise that "all systems are mine, I just haven't reached them all yet". Any territory anyone else claims is also mine, I just haven't "taken it back" yet. I tend to get vindictive about lost territory too.
Despite that, I'm not very aggressive most of the time, preferring to turtle up and only strike when I can be sure I have good odds, usually focusing on bigger enemies first. I avoid any sort of war pacts (defense treaties, guaranteeing independence, etc.). I learned my lesson about that shit in one game where a Fallen Empire declared war against one of my allies but had to go through me to get to them, and whilst I was trying (and failing) to deal with that my lifelong arch-enemies on a completely different border capitalized on it and next thing I know my 500-system strong empire is reduced to... two. So yeah, screw defensive pacts. I'll do migration treaties, commercial pacts, research agreements, anything else, but you're on your own when it comes to warfare, ya jerks.
I'm also apparently terrible at military development. I have not once gone through a game where my fleets developed faster than the enemy's. Eventually my tech outpaces theirs, but for the first half of the game war is a dangerous prospect because it's a guarantee that any one of their fleets will be equal to four or five of my own. If I could just get over the fact that the command limit is a suggestion, not a hard limit... but that doesn't explain why they can fit 100,00 power in an individual fleet while I'm still stuck with only 20,000 or so at a time.
So yeah. I turtle up for the first half of the game. On the plus side, this usually means my rivals can deal with the crises on their own, and I can opportunistically hit them when it's over.