Dragster, Destiny 2, and the Pursuit of the Human Element
I watch an awful lot of Twitch, let me tell ya. And yeah, I know that to some degree it’s a substitute for the flesh-and-blood connections I don’t have in my real life, and that more often than not, I might rather go out for a drink with good friends on a Friday night (or a Tuesday night, for that matter) than stay in and watch people play games on the internet.
And yet, that’s not to say the connection between viewers and streamers, or between viewers and other viewers, can’t be real in some way. It definitely can. If a person is real onstream, you get to know them in a way, after spending hours and hours watching them play games. Lately, there are nights when I’d much rather watch someone else play a video game than play one myself, because I already spend way too much time alone and because I need to feel some sense of connection with other people.
What do I mean when I talk about a streamer being real? I mean that Twitch is as much about personalities as it is about games. Probably more. I’m not going to watch someone I can’t stand streaming a game I love, but I will gladly watch a streamer I love playing a game I can’t stand. A lot of streamers, you can tell it’s a persona they’re putting on. They have a shtick. Maybe they have lots of bells and whistles, tons of giveaways or other things that make their stream feel like a drive-time radio show. I wish them success, but these are not the streamers for me. I like those people who make you feel like you’re there in the room with them, casually hanging out on their couch. Just you and them and their genuine experience of the game they’re playing.
I mainly watch speedrunners, for a number of reasons. Because they have clear goals that I understand and that I can get invested in seeing them accomplish. Because they approach games in an entirely different way from how I and most players approach them, and that approach often reveals fascinating things about the inner workings of a game that I’d never know otherwise. I also watch them because there’s a fair amount of failure and suffering involved, which I can relate to; I know what it is to suffer through a game, and I know that victory can be all the sweeter because of what a struggle it was to get there.
There’s something particularly compelling to me about speedrunning when a game that I really care about comes back to life, like Super Mario Bros. did last year with the discovery of a viable–extremely difficult, but viable–way for human beings to pull off the flagpole glitch, allowing a fraction of a second to be shaved off of the existing world record.
I watched a speedrunner named darbian play for hours and hours, night after night in pursuit of a new world record. That meant playing through the entire game with incredible precision. One tiny mistake and he might as well reset. Sometimes he’d get very close, only for something to go wrong in the home stretch. It was a heartbreaking ordeal. at times. Even now, re-watching the world record run, I still get a little nervous as it approaches its conclusion, just like I did when watching it live.
At 4:49, darbian says, “Please, please, please-please-please,” which mirrored my own thoughts exactly. And when he finally got there, and his reaction was so joyous and so real, I shared in his jubilation.
That was a five-minute run. I never expected a five-second run to become just as captivating to me. But then Dragster came along.
Actually, Dragster’s been around for nearly my whole life. Released for the Atari 2600 by Activision in 1980, it’s a demanding, ruthless game that plays out in a matter of seconds. The goal is to propel the dragster to the end of the track as quickly as possible. Doing so requires shifting gears at just the right moments and using the clutch intermittently to prevent the engine from being pushed too hard. Push it too hard, and the engine gets BLOWN, which was the source of infinite double entendres in darbian’s chat while he aimed to become the first person on record to get a time of 5.57 on actual console hardware.
But let’s back up a second. Or, rather, .06 of a second. Isn’t the world record for Dragster 5.51? According to Twin Galaxies it is. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Todd Rogers’ 5.51 in Dragster is the longest-enduring video game world record in history.
Do you know why that is? Why nobody has been able to match it or beat it in all this time?
Because 5.51 is not possible. It literally can’t be done; the game is coded in such a way as to make that time unachievable. Omnigamer has figured this out and documented his research on YouTube. Here, he explains how research for a book he’s working on that covers the history of speedrunning brought him to Dragster in the first place, and how he determined that the 5.51 is impossible.
Todd Rogers, unsurprisingly, takes issue with Omnigamer’s methods and makes it sound as if Omni and others haven’t been exhaustive in their exploration of the game’s code and what the limits within it are. In a piece by Kotaku’s Heather Alexandra about the Dragster dispute, Rogers says, “If he’s basing his spreadsheets and his shifting on one particular pattern, then that’s pretty ignorant and closed-minded, because you’re not factoring in the human element of how the game would respond.”
The human element. Oh, what a joke that became in Twitch chats during Dragster runs. This magical notion that somehow, with a person’s hands on the joystick, things become possible that are otherwise impossible. It’s a nice idea, but that’s not what the human element actually is. At least I don’t think so.
Todd makes it sound like getting the mythical 5.51 was fairly simple. He has attributed the time to a straightforward trick: “[I] engage the clutch at the count down and rev up my engine in the red just before the count of zero. Once the timer reaches zero, I pop my clutch and I’m already in second gear.” Yeah, no. Even getting the 5.57 requires a series of near-frame-perfect inputs. Darbian spent hours and hours playing Dragster, night after night, ultimately racking up 50 5.61s (the next-best possible time) without getting a single 5.57 (which can be done, with tremendous skill and some significant luck), much less a 5.54 or a 5.51 (which can’t). Do you know how many Dragster attempts you can squeeze into two or three hours? A lot.
