Playing As A Spectator: The Definitive Review
Trackside not Backside
Earlier, back in May, I had the pleasure of fulfilling a dream. Now this might seem somewhat niche, but I went with a few Industry friends1 to the wonderful Spa-Francorchamps race circuit in Belgium. I adore the racetrack after many, many years of watching motorsport and driving the circuit across plenty of racing games. We were there independently of our respective employment to watch the WEC six-hour race, a stupendous dose of motorsport that sees extreme high-end prototype machinery share the track with heavily modified road-going sportscars in a race that takes, yes, six hours to complete. A race of that length may seem like a serious undertaking on a par with watching cricket or some arduous golf tournament, but what it brings is a unique kind of leisure to the whole affair. As a spectator on the ground, the experience of both the race and the track is very different to watching the TV coverage. And even though the TV version offers you the better experience in terms of following the action, it lacks a certain atmosphere but more critically, a sense of place. And it’s in the long-distance endurance races that a spectator can really grasp where they are. You have the time to walk an entire lap of the circuit and in doing so, get to see the action from viewpoints, angles and distances that the TV cameras cannot ever convey.
Spa has a legendarily famous curve that starts at the bottom of a steep hill and twists as it climbs to the brow. On TV, Eau Rouge can be understood in its steepness and gradient with two cameras, but when you see it for yourself from a multiplicity of viewpoints across a range of angles and heights, it takes on a multidimensional quality. You feel the twist as much as you see it, and can sense the shifting masses as cars fly up it. In the flesh, it has a vertiginous quality and if you stand in the right points, you can see far more of the circuit in the distance than the TV coverage would suggest is visible, all within the gaze of your widescreen human vision. To be there is to really see it as the geography it is instead of the geometry that the camera reduces it to, and despite my many years of drilling Spa in racing games as a certified top-three favourite track, my experience of it from the trackside was not only so new as to be almost revelatory, it granted a deeper and richer appreciation of what you see from the cockpit.2 It comes from seeing the track from completely new angles, but also from viewing the track at human scale. There’s something in the view from the eyeline, from feeling the size of the vehicles and the tarmac and kerbstones that makes the whole experience richly intense.3
While my laps of Spa in Gran Turismo 7 now have an extra sense of geographical richness, what I really felt a strong tug for was the nature of spectating in the virtual realm. I often find it quite hard to watch online simracing streams for any length of time, and I think this is down to the way in which those streams are displayed - all too often it’s just in-car or a chase cam of the vehicle’s backside. You might get some virtual trackside camera action, as per replays and the like, but the sense of artifice-upon-artifice that this promotes ultimately has an alienating effect on me. What I realised in thinking about the richer, broader understanding of Spa that I gained was that racing sims, and even videogames in general, lack the quality of the trackside spectator. Namely, the idea of watching the action while inhabiting the environment. It immediately made me leap to the idea of trackside spectating as a social activity; to be in the same place as the race, rather than detached from it. I wondered if it would be fun to join with my Spa friends to watch the highest-level virtual drivers compete, only with the added functionality that we can wander a fully-modelled trackside as the race is fought. As a party, I think it would be a fantastic way to hang out.4
As I look forward to this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, otherwise known as the fucking greatest motor race there is (and the real reason I chose this topic for this week), I feel almost cheated that there isn’t a virtual trackside version that I can go and inhabit with my motorsport fan pals. I’ve sat on the inside of Le Mans’ most famous corners and watched brake discs glow red hot as the sun sets, and stood on the outside of them as the sun rose to reveal the grime and damage that 18+ hours of flat-out racing does to a car. I’ve probably done more than 24 hours in laps of the circuit de la Sarthe over the decades (and multiple racing games), but as with Spa, the in-car, on-track view misses some fundamental beauty of the place as it really is. What’s more, the track absolutely deserves to be modelled as the full environment that the racing is embedded in, and that all deserves to be explorable as a real, tangible place.5 The same goes for Spa, which is a lovely walk in the forest for stretches of its trackside, or the natural bowl of Brands Hatch. The brutally minimalist and relatively flat surrounds of SIlverstone may not have the same aesthetic appeal, but you stop caring about that when you’re centimetres from the cars going flat-out in top gear - and I suspect a virtual version would be just as much fun to witness.
