Sanctuary on the Open Road
Diablo IV and American Truck Simulator, a natural combination
Hello there. Thanks for bearing with me. It has been a busy summer, with most of my energy dedicated to writing about Catholic missionaries in southern China during the inter-war period. So... between the basic psychosis of trying to reach a certain deadline and the challenges of trying to think of something that wasn’t about Catholic missionaries in interwar China - Jiangxi Province, if you're curious - this little newsletter thing got lost in the shuffle. Which is fine on the one hand; it was never meant to be a super regular thing.
On the other hand many of you have been kind enough to subscribe, so I felt bad. Also, I have been playing games, mostly. I actually just started Baldur's Gate 3, but we'll do missives from the Forgotten Realms next week. For now let me catch you up. When in the true depths of the final weeks of the book-writing miasma these past few weeks, that cocktail of "why am I doing this again?" and "what the heck do I do next?" and "what if they find out I am not able to do this?", I turned to an odd mix of video gaming comfort food. Specifically, Diablo IV and American Truck Simulator.
Ah, obviously, you think to yourself. I feel like the Diablo thing can't be a huge surprise if you read my last few posts: it's the most 90s thing imaginable, in a lot of ways. First off, everyone I know my age played a lot of Diablo II. Bob Whitaker likes telling people that game almost bounced him out of freshman year in college. Thing is... I didn't. Diablo is yet another entry in the list of games/series/genres I want to like. So much so that I played a bunch of the first act of Diablo III. Diablo IV has genuinely got something though. I finished the campaign, and not just because Blizzard Activision decided to peer pressure its entire userbase. I was enjoying myself.
The why of it all probably isn't too hard to figure out. After hours of writes and rewrites and a LOT of thinking about the New Life Movement - to just use one example - there was something comforting about sitting down and right clicking the crap out of some well drawn if rather dark demonic sprites. Dark, literally, by the way. As well as figuratively. The backlog is always judging me but Diablo IV doesn't care. It still loves me no matter how many cheeseburgers I eat. It's fattening and sometimes leaves you wondering how you ended up sitting there wiped out at 1am: it is the cheeseburger.
American Truck Simulator is a different thing. Like a warm hug that carries you flying a few feet high in the air through New Mexico. I had an initial burst of driving for 18 in-game hours while listening to The Beatles; now I tend to still take the long drives but I break them up into short sessions. I have reached something like an American Truck Simulator mid-game. I've bought a second garage, upgraded it, grabbed a second truck and hired an apparently somewhat feckless employee who brings in almost enough money on his own per day to pay the mortgage fees I now have. Because of the garage and truck and so on. This always seemed the next step with these games, some kind of management layer that would sustain you through another freight run to Carlsbad, CA. As with so many games, I think of Ian Bogost’s famous critique of games as work and then... click away. Or in the case of American Truck Simulator, keep my thumb steady on the controller.
As things went on I began to dream of a life beyond the mortgage. I'll increasingly take on jobs to see new places (something I'm already doing anyway) and eventually drop the trailer completely to tour the Pacific Northwest in a souped up Volvo. My then numerous employees will manage themselves at that point. "Just take that job to Kingman, AZ" they'll say. "I think the boss is in Oregon somewhere."
The simulations of the American countryside, just like those in the European Truck Simulator games, are deliberatively incomplete. You are supposed to derive a sense of things. In this regard the American-set game excels. You can see why SCS Software started out west and have since expanded backwards in an inverse of Manifest Destiny. It's Big Skies all the way. At the time of writing the game really wants me to buy the new Oklahoma DLC. Overall, it works. The cities are pretty spare, but they do their job, emerging into the interstate wastelands that built the modern United States to disrupt you from your Americana meditations. It's a wonderfully soothing game. A nice shift from wondering how much your reader needs to know about that Wisconsite priest's feelings about Chinese marriage rituals.
I will leave it at that for now but the next interval will be much shorter than the last. I am eager to talk about Baldur's Gate, though I need to play more of it first. I didn't just spend my summer on the book by the way. Bob and I found time to record a podcast. While you’re there, check out Bob’s recent History Respawned episode covering The Saboteur.
Talk soon. Keep on truckin'.