Fittingly, Omnigamer himself was the first person to get the 5.57, on an emulator. Darbian wanted to be the first to get it on console. Last night, finally, he did it.
That makes me feel alive. You want to know what the human element is in games? It’s in the look on darbian’s face as he played the game thousands of times, striving for the 5.57. It’s in the exultation you can see and hear when he finally gets it. It’s why I and so many other people watch Twitch. Because a game without a player is nothing, but a game with a player? Now that can really be something.
***
[This section has spoilers for the end of Destiny 2′s campaign.]
The human element is also often why I play games myself. Lately I’ve been looking for it in Destiny 2. Something, anything that seems real.
I know that Destiny 2 is a game you’re meant to play with others. You and your friends are supposed to bring your own humanity to the game, and I went about it all wrong by spending most of my time with the game alone. Fine. Take this as you will, then; if you’d like, take it as the thoughts of one player who played Destiny 2 wrong.
The truth is that I don’t like what Destiny 2 does to me. How it uses expertly crafted reward loops and presents all these manageable goals to keep me wanting to come back for more. This is cold, calculating stuff that’s designed to create an addictive experience, and in my book, that’s not a good thing. I don’t like how my mind drifts to the fact that if i just complete three public events on Nessus I’ll get some gear and maybe see my Star Wars action figure’s power level inch up a number or two. How I close my eyes and see Destiny 2 enemies dying in a shower of glimmer and ammo and engrams and think that if I just go play for another 15 minutes, I can reap the rewards myself.
In games like The Witcher 3, if I get a new sword or better armor, I’m grateful for it because of what it might enable me to do. The thing pulling me back is my love of the world and its people; my desire to spend more time with Yennefer, or to smell the salty air of Skellige. Destiny 2 and similar games flip this around. I don’t get better stuff so I can do the harder things. I do the harder things so I can get better stuff. And unlike games such as The Witcher 3 or Breath of the Wild, I never feel firmly rooted in Destiny’s places. I feel insulated, somehow. I know I’m not actually wearing Master Chief’s Mjolnir armor, but it sure feels like I am.
But oh man, what stuff Destiny has. It’s hard not to fetishize some of it, it’s all so strange and beautiful. I examined a friend yesterday who was wearing a helmet called the Crown of Tempests and the damn thing nearly took my breath away. I find myself coveting these things, these bizarre, nonexistent things, and I don’t like it.

I also object to the game’s hollow attempts at philosophizing. As I was making the introspective journey of the soul to get my kickass voidwalker subclass, a phantom of light spouted bullshit masquerading as wisdom. “You will fear nothing and nothing will not fear you,” he said. What a horrible way to think about life.
I know my character is “human,” or was, but now I’m something else, as lifeless as I am deathless. Sure, so many heroes in games say nothing. So many of them are blank slates onto which we are meant to project ourselves. But why is it that I feel like Link and Samus are defined by their actions, while my guardian is defined by whatever she’s wearing and whatever gun she’s holding in her hand?
Yet there was a fleeting moment toward the end when I felt that Destiny 2 came closer than it ever has to achieving the potential of this kind of multiplayer online shooter. At the start of the campaign’s climactic mission, I was surrounded by other players as we all pushed our way into the city. This was far more exciting than any public event I’d ever participated in. This had momentum. We were moving, making our way forward through enemy resistance. I felt like part of something much larger than myself.
Then, in the end, the Traveler actually does something. It responds. It fights back. The Traveler, which should be this transcendent, undefinable thing, this mysterious being of technology and spirituality, in the first game was nothing more than a matte painting, a convenient explanation for why you get to do space-magic and why you never die. Here, in the end, it acts.
After that battle, you return to the tower for the first time since the game’s beginning. But it’s different now. Plot events have taken place that have had an impact on the world. Change has actually happened, which, in Destiny, was surprising and remarkable to me. It ain’t much, but the new tower is so much better than the last. Yes, more human, for one thing. I love that it has a noodle shop where you can see people just sitting outside, enjoying their meals. There’s a warmth to the space, like a pleasant summer night. The Traveler looms much closer above, damaged from its part in the struggle. And below, the city is so much nearer, the illumination of its buildings stretching out beneath you.

Both above and below, you are closer to the light.
Notes
periodicperspectives liked this
crispyconundrum-blog liked this jmindigo liked this
bobfranklinhippyflower liked this
onthegreatsea liked this
benfelldown liked this
wojit liked this
mechattack liked this missingrache liked this
scowlowl liked this
carolynpetit posted this