Racing sims are manna from heaven for control freaks! We’ve all been there, braking two meters too late and blowing the corner. Or ending up with the rear end trying to overtake the front after getting a bit too greedy with the throttle.
Spend enough time in Gran Turismo 7 or Forza Motorsport, and you start obsessing over the things normal gamers never really have to think about. From tire temperatures to brake bias, fuel loads to whether that tenth of a second disappeared somewhere around Turn 4, there’s always another mistake to iron out.
Which makes it all so wonderfully ironic that our biggest racing games are just as happy to take all that control away from us the second we climb out of the driver’s seat.
Hang On, Haven’t We Seen This Somewhere Before?
You’ve noticed it too, right? Whether it’s Super Wheelspins in Forza Horizon 5 or those Roulette Tickets in GT7, you can spend a good portion of the game driving beautifully and completing every challenge thrown at you, only to watch a wheel decide whether you’re getting a shiny new ride or something a whole lot less exciting.
What’s especially interesting about this love affair with randomness, though, is that its visual language has come straight from another arm of online gaming. Take racing out of the equation for a moment, and what remains? Spinning wheels, prizes flashing past, that agonizing pause when it looks like you’ve landed the top reward, but you don't know for sure yet…
Casino games have been doing this forever. And now that so much casino gaming happens online, it’s easy to see how these “vintage” ideas have been translated into digital form.
Open up a modern casino platform like mBit, and you’ll find all sorts of variations on that basic recipe: spinning reels, roulette wheels, live tables, and other games built around waiting to see what happens next.
Now, we’re not saying that GT7’s spinning wheels are a direct replication of the RNG-driven roulette and slots games available to play at mBitcasino—or any online casino platform—but put them beside each other and the family resemblance is impossible to miss.
Watch either unfold, and there’s that same temporary loss of control. Once you’ve hit play, all you can do is wait for the reveal to unfold.
Of course, play an actual roulette or slot title online, and randomness is the game. You place a wager, and the wheel or spinning reels decide what happens next. Take your shot in GT7 or Forza, and the randomness arrives afterward, since you’ve already done your Daily Workout or whatever challenge got you the ticket in the first place.
So, maybe it’s not so much that your ride-or-die racing sim has borrowed the entire concept, but it’s certainly nicked the reveal, and for good reason: we love this kind of anticipation, and it heightens the fun of the game dramatically!
Skills Get You There, Chance Takes Control
On closer inspection, Wheelspins and their ilk look a lot less like quirky extras and a lot more like very deliberate pieces of game design. Which is still pretty bold, when you think about it.
The central premise of any racing sim worth its salt is that improvement counts. Learn the circuit, understand the car, then drive better than you did last time. Rinse and repeat.
Even when the physics are forgiving, racing still sells us the idea that the outcome is largely within our control.
Then along comes one of those random elements and suddenly, all your painstaking mastery is irrelevant. You can’t tune your suspension to land your dream ride under the pointer. Once that wheel starts moving, you’re reduced from a digital driver who’s clocked in the hours to somebody sitting there muttering “come on, come on…” while somewhere within the code, an algorithm gets the final say.
And, apparently, we love it.
Regardless of the franchise, randomized rewards crop up through leveling, Car Mastery, Menu Books, campaigns, and countless other progression systems. But we can’t help asking: why does a genre that spends so much time rewarding our skill keep making room for something we simply cannot get better at?
Virtual Racing Needs Something You Can’t Master
When you think about it, the actual act of playing racing games is a bit of a paradox. It’s common enough knowledge that predictability can be a death sentence in gaming. However, the better you get at steering your chosen lump of virtual metal around a circuit, the more predictable these games become.
While that’s obviously intentional design—what, you mean you want that corner that chucks you into the barrier to keep doing it?—some of the intrigue and uncertainty that comes with doing something completely out of the ordinary inevitably disappears from the experience.
Reward drops are one way of injecting that unpredictability back in.
Review your play, and you can pinpoint the exact moment that landed you in third instead of first. You know where you lost the lap time. Load the game up again, and within minutes you can probably fix both.
What you don’t know, though, is whether the game will hand you a dream upgrade or some deeply underwhelming spare parts. And, after spending an entire race removing every last scrap of unpredictability from the experience, having absolutely no control over what happens next might just be fun!