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The Liminal Beauty of American Truck Simulator

American Truck Simulator is a wonderful game because it makes you sit in traffic.

It’s a mundane video game to the point of borderline absurdity: all you do is drive a truck from town to town performing delivery jobs. You have to stop and sleep at rest stops, you have to stop and fill up your gas tank, and yes, you have to stop and wait for traffic to clear up. Outside of the driving simulator niche, it’s known for semi-ironic videos and streams of people playing trucker characters and laughing off crashes and traffic violation charges. But if you want to play it long-term, you have to start obeying the law. You have to start being careful. You have to start slowing down and, dare I say, take it seriously.

I didn’t think I would be able to do that. My tastes and preferences for gaming are pretty defined and clear: I like games with distinct art styles, games with a focus on story or characters, succinct games that I can finish and roll credits on. This lends itself to cinematic blockbuster games and precision platformers with deceptively simple gameplay and popping visual design. Truck Simulator, on the other hand, is a fairly drab game with a steep learning curve and an indefinite gameplay loop. It has no ending, let alone a story, and you play as a disembodied ghost behind a steering wheel. Being a truck driver isn’t even one of my “simple life” fantasies, given my dislike for driving.

So why have I loved it? For one thing, my dislike of driving might make the gameplay more novel for me than it does for most people. I was the kid who stopped for red lights when playing the Transformers Movie Game for PS3. It’s relaxing and simple without being mind numbing. The inherent goofiness of the game makes me chuckle as well, with my fun ram paint job showing up in every picture I take on the road.

But it goes deeper than that. I love the liminal world this game revels in. Driving by a burger joint at 1AM to fill my gas tank, seeing American cities through their backwoods construction zones and logistics companies. The world isn’t dead, in fact it’s quite alive: driving through the still of night and passing other trucks, then looking up and seeing the big dipper in the sky. Pulling into town a bit later at night, and the only activity is a group of local skaters jumping off a halfpipe. The next day, I pass by a cop that’s pulled over a driver. The next day, I stop by a bigfoot tourist shop crawling with customers.

This is why waiting in traffic elevates Truck Simulator. Here’s the core of why, I think, I love this game: the simulator genre often revolves around making you feel like a king of your own little world. Strategy sims often take this literally, like Crusader Kings or Sid Meier’s Civilization. But in most other strategy games, you still have complete control of your domain, and you strive to become the biggest and most successful farm or zoo or city or whatever. Conquering. Growing. Tinkering. This is the bread and butter of the sim. I get it, and I often like it! Civilization kicks ass! I loved Rollercoaster Tycoon as a kid! But there’s something refreshing about a sim that places you in a much bigger world.

Sure, you can grow your business in Truck Simulator. You can buy out garages, assemble a fleet of trucks, and hire other drivers. But that all just makes the numbers go up faster. The core gameplay is always just you and the open road. And it’s not always open: construction throws off your route, exits close entirely, and traffic jams lead to sitting at red lights or on highways right outside of the city you need to get into.

Let’s say you’re running low on time and you’re almost to the drop-off spot for your job. The back roads are winding, and the other cars are moving slowly, and the lights are always red. It can be frustrating, it can stoke your impatience. But this is not a challenge to overcome. This is not a puzzle to solve. This is not a door to revisit later when you get your ice beam. The intention in the game’s design is that you just have to wait. Growth will not allow you to control traffic, you just have to allow for that time in your trip, you have to budget your hours and your resources for the inevitable forces outside of your control. Truck Simulator routinely makes you feel small. And in doing so, it makes its world feel big. There are other lives all around you, with their own desires that might conflict with yours. You are not more important than they are.

I am not The King of the Trucks. I am just one guy, in a world full of guys, doing my job. And in doing so, I share the roads with everyone else, catching glimpses of their world as I drift from town to town, taking pictures of landmarks, happily operating in the background of someone else’s story. It’s not just calming, it’s not just goofy, it’s beautiful. 

Not visually, though, the graphics kinda suck.

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friends

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snoopy of the day

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snoopy of the day

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In case anyone is skeptical of my claim that putting on jackets in a crucial element of Peanuts strips, these are just a few recent examples from the late 50s

Also a subversion!

How sad, kicked out and he didn’t even get his classic jacket panel

This Peanuts strip is fantastic because it has the two most critical components of good Peanuts content: an underlying sadness, and Charlie Brown putting a jacket on.

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Texting my wife about minor inconveniences at work

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Review: Peanuts Every Sunday, Vol. 2 (1956-1960)

In my last Sundays review, I said that the star of the show was Lucy Van Pelt. This time around, things have changed. The power has shifted. There’s a new Sheriff in town. His name? Linus Van Pelt.

One of the best running gags in this collection is Linus as an outfielder, going to extreme lengths to catch the ball. It’s a repeated masterclass in Schulz’s command of structure and pacing.

In classic Peanuts fashion, these strips feature a simple core gag but are elevated by small touches: in the top left, Linus spends several panels idly picking at the grass before jumping into action. In the top right, I love the casual way with which he catches and throws, and how slowly his movements develop. In the bottom left, “I beg your pardon” and “Thank you, girls” are the funniest possible things to say as he enters and exits the pool, not to mention the little way he sticks his tongue out as he takes his shoes off (and I think even flexes his toes?). And In the bottom right, I mean, come on, look at how small he is in that title panel!

I’m excited to see Linus begin to shed his blanket. It made for good baby gags, but he’s such a more interesting character when it comes and goes. Alongside the above scenes, he also has a series of battles with Snoopy over the blanket. He’s multi-dimensional!

