The game I chose to play is Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2012 Edition). It’s a car-racing game where you, the player has to make your way up to the top. As the player, you are allowed to drive around the city of Fairhaven and participate in races. Winning races unlocks car mods and gives you Speed Points (something similar to street cred). The underground street racers maintain a blacklist of the most dangerous and deadly drivers (and their cars). Gaining enough Speed Points allows you to challenge them and move up the blacklist!

A peculiar aspect of the game that I find worth mentioning early on is that there are no characters in the game that resemble humans. While you do see cars being driven and hear cops on the radio – there are no 3D human figures that you can actually see. However, the absence of humans is never felt – primarily because the game emphasizes focus on the cars, the drivers aren’t that important. Even the names on the blacklist are actually just the names of the cars. The are no pedestrians in the city of Fairhaven either.

An hour of gameplay is roughly a day (24 hours) in game. This has no special contribution apart from the fact that the player gets to experience driving around in fairhaven at different times of day, which would mean if different lighting, and of  course, a slightly different feel (I always enjoyed driving at night more that the day). The game itself may take a while to finish. Each race typically lasts for about 3-4 minutes.

The elements of a car dashboard, all present on the screen – a map, an odometer. The number of Speed Points is also displayed on top.

In terms of conventional terms, the game space for NFSMW is more of a free-roam environment, where players can not only roam around the space without any particular object, but also interact with the space to unlock and participate in objectives. Fairhaven would seem like any other metropolitan city that you’d typically experience. There are buildings, roads, a pier, a huge park, etc. Apart from the absence of any human life, the city is quite ordinary. It obviously draws from a real city to give the player a sense of actually being able to race in an environment that is relatable to them, as opposed to driving in hyperspace or any other crazy fantasy racetracks. The splendid graphics add to the feel of the game which make it seem more real. The cars in the game themselves are also taken from the real world, and these are hands-down some of the best cars one could drive. There are definitely certain things that might seem odd in comparison to the real world. The most striking example would be the repairs from a crash. When you do crash your car, regardless of how bad the crash may seem, the car still functions as well as it did prior to the crash. The only difference is that it looks slightly beat up. A quick stop at any gas station, and your car will look like it is brand new. A stop at the gas station also changes the paint-job on the car.

Another aspect of an alternate reality in the game is the way in which changing cars functions. Each car has 5 races of its own – winning all of them will unlock all the mods for the car. Once you are done with those 5 races of the car, the logical step forward would be to move to a different car, since there is no other way to gain speed points beside winning unfinished races and evading the cops. The cars themselves are situated at different spots around the city. Some are obviously much better than the others. The player can jump to a different car once discovered, or if the car has been already discovered, they can use an ingame menu to jump into that, at the location of its discovery. This means that there are jack spots all around the city, and a fun thing to do is to find all of them and unlock all cars. To race the blacklist cars, the player may use any car and still get the Speed Points. While being different from reality in how you change cars, this feature obviously helps provide a better gameplay since its easier to change cars once you know where they are.  

The ingame menu for choosing races (left), and the current mods applied to the car (right) [in this picture, none applied yet[

Overall, the game is a typical racing game. Most people drive cars, but are confined to the rules of the roads. The game provides a space for the player to do what they can’t do in their own cars. Since the damages are confined to the game space, there are no real-world consequences of speeding. The game also allows players to drive around the city of Fairhaven in supercars. It’s also a fantasy popularized by movies like Fast and the Furious, which paint a picture of how ‘cool’ it would be to actually race. This makes the experience all the more enjoyable.