On the Road With the Women of Wheels of Aurelia
In March, around the release of 3D OutRun on the 3DS, I wrote a post called The Women in the White Convertible.
OutRun is one of the essential games of my life. But in that post, I wrote,
I was aware that while OutRun was a fantasy, it wasn’t entirely my fantasy. On the long road trips my family sometimes took, I’d often look at another driver and escape from my own life for a while by wondering who that person was, where she might be going, what her life might be like.
This would happen when I played OutRun, too. I didn’t give a damn about this guy in the Ferrari with a lady by his side. His California adventure was not the story I was really interested in. Always when I saw the convertible with what I interpreted as two women in it…

…I started wondering who they were. I wanted them in the center of the screen, and the Ferrari with the man behind the wheel and the woman in the passenger seat to be just another car I was outrunning on the road. I wanted their California adventure. Were they good friends or lovers? Were they getting away to San Francisco for the weekend? Would they go on wine tastings? What did 25-year-old women even do together, I wondered. Whatever it was, that was the life I wanted. And even in this fantasy world, I was still denied it.
In OutRun, male experience is literally centered. Women exist in the periphery. Now, as if in answer to my longings, here comes Wheels of Aurelia, a narrative road trip game set in 1978 Italy, centered on a female protagonist, the restless and stylish Lella. Upon launching the game (which is currently in beta), I was immediately reminded of OutRun. The first thing you see here are arcade-style high score screens listing the times at which drivers have reached each of the game’s endings, and OutRun, famously, is a driving game in which you try to reach one of five destinations, choosing your path at forks in the road.

In some ways, this comparison I couldn’t help making does not benefit Wheels of Aurelia. In OutRun, driving is a core part of the experience. The shimmering music and the idealized California settings are what make OutRun memorable, but if the driving weren’t pleasant, none of that would have saved it. I came to Aurelia expecting to similarly enjoy coasting along its Italian roads, but Aurelia’s driving is not fun, at least not yet. It’s too limiting to be enjoyable and yet too involved for you to ignore it altogether. I almost wish I could ignore it, and just take in the scenery and the conversation. I figure Lella’s a seasoned enough driver that she doesn’t have to think about it much, so why should I? Let it be almost automatic, like it is in another game about driving and talking at the same time, Three Fourths Home.
Lella’s conversations with her passengers take priority but they don’t mesh well with the driving. The game divides my focus between cycling through possible responses to my passenger’s last comment and navigating the turns ahead, and the conversations suffer as a result, dragged down by my diverted attention. I was also repeatedly frustrated when I’d encounter a hitchhiker and had no choice but to stop to pick him up, which abruptly interrupted the flow of a conversation I’d been enjoying.
And yet, for all that, I came away from the game with my brain buzzing, exhilarated by an encounter with something I still so rarely come across in games or even films: women who are intellectually and emotionally alive, whose lives as women are centered, and who talk about their own experiences as if they matter. On my one brief playthrough, conversations touched on political systems, feminism, sex and abortion and children and religion.

These conversations are not the stuff of what some might nonsensically dismiss as games writing with a political agenda, but rather an example of writing that acknowledges that life as individuals and as women within social systems is inherently political, and that women actually talk about their lives in ways that recognize this. If you don’t think women actually talk about these sorts of things, you get too many of your ideas about women from movies and television.
Why are such depictions of women so rare? Where are all the thoughtful characters who are passionately invested in the intrinsically political nature of their own lives at a particular time and place? As if responding to my thoughts about how refreshing it was to see two women discussing the social forces shaping their own lives and not just, say, talking about men, at one point my passenger said something like “To hell with men! They always want you to talk about them!”
In her great piece Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters, Vanessa Veselka writes,
Whereas a man on the road might be seen as potentially dangerous, potentially adventurous, or potentially hapless, in all cases the discourse is one of potential. When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.
Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom—we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can’t go anywhere if you can’t step out onto a road.
True quest is about agency, and the capacity to be driven past one’s limits in pursuit of something greater. It’s about desire that extends beyond what we may know about who we are. It’s a test of mettle, a destiny. A man with a quest, internal or external, makes the choice at every stage about whether to endure the consequences or turn back, and that choice is imbued with heroism. Women, however, are restricted to a single tragic or fatal choice.
And in the preface to the 1999 edition of her novel Girls, Visions and Everything, Sarah Schulman writes:
If I could stretch to universalize to Jack Kerouac, then the dominant-culture reader must be able to reciprocate by universalizing to me. This last goal has not yet been realized. Yet over the years, it has become clearer to me what that shift in subjectivity would require. And, of course, being able to imagine a cultural progression is the first step toward achieving it.

And that’s what I find so exhilarating about Wheels of Aurelia. Road trips and quest narratives have always spoken to me deeply. But from Jack Kerouac to the driver in OutRun, these experiences and narratives have almost always centered men. And I universalized those men. But what I was grasping at when I wrote The Women in the White Convertible was the longing–really, the need–to have women’s quest narratives be universalized, too. In OutRun, I wanted to know who those women were, what their relationship was to each other, what they were running from, what they were running to. Aurelia gives me a glimpse of what that might look like.
We’re nowhere near the point where these kinds of stories, when they have women at the center, can be seen as universal, but Schulman is exactly right when she says that being able to imagine a cultural progression is the first step toward achieving it. Wheels of Aurelia left me buzzing because it nudges us ever so slightly closer to that world.

I think back to OutRun, and how you, as a male driver, choose your path at those forks in the road. The woman is just along for the ride. How that seemed perfectly normal, yet how strange it would it have seemed in 1986 if you were driving as a woman who was forging her own path. Typically men are the doers, and women are the ones affected by the actions of men.
Veselka wrote, “True quest is about agency, and the capacity to be driven past one’s limits in pursuit of something greater. It’s about desire that extends beyond what we may know about who we are. It’s a test of mettle, a destiny. A man with a quest, internal or external, makes the choice at every stage about whether to endure the consequences or turn back, and that choice is imbued with heroism.”
How political, how heroic it is for a woman to get behind the wheel and hit the road.
(Wheels of Aurelia has just been Greenlit on Steam.)
Notes
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I’m always excited to hear about driving games that aren’t simply racing games and this sounds fascinating. And its full...
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