I know how to be a car better than I know how to be a person.
I know exactly how I move when I’m a car. I’m extremely aware of the geometry of every surface that make up the world that I inhabit. I know how to maximize every degree of turn, every drop of fuel, to move quickly and powerfully through space.
As a person, I’m not uncoordinated, but I don’t really have an understanding of the exact physical limits of my body. I wouldn’t, if I saw a ball falling a few feet away, know exactly how long it would take me to get there, or know if I would catch it before it hit the ground.
When I’m a car, that spatial knowledge isn’t even a thought. I just know it, and I know what I’m supposed to do as a result.
The fact that none of it is “real”—that the world that I’m moving through is stored on servers and in data, and that my only means of influencing it are buttons on a keyboard—doesn’t matter.
Rocket League is a game where you’re a car, and you play soccer in teams of one to three players. Your car isn’t close to realistic: “boost pads” throughout the field give players the power to jump into the air and fly, retaining three-dimensional control of movement as they do. This is the kind of car that I know how to be.
I have played Rocket League for around 2,500 hours over nearly eight years. I’ve reached high into the game’s ranked ladder, competing with the elite 1% of players who choose to dedicate countless hours to it. I’ve been paid to teach kids to play this game better. I’ve spent two years on a varsity college team.
I’m far (very far) from a professional player, but I have spent a long, long time playing. I’ve spent more time playing Rocket League than I’ve spent in every class so far in college! I’ve been in college for two years, call it 80 weeks to be generous—at 20 hours of class a week (also generous), that gives 1,600 hours as an upper bound, well below my time in Rocket League.
I’m probably done now, and I doubt I’ll ever play it competitively again. I’m transferring colleges in the fall, and without a team to play for, the effort of keeping the skill honed isn’t worth it. Besides, I don’t have a gaming PC of my own; I’ve been using the equipment the college gives the esports players.
It’s a weird feeling. I’ve played Rocket League longer than I’ve known all but one of my friends. I’ve played Rocket League since well before I transitioned. The name I use online, sunshine, was a Rocket League handle before anything else. It was my first job, my primary extracurricular.
And it’s wired into my brain at the same fundamental level as things like walking.
In high level Rocket League gameplay, by the time you have consciously thought about a decision, the window of opportunity for it has often passed. When it’s time to act, you need to be able to act prior to thought.
The only way to be good at this game is to burn it into muscle and synapse. You’re not thinking about the keys you’re pressing on a keyboard (or sticks on a controller); to even try to think about that is disorienting. How do you position your toes to maintain balance while you walk? It’s a non-question: you don’t (consciously) position your toes, and if you thought about it too hard you might trip over yourself.
The controls of this game are beautifully simple, especially in the air: there are six keys (when playing on keyboard, as I do) that correspond to movement, in both directions, around the three axes of freedom that your car is allowed: pitch, roll, and yaw, not unlike an airplane.
A skilled player can throw themselves at the ball and find any angle to score. A drill that new players are often given is to throw themselves into the air, turn wildly in some random direction, then try to land on their wheels. At first, navigating the complex three-dimensional space is impossible. Landing on your wheels feels inconceivable; how could you know how much to turn in each direction? Eventually, through trial and error, you learn, and you can do it when you focus. Once you’re a few thousand hours into the game, you’ll never not land on your wheels—it’s not even a process, it just happens, entirely without conscious thought.
My point here is that the process of Brain -> Fingers -> Car gets simplified. You stop moving your fingers in order to move the car and just start moving the car, without thought to the mechanism—just the same as you would move yourself, without thinking about which muscle groups to activate to push in a chair and stand up. The fingers fade away, and your brain is simply controlling the car. Brain -> Car. Direct. Instant.
If you drive a real, physical car, you’re already familiar with what I’m talking about — your conception of self, over time, extends to include the body of the car you drive, and you become familiar with the unique ways to sense (using mirrors) and act (using the steering wheel and pedals). In Rocket League, though, this is taken to the extreme—when you drive a car you’re mostly doing the same simple, restrained actions over and over again, while in Rocket League, you’re constantly pressured to push yourself to, and through, the limits of your abilities, becoming more and more capable in the body through that pressure, coming to understand it better, and better, and better.
If you know how to touch type, if you’ve obtained mastery of a keyboard such that the tool becomes an extension of your will, you know what I mean here, too. Brain -> Keyboard -> Words becomes Brain -> Words.
Sure, you could think about your fingers—but if you’re practiced, you don’t. It goes the other way, too. Think about the buzzing of your phone—after years of owning one, you probably don’t feel a notification as “a buzz against your leg”, or at least that’s not how you process it. You process it as “there is something on my phone”, and the mechanism of that information’s delivery isn’t the point. All the acts of controlling a phone, too, become subconscious.
