My second post on Driver: San Francisco is up on PopMatters. I’m surprised the title made it through at all. Hell, I’m surprised I wasn’t told to write something else. I mentioned on twitter I was playing fast and loose with terminology and was told that is how you know you made it.
This piece spawned from the simple thought of how the game got around the problem of breaking my immersion by taking innocent civilians in their cars and smashing them into oncoming traffic. As Yahtzee put it “Protect and Serve ladies and gentlemen.” The rest came out of how to fame this thought and how to stretch it out into an 1000 – 1200 word post. Out of that came the bizarre post of conceptualizing the process of the game’s dynamics in the player’s mental state during play. I had no idea where it was going until I had arrived which I think is how most good theory work is written. That and written right before the deadline.
In all seriousness, go check out the piece and then find a copy of the game and play it. I am really pushing this as an overlooked gem of 2011.