How Virtual Driving Helped Me Get Free

Once, while riding the Canada Line on the way to work in 2019, a man I’d never met before reached into my beard and drew out a long, stray strand of hair. The strand belonged to my partner Claire, I explained, and I shared then how excited I was about our deepening relationship. He told me about his daughter, his family’s struggles with finding child care in the city and his plans to move to the East Coast soon. I never saw him again, but I think about him often.

Moments of intimacy and humanity like this have cemented my adoration of public transit. I love to look out the left window of the Expo Line, between 22nd Station and Edmonds and watch the landscape roll by.

I like how public transit can open up a city and expose its connective tissue. Even during rush hour on a weekday, watching interactions between strangers makes it one of my favourite places to be. I once watched a man jump off the bus, not at his stop, to help an elderly man lug a massive bag onto the bus. Sometimes a stranger asks me for assistance and then we ride the line together until one of us steps off and we go our separate ways.

I’m from Lagos, Nigeria, a diverse megalopolis with an estimated population of 21 million with ageing public infrastructure and corridors perpetually congested by traffic. Growing up, it always sucked to be stuck in a vehicle during rush hour, and I always thought it sure must suck to be driving it. For me, a robust public transit system has always represented the fulfilment of a core part of the liberal idea of freedom.

So, since I moved to Vancouver to pursue an undergraduate degree, I never felt a strong compulsion to obtain a driver’s licence. After all, everywhere I needed to go could be reached by train, bus, bike or foot.

I don’t have a car, and I won’t be getting one in the immediate future. I’ve seen too many mangled victims, crumpled sedans and carcasses of fuel tankers smoldering and torn apart for vehicle ownership to seem appealing.

It never made sense to me that everyone should need the skills to manoeuvre heavy machinery to get from one part of the place they live to another. I see the automobile arguably as one of the biggest net negatives on human society (even when it’s fuel economic, electric or chic).

These could, of course, all be read as excuses for my not being a card-carrying member of society by not having a driver’s licence or a car, a core tool that many use for their livelihoods and fostering a sense of stability within their families.

My position is one of privilege, of having an option to abstain from driving in silent and noble protest. I’m grateful to friends and family who have saved me from being crushingly late for important events or moving-induced meltdowns with their earth-killing machines of doom and destruction. I’m at their mercy.

But lately, despite my strong aversion to automobiles, I find myself driving all the time.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been drawn to an indie video game called Art of Rally.

The game transports you back in time, to the blazing high noon of the World Rally Championship, inside some of mankind’s greatest inventions besides bread and wine — rally racing cars between the ’60s and ’80s.

You’re in the driver’s seat of bullish and brazen creations whose specs make you feel relieved that they no longer exist. After all, it’s a period pockmarked by horrific, tragic accidents.

But Art of Rally disposes of the baggage and grit of these events. Playing the game also enables one to helpfully shed the baggage of real life itself, and the refreshingly pared-down, minimalist graphics offer a soothing locus of focus on speed.

The different race settings, from broad daylight to dusk to midnight, from gravel to tarmac to dirt, from Finland to Japan to Kenya to Sardinia, are an itinerary for places that I’ve never been to, and places that I will probably never go.

It’s an absolutely gorgeous game.

Even from its origins, the game was always a form of escape. Art of Rally’s creator Dune Casu, who actually went to rally school in New Zealand (yes, that exists), has said he built it in a Ford Transit camper van while driving across North America, ferried by his love of travel and Vancouver’s housing crisis. The look and feel of the game are all informed by this time.

“How a tree looks… I’d take a closer look at one, take pictures, to get the essence just right in the game,” Casu told Driving magazine.

Again and again, I find myself returning to this place to cruise the roadways, winding along a sea in a lovely shade of glass.

My last five years have been marked by events largely out of my control. There has been the systemic: a pandemic, climate anxiety, a growing, conjoined housing and affordability crisis.

And alongside all of this, the personal: Claire’s cancer diagnosis in 2019; my overwhelming, sometimes debilitating anxiety and despair.

Something changed for me with the pandemic. When public health restrictions came into place, I didn’t take transit much. Those daily, spontaneous interactions on the bus and SkyTrain that used to be such a lovely source of joy for me vanished.

