There are two cars to my left, sand and grass on my right, and the road ahead is getting narrower and narrower as we barrel towards the next bend at over 140km/h.
One of us might be slightly ahead of the other, but I can’t tell for sure; one of us will have to give way before there’s not enough road left for three cars line abreast.
Who will blink first? Whoever does will lose a position, so not yielding seems like a good idea. But what if the other driver thinks the same? Then there’s going to be a collision, and that’s a lot more costly.
Being too cautious makes you the loser, but not enough caution leads to disaster. What do you do?
I’m not talking about my commute to and from work, though the way some drivers out there behave makes me think they are under the impression that we are all on the final lap deciding the Formula 1 world championship.
All Images: www.iracing.com
No, the sort of split-second decisions I’m talking about are the sort of ones you have to make in iRacing, a racing simulation service that’s been going from strength to strength since launching in 2008.
Most racing games scale back realism in the interests of accessibility and fun, but iRacing takes a different approach. That’s why it’s more properly described as a motorsport simulation.
That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a lot of fun; it most certainly is. It’s just a different sort of fun than you’re going to have with a game like Need for Speed or even in games that take a more realistic approach to the genre, such as those in the Gran Turismo and Forza franchises.
It’s not only the laser-scanned tracks and the extremely realistic modelling of the cars’ handling and physical characteristics that makes iRacing more realistic.
If you’ve ever played a racing game against real people online, you’ll know that it rarely resembles its real-life counterpart. Forget about clean racing — in these games it often pays to physically shove others out of your way and to drive as dirty as possible, to drive in a way that would either get you banned for life, or sent to the hospital, jail or a morgue if you did it on a real racetrack.
To prevent this sort of scenario, iRacing makes use of a Safety Rating system which rewards clean driving and heavily penalises contact with other drivers. You get penalised even if you’re not the one at fault, which helps to add to the realism — if you were racing in real life, you’d still have to spend money repairing your car, even if the accident wasn’t your fault.
And while there’s no monetary penalty to wrecking your or another driver’s car in a fit of pique in iRacing, the in-game consequences are serious enough to ensure that iRacers behave a lot more like their real-life counterparts than do players of racing games where there’s no system like this.
It all means that being fast is just one part of being a good racer. Racecraft involves so much than just being able to drive a fast lap; it includes being able to drive safely in traffic, to have proper situational awareness, to have the judgement and skills necessary to pass another car safely and effectively.
Getting good at all of these is very hard, and I’m certainly not very good at any of them. But when it all comes together well enough for me to do reasonably well in a race, the sense of accomplishment is so much greater than what I can get from a game that puts fewer demands on me. Winning an iRacing race will always feel much more meaningful than crashing my way to the top of the podium in some other, less realistic game.
The scenario I wrote about at the start of this article was one that played out earlier this week as I made my return to iRacing after a long sabbatical. Spending so much time away from the game meant that my racecraft was quite rusty, especially when it came to driving in traffic. I was so cautious that I ended up losing six positions on the opening lap, but I did manage to win back some of them by the end of the race.
It’s obvious that I’m going to have to do a lot of work to become a better racer, but I know it will be worth it in the end.
There are few games that will reward hard work and perseverance as much as iRacing does, and this is why I recommend it to any and all fans of racing games who want to take their online racing experience to the next level.
Platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux
