A Car, a Rocket, and a Contract - Vol. 1 Ed. 25
Jan 06, 2021 1:01 am
World Builders' Guild Newsletter
It's 2021 and we have flying cars.
Except they play soccer in cyberspace.
No freewheeling (jetting?) sky highways yet, sadly. We're just entering the era of the autonomous passenger car. I don't think we're ready for the near-earth personal transport vehicle yet. Imagine the DMV, except now you have to take a flight checkride.
I'll stick to the virtual cars, thanks.
In a game of Rocket League, you get five minutes beat the other team in a breakneck riot of rocket-powered car soccer. Everybody rips across the stylized pitch in a tricked-out, four-wheeled, flight-capable dune buggy.
It sounds like chaos. And, for the uninitiated, it is.
However, when you get the hang of it, it's the most addictive and rewarding virtual sporting experience imaginable.
It's like this A320 and this Tundra had a baby and made it play soccer 24 hours a day (Photo by Harrison Haines from Pexels).
At a certain level of play, no matter how random your pairings, you enter into an unspoken contract with the rest of your team (usually that's two other human players).
It looks like this.
For the following five minutes:
- I agree to play to the best of my current ability and no less.
- I agree to abide by the standard practices of competitive Rocket League: to strike any ball directly in front of me, to attempt to keep the ball in our opponents' half, and to take turns "rotating" into scoring and defending positions.
- I agree to not be a hotshot, ballhog, or play below my true level so as to embarrass new or struggling players.
Position and timing are everything. Communication is key. The developers wisely included a "quick chat" feature - you can spam phrases like "I got it!" or "In position!" instead of taking a costly typing break or risking an earful of pre-adolescent profanity.
My mother would never do anything of the sort, kid. Beat it.
The world demands your commitment to the contract. Those who break it suffer the pain of an entire game's worth of vitriol. Both teams, in fact, will denigrate the offender and run them out of the server, tail tucked in shame.
Rocket League is more than a brilliant and simple physics simulation-turned-amateur sport. It's a self-contained, self-governing, short-lived virtual world engine. It's a neon-flavored taste of the pursuit of excellence and happiness in near silence. It's a democracy where your cooperation is ratified by the sound of an exploding soccer goal whose discharge is shaped like a dragon's mouth (or party balloons, or a mushroom cloud, or a bunch of Christmas presents...)
"Savage!"
To future worlds,
Matt Ventre
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