All kinds of tool use have this effect to some extent or another—I think that competitive tool use does it the most, though, because by nature of competition you’re incentivized to identify yourself as deeply with the tool as you can. The more you do it, the better you get at it, and eventually, well—
I started this essay by saying I know how to be a car, and that is what it feels like. My brain knows what signals it needs to output to control this body of digital metal, and knows how to interpret what comes back. When that’s happening, the body in between ceases to mean anything.
In Livewired: The Amazing Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman makes a case that neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change its own workings—is a core part of how the brain functions. The brain, he argues, uses experience to turn nonsense electrical signals into, eventually, something meaningful.
One of the consequences of this argument is that, if systems are designed with this in mind, they can cause the brain to learn any sort of process—ways of sensing and acting can be externally designed and attached to the body, and the brain will learn, through experience, how to use them.
One example is the cochlear implant, a way of giving a sense of hearing to people with damaged inner ears. The inner ear is the biological system that turns sound waves into electrical signals for the nerves; when it’s nonfunctional, hearing aids, which simply amplify existing sound, won’t do anything to help. The cochlear implant bypasses the inner ear, turning sound directly into electrical signals and passing those signals to the brain.
The brain then needs to learn to interpret these signals—which are different from the ones produced by a functioning inner ear—as sound. Which it can! Despite the difference in protocol, because the brain is constantly being given data along with contextual clues about what the sounds “should be”, it can eventually learn to interpret sounds quite well.
A similar procedure has been tested with vision, passing electrical signals directly to the optic nerve when retinal cells died, and it was able to find similar success, with the quality of the artificial “sense” gradually improving as the brain became more and more used to the new kind of signal—as it rewired itself in response to it (a change whose impacts can be seen in brain scans!).
But this—Eagleman thinks—isn’t limited to the pre-existing senses of humans. After all, other animals have brains that are, in many ways, similar to ours, but support different senses. The brain, in Eagleman’s view, “sucks up the available signals and determines—nearly optimally—what it can do with them. And that strategy […] frees up Mother Nature to tinker around with different sorts of input channels.”
Senses, Eagleman argues, are like “plug-and-play” peripherals for a computer. “The importance of the designation ‘plug-and-play’,” he writes, “is that your computer does not have to know about the existence of the XJ-3000 SuperWebCam that will be invented several years from now; instead, it needs only to be open to interfacing with an unknown, arbitrary device and receiving streams of data when the new device gets plugged in. As a result, you do not need to buy a new computer each time a new peripheral hits the market.” Returning to the idea of brains, he describes a few of the vast array of senses that exist throughout the animal kingdom, asking us: “To accommodate such varied peripherals, does the brain have to be redesigned each time? I suggest not. In evolutionary time, random mutations introduce strange new sensors, and the recipient brains simply figure out how to exploit them.”
This is not purely hypothetical. In the last few decades, experiments have advanced regarding “sensory substitution”, or passing information to the brain through different sensory input methods than originally “intended”. For example, blind people gained a vision-like sense when they were equipped with a camera that controlled a grid of small points that could be pressed into their back, corresponding to what the camera saw.
Gradually, the brain got better and better at interpreting this strange new sense, and participants reported feeling as though the objects sensed through this back-poking mechanism were “out there“ rather than on the skin of their back—just like sighted people see objects in the world “out there”, not on the retinas of their eyes.
Eventually, a more portable system for a vision-like sense, called the BrainPort, was developed, connecting to electrode stimulation on the tongue instead of the back—because the tongue has many touch receptors, it’s able to take in a great deal of information—and though the sensory information coming in felt like nonsense at first, participants’ brains quickly became able to decode and use it, just like how anyone uses any sense. Prosthetic limbs have begun to use similar principles to return feeling to limbs, even when those limbs are completely artificial.
But this information-processing capacity goes beyond restoring sense experience to people who have lost it — it can also add new kinds of sense experience.
A colorblind artist built a color -> sound device, and not only can he use it to perceive all the normal colors, he has access to ultraviolets and infrareds too.
A photo of Neil Harbisson, the colorblind artist who hears color through technology. A biohacker implanted a magnet under the skin of his finger; now he feels magnetic fields.
Scientists designed a belt that buzzes in the direction of north, and people gained a new sense of space and their orientation improved significantly without them even thinking about it.