And then I didn’t leave home much at all. Claire was in the midst of her first round of chemotherapy and severely immunocompromised at the time.

I realized then that the things that once felt empowering suddenly felt scary. I used to embrace the experience of being pressed up against people on the train, but with a new pandemic and cancer diagnosis in our midst, the idea of a crowded bus as a potential vector of disease horrified me. Without public transit, I felt like the primary way I moved through the city was now cut off or at least severely limited.

In the face of this, a new car feels like a luxury. A fast car is a dream.

And now, all of a sudden, I can’t stop imagining myself in possession of one of these things, in control.

I’m whistling when I see a European city car or a Japanese Kei. On Instagram, I watch a French man drive his family for a Corsican vacation in a dolphin-blue Porsche. A British guy just across the English Channel tells me how many Mazdas I can buy for 5,000 pounds.

I’m fixed on online discussions about Formula 1’s leading drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. (I’m partial to Fernando Alonso and the Ferrari team myself).

Facebook keeps feeding me videos of simulators. In each video, cars drive off varyingly absurd cliffs and then we’re shown the “chance of survival” upon crashing.

Despite knowing how silly it is and how embarrassed I would be if someone could see me, I watch it every time.

I feel sick.

And it doesn’t seem to be just me. Everything I’ve just mentioned seems to be catching fire and blazing in popularity.

These Instagram car accounts have tens of thousands of followers and often go viral. Netflix’s documentary series about Formula 1, Drive to Survive, has been a hit.

And F1 drivers have taken on a broader cultural appeal. To wit: recent Silverstone winner Lewis Hamilton, who was featured on the April 2024 cover of GQ magazine and the September 2022 cover of Vanity Fair, recently got his own skin on the popular battle royale video game Fortnite.

And even these car crash videos seem to have thousands of likes.

Who in the world are all these people, fuelling this resurging appreciation for the automobile?

People like me. And it turns out I’m not the only one at work for whom fast cars loom large in my free time. In early discussions about this essay, my editor Jackie Wong laughed while telling me about her husband Paul Carr’s quiet appreciation for Formula 1 racing and fast-car video games. He too is a transit-loving, bike-riding city dweller who lacks a driver’s licence.

“There’s a flow to all this,” he told me when I caught up with him. “Which is bolstered by the aesthetic and soothing effects of things like the landscape quietly passing by and the effects of light slowly playing on the surface of the track and on the bodies and interiors of the cars.”

He plays Real Racing 3, Forza Motorsport 7, Grid Autosport and New Star GP. He has punched up the difficulty settings to more closely simulate real car handling.

But, he added, “I don’t have much desire to own or drive these or any cars.”

Whether in-game or watching in real life, Carr finds satisfaction “in the focused, repetitious drive toward perfection lap after lap: getting the racing line just right, nailing the entry, apex and exit of each corner; and pushing the limits of tire grip without losing control.”

Art of Rally has been a calming presence through many life events largely out of my control.

The game has grounded me in the moments I have felt overwhelmed by it all.

Surprisingly, one of the biggest appeals of this game is how hard it is to master. Every time I log in after a hiatus, or whenever I try out a new car or change groups, I have to run up a new hill or beat other ghost racers with times that feel impossible to reach. That is, until you finally beat them.

It’s like a puzzle, balancing out at the right speed, hugging the windy curves of the hillside at just the right angle, knowing when to hit the brakes and when to step on the gas.

It all feels just right. At the end of the race, my car is beaten up and covered in mud.

One of the various definitions of the verb “rally” comes up in the Cambridge dictionary as “to return to a better condition.”

Maybe my fascination with Art of Rally is that it quietly reminds me that humans are capable of so much learning. No matter the challenges before us, what we’ve been through, the things that we are currently enduring, we have to trust that it will all be alright.

Maybe it’s never been about the destination or the getting on the podium at all, but about the journey.

Of slowly learning each course in life and learning to enjoy it for what it is and not what you want it to be.

Last year, I finally went ahead and got my learner’s permit. But I still don’t believe I’ll be buying a car any time soon.

For now, it’s summer. Claire is not in a hospital today. I hope to take my road test sometime next year.

Until then, I will be gleefully making my way through tense curves on my way across Art of Rally’s luscious digital landscapes.