Nondescript: Forza Horizon 2’s World of White Dudes

I’m enjoying Forza Horizon 2, but it hasn’t gotten under my skin the way the first game in the series did. When I ask myself why, there are a few things I come up with. One is the setting. The first game is set in a fictional region of Colorado, but although its locale wasn’t real, it felt like America to me, conjuring memories of the landscapes I’d watch pass by in the window on so many childhood road trips. To me, by comparison, Horizon 2’s European setting feels bland, lacking in character. But it’s entirely possible that, to people who have a connection to the real places that inspired this game’s regions, it taps into something the way the first game did for me. 

Another thing is the music. I pretty much had my car’s radio tuned to Horizon Pulse all the time…

…and while I’m not going to argue that the songs on the station are actually good, I do think they’re good for driving to. They’re energetic, propulsive pop songs that you can’t ignore; they become part of the moment and they feel like they’re driving the car right along with you. Horizon 2’s tunes are generally a bit more ambient, a little less in-your-face, and they just don’t move me the way the first game’s songs did.

And speaking of being less in-your-face, this is also the problem I have with the game’s story. The first game’s story was much-criticized, and it certainly wasn’t great, but at least it had personalities in it that I could latch on to, a series of rival racers with big egos who I could delight in taking down. Your nameless, wordless character, who I referred to only as “nondescript white dude,” was as close to being a non-presence as possible.  

Or at least I thought so. In Forza Horizon 2, the non-presence of your character is itself a conspicuous presence, a huge looming emptiness at the game’s center. This is because there’s nothing to distract from it. There are a few characters–the woman who runs the garage and some British guy who acts as your guide and congratulates you when you win–but the game has done away with the rival racer characters of the first Horizon. Instead, every other racer is a so-called drivatar, a driver whose behavior is supposedly modeled on the behavior of an actual human player of the game, with each AI racer bearing another person’s gamertag. Typically many of your opponents in a race will be your friends' drivatars, and you’ll often see them just cruising around the game’s world, too.

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Yes, of course the “real stars” of Horizon 2 are the cars. That all happen to be driven by white dudes.

But while it’s fun for a bit to pretend that I’m actually leaving Sophia in the dust during a race, or to laugh at Kevin as I see his drivatar careening off the road and cutting across an open field, I know that it’s not really them, that if I were actually racing against my friends, there’s no way I’d come in first in every race. But I do come in first, because I’m the human player, and so as long as I drive reasonably well, I’m supposed to win. So while the tradeoff from AI racers with different character models and personalities to drivatars may have been meant to give this game more personality than its predecessor by populating the world with your friends, I know they’re not really my friends, so for me, it’s a loss.

Your character, the nameless, nondescript white dude, is supposed to be someone we can all just project ourselves onto. He is specifically designed to have as little character as possible. That is why he’s a white dude. If the character were Asian, for instance, or a woman, then he or she would no longer be so nondescript. These become character traits, in a way that the character is seen to be completely lacking as a white dude, because white dude is the default. White dude is the “standard” human. White dude is “normal.” The experiences of a white character are seen as potentially universal experiences that any player should be able to inhabit. A female character’s experiences are seen as gendered. There is also a perception that a character who is not white may feel less inhabitable to some players, in the way that a character who is white is understood not to. 

This isn’t just a phenomenon that’s present in video games. The elevating, universalizing perception of white male experience is present in films. As Imran Siddiquee said in a recent TEDxSCS talk on film: 

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 and as he wrote in his piece for The Atlantic on the film Boyhood, entitled “Not Everyone’s Boyhood,” “as long as society continues to present lives like Mason’s as what’s normal, the childhood of people of color, like Michael Brown, will be seen as variant—as other. To be centered is not merely normalizing—it’s elevating.

It’s true in literature. As lesbian writer Sarah Schulman wrote in the preface for the 1999 edition of her novel Girls, Visions and Everything, “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." 

And it’s certainly true in video games, where white men dominate as playable characters. Of course, you could argue that in Forza Horizon 2, you don’t really play as a person at all, that you’re meant to identify most directly with whatever car you’re controlling at the moment, to feel it grip the road and come speeding out of turns. But to me, that just makes the bland white-dude-ness of Horizon 2’s playable character a little more insidious. Would some players really feel less able to inhabit the driving experience if their stand-in in the game’s world was a black woman? Yes, they probably would. And that’s something that I wish more games challenged, rather than accepted and replicated and perpetuated. 

And here’s the scary and surreal thing to me about Forza Horizon 2: EVERYONE is a bland white dude. You are one bland white dude. Everyone else are white dudes who are slightly different from your white dude but identical to all the other non-player character white dudes.

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The driver of the Cadillac SUV

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The driver of the Pagani

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The driver of the Lancia

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And "me” exuding so much personality (I have stubble!) driving the sweet 1981 BMW in the background

In the game’s photo mode, I was able to get a closer look at the other drivers, and whether I was looking at the car ostensibly being driven by Kevin or Chris or Sophia or anyone, they all had the same chillingly blank-faced guy sitting behind the wheel. Not only do they look as nondescript as possible; they don’t even appear to be feeling anything! Heck, they don’t even appear to be capable of feeling anything! They look like soulless husks! And frankly, the NPC drivers look stoned. They’re in no condition to be driving!

It’s a world full of people we’re all meant to be able to relate to without any problems because they’re all exactly the same. They’re all person-as-default. They’re all white dudes.

We all play games as white dudes all the time anyway. Now we’re all playing the same game, occupying each other’s worlds, as the same white dude. This is, in video game terms, the issue of the universalizing of white male experience taken to its extreme, an extreme that is at once absurdly humorous and kind of terrifying.