R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 (1998)
There are, I think, two buttons in R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, and one might be optional. The one that might be optional is the brake button. The brake is there, insofar as, if you hit the square button, the brake lights will come on. I often forget about the square button, because a lot can be accomplished with just the x. Removing my thumb from the x button forces some sort of brake to kick in, and if it's done when turning a corner, the car locks to the road. If I then reapply pressure to the x button, the car stops sticking to the road, and starts drifting. Racing games love drifting, but the simplicity of it here emphasises the small window that is controlled chaos. In anticipation of the corner, one jams the analog stick in the wrong direction, lets off and re-engages the accelerator, and hopes for the best. Trying to peer around the corner, neck taut, the body relaxes, breathing with the contours of the road. It feels as though the head is being pulled sideways by the hair, into a warm rushing numb. Sometimes it works, and the warm numb carries over into the next stretch, like a breeze atop the ocean conducting sea spray. Other times it backfires, leaving us up against a wall or in the dirt. The cars in this game sustain no visible damage, but it's not as though your failures go unnoticed. The realisation that you have been ejected from the warm rush of perpetual motion is much worse than anything like that. There's a channel through each map, as in a river, and somewhere in this channel is an ideal velocity, and all we can do, as the imperfect drivers, the human interlopers, is either be swept up in it or ejected.
As I approach R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, I think that I know who I am, and what I will be bringing to the game as a driver. I know that I am good at driving cars, bad at driving games, and only enjoy the driving games that allow me to be bad at them. I want to feel where my intentions and those of the game diverge, and to follow that path of most resistance. The simplicity of R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 does not allow for this. It reduces the body to unknown quantity, to be resolved or rather achieved through the act of driving. What I mean to say is that, who I am, and what I think I will be bringing to the game, does not matter at a certain speed. In the flow of things - and really R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 cannot be understood by its look or sound or map alone, but must instead be defined by the way these things feel when they spill into the channel and flow together - there is no pre-given 'self' or 'game' or 'car' or 'road'. These things must be established at every corner, lost, and then established again. The player's body, and the game, are part of an ongoing experiment, where they must determine one another, through one another, taking corners at high speed.
***SPEED AND SUBSTANCE***
As I drift, and fuck it up, I become all at once aware of myself again, as a person bringing something to the game - my clumsiness, my thoughts and expectations. Then as I drift the next corner, and ride the numb ecstasy of the track's invisible channel, I feel as though I've understood something about the capabilities and physical heft of the car and the road. It also feels more me, even as 'I' recede, my eyes blown out sideways through the pulsating noise of the grass beyond.
It's clear that I've done right by the car, tapping the button at the right time. And the car has done right, delivering me to the ecstatic obliteration of eyes and hands and face. In this obliteration, player, controller, car, road, pixel, sound, all coalesce. Here I'm reminded of Baruch Spinoza's claim "Bodies are distinguished from each other in respect of motion and rest, of swiftness and slowness, but not in respect of substance" (56). Before turning on R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, I can be differentiated from car, car from road, road from controller, and so on, because each of these things is more or less motile/still/rapid/lethargic than the other. Fused in motion, however, it becomes difficult to distinguish each as a concrete unit in its own right. It follows that the fusing of these different bodies into a single plane of acceleration makes it difficult to determine forces of cause and effect. Spinoza writes "A body in motion or at rest must have been determined to motion or to rest by another body, which also has been determined to motion or to rest by another body, and that one again by another, and so on ad infinitum" (56). Neither the car nor the player nor the road, the corner, the physics engine, and so on, is entirely responsible for rest or motion - all there is, is the moment these potentials are made determinate in movement.
The player and R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 move one another, determine one another, and also, critically disclose something about one another through their coming into contact. R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 expresses something of itself via the body of every imperfect driver that comes its way. And every imperfect driver expresses something of themselves through coming into contact with R4: Ridge Racer Type 4. This is of course the case for any text and its coming into being through the imperfect reader. It's also the case for an account of material reality. We are always being composed and decomposed by the external bodies with which we come into contact, and so every moment of contact is an experimental disclosure of bodily capability. This is a useful way to begin an analysis of R4: Ridge Racer Type 4: I do not know the game, except by the ways that it affects my body in play. By the way that it blows my eyes out sideways and tears my head in half, all in pursuit of the warm numb. But let's remember that the external body doesn't simply happen to us. The game in motion discloses something about the one playing it. What this means is the warm numb that arises through contact with R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 expresses the warm numb already inside the human subject.