On my two visits to Le Mans, I took a terrible DSLR camera and pretty decent telephoto lens6 and set about photographing as much as I could. I was obsessed with motorsport photography for a brief time and while that did bizarrely earn me some money, I love a dalliance with photomodes up to the current day.7 Yet with virtual racing, having access to a modern camera mode with full replay controls makes the whole thing almost too easy. When you’re trackside, you have to be in the hunt, so to speak. The car, the lighting, the angle, the speed - all these are transitory in real life. There is no rewind, no pause, no free-look to go wandering for optimal viewpoints. And with that brutal restriction comes a spectacular reward when you capture a favourite car at its most dramatic and beautiful. Given that Dead Rising’s photomode debuted twenty fucking years ago, it strikes me as a tragedy that Gran Turismo and the like haven’t bothered to implement a scoring system for in-race photomodes.8 Given trackside modelling and in-situ virtual spectating, a score-based virtual photography option would be absolutely glorious, especially when watching, for example, the highest ranking players battling it out at Le Mans in vintage Group C machinery. This seems to me a perfectly natural expansion of the racing game where the multiplayer makes demands on talent and time that I, and I suspect many players, simply do not have.
To naturalise, complexify and expand the spectating experience isn’t solely worth exploring for racing games. I can think of how it could apply to other genres, particularly PvP FPS. Again, I can also see score-based photomodes working in much the same context as a virtual race. It can extend beyond the extraction shooters, Counterstrike or Warzone and off into just about anything, given the will and the vision to do so. The idea of placing viewers within the environment would seem a generational leap from the status quo for all sorts of spectator videogame streaming. In my most relaxed states, I can easily drift into imagining a Danmaku shmup that plays in trad 2D, but has a spectator mode in full 3D, only at the individual bullet scale. You get to see expert players dodge and weave through the barrage curtains from utterly thrilling viewpoints and perspectives. AND TAKE PHOTOS OF IT.9 Likewise, watch a Soulsborne boss battle from dramatic viewpoints or a fighting game as one of the NPCs in the background. I’ll leave you with this; when it comes to the dread inevitabilities of GTA 6 Online, would you really enjoy duking it out on the ground with the adolescents and adolescently-minded going at full force to be as antisocial as possible? Or would it be more fun to be an immortal news cameraman on an invulnerable helicopter trying to capture the mayhem for livestream viewers? This old man knows which he’d choose, and maybe it’s that breath of fresh air that could get us all placing more value in the role of the gamified spectator. After all, there’s always so much we could be watching, and we really shouldn’t settle for the same old viewpoints.
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Shout out to Martin, Mike and Luke!
In a fit of utter dishonesty, I chose 'cockpit' because it places the reader in the car rather than the viewpoint that I actually use in every racing game ever - the objectively superior front bonnet cam. Yes, with the dials overlaid and everything. It’s so wooshy, you know? It makes you form a closer union with the vehicle and I’ll quote the greatest wisdom I ever heard when it comes to sim racing: “use the high, become the car”.
As with every race track I've ever visited, I was amazed at how some of the spectator viewpoints at Spa put you so close to the track that you could touch the cars as they pass. There's a unique intimacy that comes from those spots that the camera or even a virtualised free-roam ghost view can't adequately capture.
I did wonder how this may be technically possible with two classes of server - one to run the race, which streams the race data to a spectator server that holds just the spectator players. I'm 100% convinced this is both possible and really fucking easy to do, even though I have no credentials whatsoever for making that estimation.
This is most ably demonstrated in Hitman's superb Miami level, which has all the innards and backroom environments of a real race track. It's almost a shame that you can't drive the street track yourself, but Miami certainly gives you the sense of what could be possible as a virtual social space for spectating racing games. Think PlayStation Home with a shared common passion and a point to spending time there.
Yes, yes, Canon L-series, as it goes. Once I was able to borrow a fucking amazing image-stabilised one with an extender on top. I got decent shots of every car from the first hour and the same in the last hour. Utter pornographic filth if you like battered and scarred race cars. Of course, I now have no idea where the fuck those pics are as I lost the SD card in one of many drawers brimming with clutter that I maintain (and frequently add to).
Eventually, I will publish my 500-page photo-essay of Starfield’s NASA-porn wall textures.
I'm really not joking when I say the Dead Rising PP/photomode system should be in the BIOS of every console alongside things like UNIVERSAL Y-AXIS INVERTS, custom soundtracks, a full M.A.M.E. install and hardware-level cutscene skipping/sending letters of complaint to developers.
I mean, after R-Type Dimensions, can’t we have some kind of grandiose spectator mode for R-Type Final 3? I’d settle for a cockpit view of a Leos Klein doing an R-Typer difficulty run.