The Liminal Beauty of American Truck Simulator
American Truck Simulator is a wonderful game because it makes you sit in traffic.
It’s a mundane video game to the point of borderline absurdity: all you do is drive a truck from town to town performing delivery jobs. You have to stop and sleep at rest stops, you have to stop and fill up your gas tank, and yes, you have to stop and wait for traffic to clear up. Outside of the driving simulator niche, it’s known for semi-ironic videos and streams of people playing trucker characters and laughing off crashes and traffic violation charges. But if you want to play it long-term, you have to start obeying the law. You have to start being careful. You have to start slowing down and, dare I say, take it seriously.
I didn’t think I would be able to do that. My tastes and preferences for gaming are pretty defined and clear: I like games with distinct art styles, games with a focus on story or characters, succinct games that I can finish and roll credits on. This lends itself to cinematic blockbuster games and precision platformers with deceptively simple gameplay and popping visual design. Truck Simulator, on the other hand, is a fairly drab game with a steep learning curve and an indefinite gameplay loop. It has no ending, let alone a story, and you play as a disembodied ghost behind a steering wheel. Being a truck driver isn’t even one of my “simple life” fantasies, given my dislike for driving.
So why have I loved it? For one thing, my dislike of driving might make the gameplay more novel for me than it does for most people. I was the kid who stopped for red lights when playing the Transformers Movie Game for PS3. It’s relaxing and simple without being mind numbing. The inherent goofiness of the game makes me chuckle as well, with my fun ram paint job showing up in every picture I take on the road.
But it goes deeper than that. I love the liminal world this game revels in. Driving by a burger joint at 1AM to fill my gas tank, seeing American cities through their backwoods construction zones and logistics companies. The world isn’t dead, in fact it’s quite alive: driving through the still of night and passing other trucks, then looking up and seeing the big dipper in the sky. Pulling into town a bit later at night, and the only activity is a group of local skaters jumping off a halfpipe. The next day, I pass by a cop that’s pulled over a driver. The next day, I stop by a bigfoot tourist shop crawling with customers.
This is why waiting in traffic elevates Truck Simulator. Here’s the core of why, I think, I love this game: the simulator genre often revolves around making you feel like a king of your own little world. Strategy sims often take this literally, like Crusader Kings or Sid Meier’s Civilization. But in most other strategy games, you still have complete control of your domain, and you strive to become the biggest and most successful farm or zoo or city or whatever. Conquering. Growing. Tinkering. This is the bread and butter of the sim. I get it, and I often like it! Civilization kicks ass! I loved Rollercoaster Tycoon as a kid! But there’s something refreshing about a sim that places you in a much bigger world.
Sure, you can grow your business in Truck Simulator. You can buy out garages, assemble a fleet of trucks, and hire other drivers. But that all just makes the numbers go up faster. The core gameplay is always just you and the open road. And it’s not always open: construction throws off your route, exits close entirely, and traffic jams lead to sitting at red lights or on highways right outside of the city you need to get into.
Let’s say you’re running low on time and you’re almost to the drop-off spot for your job. The back roads are winding, and the other cars are moving slowly, and the lights are always red. It can be frustrating, it can stoke your impatience. But this is not a challenge to overcome. This is not a puzzle to solve. This is not a door to revisit later when you get your ice beam. The intention in the game’s design is that you just have to wait. Growth will not allow you to control traffic, you just have to allow for that time in your trip, you have to budget your hours and your resources for the inevitable forces outside of your control. Truck Simulator routinely makes you feel small. And in doing so, it makes its world feel big. There are other lives all around you, with their own desires that might conflict with yours. You are not more important than they are.
I am not The King of the Trucks. I am just one guy, in a world full of guys, doing my job. And in doing so, I share the roads with everyone else, catching glimpses of their world as I drift from town to town, taking pictures of landmarks, happily operating in the background of someone else’s story. It’s not just calming, it’s not just goofy, it’s beautiful.
Not visually, though, the graphics kinda suck.