***THREE THEORIES ON THE DRIFT***
There's something destructive about this. And it's a destruction not immanent to the vehicle, but to the vehicle in composition with the one that uses it. It's a destruction that's already intimate to us. Trying to put into words the disconcerting joy of the drift-sensation has made me think of some famous examples that have done it themselves: Speed Racer (2008), Ferrari (2023), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006). The intimacy of the drift-sensation in Speed Racer is presented by Racer X, "You don't do it to be a driver, you do it because you're driven." The driver fuses with the external body of the car to express their already-existing impulse to blinding velocity. And as with the paradoxical sense of coherence that comes with the obliteration of self in R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, Speed Racer muses "When I'm in a T-180, everything just makes sense," just as cause and effect is upended and the entire world spews into a variegated rainbow intestine. For the Wachowskis this is the driver's self-actualisation. Spinoza writes:
Anything that disposes the human body to be capable of being affected in more ways, or which makes it capable of affecting external bodies in more ways is useful to a human being; and all the more useful, the more capable the body is made of being affected and of affecting other bodies in more ways; conversely anything that makes the body less capable of these things is harmful (188)
And the film agrees. It's saying, Go into the world and experiment with external bodies! Find the ones that allow you to express the you that's you! Ferrari fixates on the same phenomenon, but colours it through the will to annihilation rather than self-actualisation. The drift-sensation is a "terrible joy" the colour of puke, that tears bodies, and not the world, in half. According to this pathology all the drivers are already ghosts. The drift-sensation is critical to the driver's undeath, because it grants them fleeting coherence by formalising the threshold between life and death. Victory is the welcoming of the latter. If you're here, it's because it's been deferred. And you're a ghost too. Finally Tokyo Drift speaks to the annihilatory metaphysics of pure motion. When it's said the drift-sensation is all there is, this means the total negation of everything, including drifting as an action. There's no grasping it. It is void.
***FREEDOM***
To go back to my earlier point, that I enjoy games that allow me to be bad at them, I remember playing one of the Need for Speed games as a kid and going off-road whenever I could. This was not a good strategy for placement, but placement was not the point. The game gives you the freedom to play badly, and to lose because you got lost. The radical simplicity of R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 doesn't allow for this. Just as it only gives us one button to push, every track only has one road. You lose because you took the corner too slowly.
It's worth examining what's meant by 'freedom' here, because the game's restrictions do not feel as though they're impeding free action. Deleuze's commentary on the Spinoza material already covered here is useful. Remember that for Spinoza, there is only one substance, but different bodies can be differentiated through relative velocity, speed and slowness, motion and rest. R4: Ridge Racer Type 4's single button - accelerate - models this well. And remember that for Spinoza, because these different bodies determine one another through their coming into composition, it is difficult to tell cause from effect. One body affects another body, that body is affected by another body, and so on, at both the molecular and aggregate level. This is insightful because, however 'free' a game may appear, the player is never the root cause of any sequence. It's important here to remember the correlative: that however restrictive a game may appear, the game can never be the sole cause of any outcome either. Deleuze plays with the word 'composition', offering a musical analogy to this view of freedom:
In the same way, a musical form will depend on a complex relation between speeds and slownesses of sound particles. It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms (123)
The player comes to the videogame already in the midst of its complex computational processes. Its processes output some information, which I respond to, and its processes respond in turn to my input: I am affected by it, and I affect it. This rhythmic play of affective capacities mirrors the fundamental dynamism of being. The only threat to freedom at this point would be to mistake oneself for the root cause, because this would be an incomplete picture.
Affective capacity varies moment-to-moment, game-to-game. Because I appear to have fewer ways to affect R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 than I do, for example, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), this game could be said to have a higher affective threshold - I push x, I stop pushing x, I push x again. Such affective-mechanical restriction is, after all, the game's divine simplicity. One might ask at this point whether games ever really allow us to act freely, given that we might intend to do something not included in its programmed field of possibility. But when Deleuze and Spinoza write of external causes, their intention is to wrest freedom from 'will': one discovers and actively fights for their freedom in light of the correspondence of body and mind, and the primacy of the external cause.
Learning what is possible in R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 is less the effort to shape one's essence in the image of the game, than it is to disclose some element of self via its restrictions. The corner, restricted and animated by the game system, becomes an expression of self. This element of the self is the warm numb. And the warm numb is the cessation of deliberate action and the blind, screaming elimination of self. R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 gives us the freedom to reveal something of our essence. At the essence of the self its own negation. Its void. Its recognition of the warm numb.
***HUNTING***
Something interesting about R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 is that, wherever one is currently positioned in the championship rankings, one will always begin the race from eighth place. What this means is that every race is a matter of gradually catching up to and overtaking seven other cars. We are always at the end, working up. An important component to this is that every car is always spaced equidistant to the next. There is never any frantic build-up of cars in a final race to the finish-line, because none of these cars will ever occupy the same space and time. Only we get to know them this way, as we're moving through them. The others become less competitors than like prey, and we the hunter. Before long I no longer read that I'm in fifth place - I read there are four left. I wonder if I've been wrong this whole time, and this is how cars think.