All of this, of course, is a bi-directional process; just as the brain can learn new ways of sensing, it can also learn new ways of acting on the world. People can learn to operate bicycles that have been modified to invert their steering, or learn to move a mouse cursor with their minds, or any number of other things which are detailed in Livewired (as well as practically every science journal for the last fifteen years).
Is it any surprise, then, that I say that I know how to be a car? As a result of Rocket League’s deeply physical nature and the thousands of hours I’ve spent learning it, and the audiovisual information that the game returns instantly whenever I make an action, I’ve deeply internalized the spatial and strategic world of this game.
At times it feels like my decision making is guided by my emotions. I feel nervous when I’m the last player back on defense, so I’m afraid to commit to a play and I play safer—the correct response, often. I feel urgency when I’m supposed to challenge the ball. I feel fear when I know that there’s an opponent trying to bump me off course—and I don’t even know why I know that they’re there some of the time!
After a few thousand hours of Rocket League, you start to feel the field. There are six cars on the field in a 3v3 match. I know (roughly) where all of them are when I’m playing, even if I can’t see or hear them, because I know how players tend to move, and I extrapolate from what I’ve seen and heard of each player most recently. This is, again, not a conscious action; it’s a sense, but not one I have any kind of word for. It’s not one of my five senses, even if it’s necessarily constituted from information that passed through them. It’s like the BrainPort—sure, the information is coming through an existing sense, but it’s giving you a kind of knowledge and awareness that transcends it.
I’d imagine most games have something like this that you experience when you do them for thousands of hours. I’m sure physical sports do, as your awareness starts to shift and be transformed by the demands of the game. I expect many other video games do as well, though most other games don’t have the same degree of physicality as Rocket League does.
I wonder about strategy games. When I play Go I often make moves that feel good. I’m an amateur player, but is that feeling good the beginning of what, if I trained it, would become a sense of interpreting the intersections and vast strategic space of a Go board? Do grandmaster chess players have a fundamentally different physical understanding of that 8×8 grid, their senses narrowing and transforming into a spatial analytical mode? In light of Livewired, I can’t help but imagine they do.
The way I use the word “sense” here is a little unorthodox. After all, is it really a new sense, if all of the information is being passed along already extant pathways? What’s the difference between “sense” and “rapid unconscious information processing?”
But return your attention to the blind person with a camera and electrodes on their tongue to create a vision-like sense. Most people would intuitively call something like this a new sense, even though all it’s doing is exploiting existing pathways into the brain — the reason it’s a new sense is that it’s a new way of obtaining and processing information, a new processing structure being created and used.
But then, what difference in kind is there between that kind of sense, and the “game sense” that all kinds of athletes talk about developing after thousands of hours on the field/pitch/court? It’s a new way of obtaining information through existing pathways—sure, there’s not an external device involved, but you could argue that the rules and constraints of the game constitute an external device in and of themselves, a new way of framing existing sensations — tingles on your tongue can come to be something like vision, and patterns of momentum and space can come to be aggressive or defensive or weak or strong—it’s creating meaning where there wasn’t any before, coming to recognize what was previously just as invisible as an object behind glass to a blind person.
All of this becomes even more true, I think, in games like Rocket League where you’re literally embodied differently — I expect there’s a very similar experience in physical racing sports like NASCAR or Formula 1, where the limits of “you” are extended, and you’re expected to push your new self to the absolute limit of its capabilities in pursuit of victory. Though, in racing sports the needs and demands of the human body are extremely relevant, whereas in Rocket League, like I’ve mentioned, the body becomes a distraction, or, in the ideal case, disappears entirely from focus.
When I play Rocket League, I am a car, and I have senses in the way that a car does, which in this game means that I have an understanding of momentum, boost, and movement, and all of the capabilities that those things grant me and my opponents alike. The information is transmitted to me through “normal” senses, but the nature of the information is different, because it’s about the different kind of body that I have learned how to control, that of a Rocket League car.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this account of senses would mean that any kind of complex tool use, mastery of a unique skill, comes to constitute a new kind of sense, a new way of sensing. Which might seem out there, but with my experience of Rocket League, it makes as much sense—hah—as anything.
Even things outside the realm of traditional sports are perhaps subject to this reframing of sense and action — think about bicycling, or skiing, or really any sort of activity where your physical form gets extended or reframed in a new kind of context, and, I contend, there’s a new kind of sense experience found there.
Science fiction has long been obsessed with ideas of the cyborg, an imagination of some future—but our senses are already reshaped by technology, integrated deeply into all of our lives. We are all already cyborgs, and if (when) technology augments that further, it won’t feel weird, or magical—it’ll feel natural.
It’ll blend into our existing sense experience, just as easily as being a car does for me.
(this post originally published May 6, 2024)
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