It’s hard to stop gushing about this collection, which really feels like it captures the strip hitting its stride. There’s melancholy, there’s laughs, there’s sincere character development. Sally Brown shows up! Snoopy lays on top of the dog house for the first time, and his head is starting to get more recognizably thick! But wait, did you think I was going to stop talking about Linus? Because you’re wrong. Here are two more great strips, which also feature his (shown above) love for sand castles.

You start to get a sense of his personality: creative, a bit philosophical. Hum drum, in the way basically all Peanuts characters are, but not a sad sack. He’s dynamic, bringing all kinds of tones and melding himself to the other characters in the strip. Yet through all of it, he’s a fairly polite little boy, unlike Charlie Brown who progressed from rebellious gremlin into depressed sad sack. In a comic strip full of extremes, Linus operates as a fluid middle piece that still steals the show.

Look at this boy! The two above strips are funny, but still kind of touch your heart. Here’s this young man who wants to catch stars in his pail, and badly wants to learn like the older kids on his street. How can you not fall in love with him?

All in all, a fantastic collection. This is the dawn of the golden age of Peanuts, I feel. It’s exciting to read through, because the hit to miss ratio is better than ever. And now I need to get through like three different Complete Collections (the black and white books with the dailies), but it’s hard to go back to them after getting through these vividly colored strips. The colors, the maneuvers that can only happen with the extra length, man the Sundays are great. Peanuts is great.

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Hey, how’s it goin? I’d love to show you these great Peanuts title panels. Hope you don’t mind!

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This Peanuts strip is fantastic because it has the two most critical components of good Peanuts content: an underlying sadness, and Charlie Brown putting a jacket on.

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Drawing Snoopy, Part 1

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Charlie Brown is afraid of believes in strong women

Peanuts

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Reviewing Snoopy Merch, Part 1

I decided I would start showing some of the Snoopy stuff I own, since it’s a growing collection. Above are my plush Snoops from Aurora gifts: five “palm pals” and a pretty standard foot long plush. The palm pals are delightful, they sit in your hand really well, they’re baggy and not quite fully filled, which gives them a floppy and squishy feel. At first I bought the Joe Cool one, but I loved it so much I needed the full set. Now it lives with regular Snoopy, Festive Hat Snoopy, Flying Ace Snoopy, and Woodstock. They’re all 8/10s, the only thing holding them back is that plushes that small are fun to hold or use as decor but can’t really be used for hugging. My favorite of the bunch is probably Woodstock actually, which came as a big shock! I only bought him because it felt like he complimented the set, but Woodstock’s body is made of a slightly different, softer material, and he’s filled just a bit more. Maybe it’s simply the fact that his feel in my hand is distinct from the others, but I really like it. Aurora also sells Palm Palms of Lucy and Charlie, but I probably won’t buy those any time soon.

As for the foot long laying Snoopy (pictured on the right, above), it’s decent. I expected it to be floppier and softer, but it’s got a stiff construction to it. It should hold up really well overtime, and could probably be thrown around well. It’s just not super nice to touch. I do like the size: it’s the perfect length to tuck under your arm like a football. So it’s a reliable mid-size snoopy, and would probably be good for kids who will take Snoopy on an adventure. For me though, it was a solid-but-kinda-disappointing addition to the collection. 5/10.

Finally, I wanted to show my “Snoopy Jug”, a hulking 64 oz Hydroflask water bottle (color is “agave”) with a variety of stickers I bought on Etsy from the following shops: Peanutspetsalsshop, Littlevintagetale, Giftandstickershop, Pinbinday, Rainbootstudios. Rainbootstudios provided what is probably my favorite sticker of the bunch, the “Stay Hydrated” Snoopy in the third pic. But these are all pretty great. I got a large variety pack and ended up discarding some that I didn’t like the design of, so I ended up needing to buy more stickers to round out the whole bottle. I’m really happy with the final result, it’s a bit sloppy but in a Peanuts-y way, and it covers a lot of my staples: Great Pumpkin, Joe Cool, Lucy Van Pelt, it even has a trans rights Snoopy. There probably exists a world where I planned the layout more, but I’m content in the world I’m in. 9/10.

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noopy btw. you care

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snoopy of the day

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Review: The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 3 (1955-1956)

The late 50s are an interesting period, as you can feel Peanuts beginning to mature and deepen. Perhaps most of all, I feel like Charlie Brown has gone full sad-sack as of this volume. His gremlin vibes are gone, now he lays awake at night upset about his lack of Christmas cards. It’s a necessary change for so much humor and pathos, but I do mourn the loss of naughty Chuck.

No notable new additions to the cast this time around, but I do continue to enjoy Pig Pen. Snoopy is obviously not a new character, but it does feel like he made big strides here towards the animated dog we know. He has started impersonating animals, doing elaborate bits, even jumping and dancing on a regular basis. His anthropomorphic behavior isn’t just an occasional punchline, it’s now a through line of his character. We haven’t gotten Woodstock yet, and he still has a narrow head, but I can sense it coming. But until we get modern Snoopy, or Marcie, this strip still belongs to Miss Fussbudget, Lucy Van Pelt.

A fun thing about this transitional period is seeing so much Pig Pen but then seeing an occasional Shermy. More notably, Patty and Violet are regular members of the cast still! I kind of assumed they’d be gone by now. They’re mostly stock women, but they do have their moments and are at least more memorable than Shermy, who has no real reason to exist once Schroeder and Linus are around. On that subject, Linus is a real sweetie. He’s still in his infancy with blanket jokes and baby jokes, but you can feel the earnestness starting to poke through.

Another volume, another great set of strips. The race to 1960 continues.