I've been reading J. A. Baker's The Peregrine (1967) - I'm only forty pages in but it's already thick with post-it notes. Most of the post-it notes point to sentences that've winded me or ruptured my language, Baker's phrasing is so exhilarating. One post-it leads to a passage I've noted for its value as a train of thought:
We who are anchored and earthbound cannot envisage this freedom of the eye. The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist: the neat squares of orchid and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries. But what does he understand? Does he really 'know' that an object that increases in size is moving towards him? Or is it that he believes in the size he sees, so that a distant man is too small to be frightening but a man near is a man huge and therefore terrifying? He may live in a world of endless pulsations, of objects forever contracting or dilating in size. Aimed at a distant bird, a flutter of white wings, he may feel - as it spreads out beneath him like a stain of white - that he can never fail to strike. Everything he is has been evolved to link the targeting eye to the striking talon.
The peregrine's mode of affectivity is to descend on external bodies at over three hundred kilometres an hour and to sever the spine. Its perceptual field, in conjunction with its speed, Baker reasons, might mean that it understands these objects through rapid fluctuations in size. It follows that if no object is dimensionally fixed the peregrine will not recognise distance - the length of space between two objects - itself and the external body. If it doesn't recognise distance, neither can it recognise intervals or movement. The bird has no sense of itself in the spatial field, moving to close distance, severing the spine of something that was once far away. Due to the violent simplicity of its engineering, space is flattened and motion with it.
I wonder about this playing R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, because the perceptual field opened by the game is so similar to the one described by Baker. Future racing games would develop new ways to communicate the subjective experience of g-force - the pressure on the retina, the knowledge the body is being crushed, the hallucinatory side-effects of mental strain. But in R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 there is nothing to communicate acceleration - no shake, dynamic camera angle or distance, blur, generation of 'speed lines' - outside of objects dilating in size. Like Baker's peregrine, it is not that we reach objects, but that objects arrive or rather pulse at us. There is no sense of us moving between points. We are static. Zeno's arrow. All we can do is respond as best we can to the images that are frantically assembling themselves right here in the field of the instant. The car is no longer a vehicle we use to propel ourselves through space - the more we accelerate the faster it pulls the landscape screaming into our eyes.
***GIULIANO GILBERT***
The ghost of Giuliano Gilbert stalks R4: Ridge Racer Type 4. In two of the four campaigns we are mistaken for Giuliano and shunned, and in the other two the ghost of Giuliano is acknowledged and not dealt with. The Grand Prix will continue, they believe, and the ghost of Giuliano will be there, like the weather and like gravity. That Giuliano has become unstuck in time is also true of the 1999 Grand Prix, which will always reach the threshold of the new millennium and then turn back. Something beautiful about videogames is their permanent latency: they are always in motion, executing script, compressing artefacts, understanding only the processual instant in which the text is regenerated. In one sense their obliviousness to the passage of time means they move through it like ghosts. In another sense, because they stay the same and we come and go, it is we who are the ghosts.
I remember being deeply disturbed by the time trial in Total Drivin (1998). The game records your best lap, and then proceeds to run through the recording atop the track while you're in it. You end up racing your own shadow, and when you walk away from the machine you know you've left in it traces of you. Two objects can, in fact, occupy the same space at the same time: you and your ghost. This happens because the game system doesn't recognise linear time and so refuses to believe in the distance between points in a temporal continuum. There are shots in the final race in Ferrari that apply this to the landscape. At night, the people just glow through it, and they're gone, and it persists. The landscape, like the game system, forever upholds the processual instant. In its adherence to eternal latency it appears to stay the same, while more and more people pass through it. Of the millions of people who have come and gone from R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, there are a myriad of attempts, producing a myriad of ghosts, stored and called forth and defaced, not in time but in space. A surface of swarming, pulsating objects, compressed into being, and whose distance is an illusion.
The emulator the PS4 uses to run R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 has a Quick Save system. The game offers save points between heats in the Grand Prix, but the save system that sits atop it allows time to be rewound at three-second intervals. This means we can practice the same corner, again and again, until we skip back one too many intervals and it's all too far away and some earlier corner, one that wasn't an issue before, now is, so we're trapped back in a worse version of the past, there is too little time to react to the immediately large image of the corner, of the windows glowing a few kilometres off, of the nightsky shuddering into the black infinity of the harbour below. I wonder where that other me would have gone, and I stop, because I know it's time to turn back. In these final days of 2024, I leave traces of myself at the threshold of the millennium.
22 December 2024