The Profound Emotional Impact Of... A Trucking Game?

Men would rather roam the open road than go to therapy

Years ago, I was a part of a small group of friends from some gaming forum who occasionally played together on Steam. One day, we noticed that one of our members had logged over 1500 hours in Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Since a truck simulator is not among the flashiest of video games, this led to some light-hearted ridicule. Several others - me included - owned this game, but none of us even had a fraction of his play time.

When we asked him about this habit, he responded calmly that he considered it his therapy. This led to more ribbing. Just how many hours of therapy did this guy need?

Now, many years later, I’m still quite far away from that 1500-hour mark, but I’ve spent over 500 hours in the game’s North American counterpart, the aptly titled American Truck Simulator.

It would go a bit far for me to call this gaming habit actual therapy, but I cannot deny that, on some level, it does feel therapeutic.

And of course, I now tend to find myself on the other side of that conversation, where people are mystified as to why I’ve put so many hours into a game that just consists of driving around and making deliveries.

Well, allow me to explain.

Over the years, playing this truck simulator has allowed me to experience something rare: how powerful places and landscapes in media can be, and how they can blend together with our dearest memories and deepest sentiments.

I already touched on this in my discussion of Hyrule in Breath of the Wild, and how its ruins allowed me to interact with childhood memories in an almost tangible form.

Of course, such a concept would be a convoluted reason to simply try out a video game, and indeed my initial motivation to start playing American Truck Simulator was a lot more mundane.

If you’ve been gaming for many years, you might have figured that, not only do different games fit different moods, but your general preference also shifts as you reach new stages in your life.

When I was young, I used to enjoy games that had violence and spectacle, as well as ones that offered a substantial challenge. My desire for both of these qualities dampened as I grew older. Not just because the novelty of video game violence wore off, but because I was getting enough of a challenge from real life to lose the desire to seek it out in video games all that much.

It’s not that I started to avoid these challenges altogether. Until recently, I still did a lot of competitive, ego-driven online gaming, leading to more cortisol spikes than my doctor would be happy with.

While I do like excitement, I personally cannot enjoy a hobby if it’s all intensity with no respite. The more I played these high-stakes games, the more I started to feel the need for an antidote. A nice, calming gaming experience to wind down for the weekend.

And so, Sunday became American Truck Simulator day.

The ritual is simple. I set up my driving wheel and pedals, fire up a good podcast and/or background music, and drive through the western United States with a drink by my side. Just 1-2 hours of such activity in the evening is enough for me to wind down from the accumulated stress of work and other challenges.

So no, it’s not therapy in the sense that I’m processing all my existential troubles and becoming a better person by driving over some virtual roads, but the soothing, positive mental effect is very real.

If I had to put a quirky label on it, ASMR on wheels might be the most accurate description of this particular experience.

However, there’s much more to my experience with American Truck Simulator than a cozy, low-stress gaming experience: this was ultimately just the circumstance that allowed me to find yet more value in my exploration of the map.

American Truck Simulator takes place in a sized-down version of the United States, with the developers using geographical data and on-site reconnaissance to recreate the country’s many iconic landmarks, cityscapes and biomes.

When the game was first released in 2016, it only contained the western states of California, Nevada and Arizona. Since then, new maps have been added as DLC, with most of the west of the country now being complete and a future DLC even venturing into the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Still, no matter how much land was added to the map, I noticed that my discovery of these new zones was being halted by a peculiar factor.

I kept finding myself going back to the Pacific Northwest, consisting of the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho. There was just something about this part of the country (and the game’s representation of it) that made me return there after every delivery.

There are already plenty of logical, surface-level reasons for making Cascadia my home base. This part of the map is rich with dense forests, scenic coastal roads and picturesque fishing towns.

All of those things make me happy, and cross-referencing certain areas with Google Maps confirmed that the designers did a very good job at recreating real-world locations in the game.

And yet, that explanation fails to tell the entire story.

Something about it felt magical. More magical than a truck simulator has any right to feel.

The key to wrapping my head around this was realizing that American Truck Simulator is an unwitting part of a lineage of media that has had a huge impact on me across my life.

And that mellow, nostalgic tingling I felt in my stomach every time I drove into the Pacific Northwest confirmed this game’s unlikely place in that lineage.

From what I recall, this lineage started with Stand By Me, a film adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Body. Filmed primarily in Oregon, the movie follows a group of young children walking for two days through the state’s enchanting wilderness.

Their aim is to reach the rumored spot of the dead body of a missing child, but this is simply a plot device to justify the kids’ transformative journey.

I saw Stand By Me when I was still very young, and it had a profound impact on me.

Even when I was barely old enough to understand the deeper layers of this movie, I was in awe of the scenery. That beautiful American nature that seemed so infinitely more grand and untamed than what I was used to at home.

Stand By Me itself was about the carelessness of youth slipping through your fingers. About the fading of friendships that you thought would last a lifetime. Being still young and impressionable, the interaction between this coming-of-age theme and its almost mythical backdrop left a profound and lasting impression on me.

For the first time in my life, I experienced nostalgia - that bittersweet longing for something which no longer is. Even if I had no life experience or other references to draw on.

I was primed to experience these feelings of bittersweet longing, and I subconsciously linked them to that faraway place that seemed so beautiful yet so unknowable.

A seed was planted.

It did not take long for more media to start pushing those same buttons.

Soon after Stand By Me came The X-Files, whose early seasons were all shot in British Columbia, the Canadian extension of the Pacific Northwest. True to its supernatural themes, the show helped reinforce this mental connection between the region’s natural beauty and a mysterious aura.

Later came the first Life is Strange game and its prequel Before the Storm, both set in a fictional Oregon coastal town. At least the first game is partially inspired by Stand By Me, sharing not just its setting but also its nostalgic coming-of-age theme. And so, this experience reawakened my fascination with the region and reinforced one of my deepest media-related childhood memories.

So, how does American Truck Simulator fit into this equation?

While its more mundane nature sets it apart from the aforementioned productions, the game is able to expand on this emotional fundament.

The driving experience itself may be straightforward and lack all of the elements of mystery and storytelling that for example Stand By Me offers, but there is still something surrealistic about being able to freely explore a space that has been cultivated across different media all these years.

If all this sounds vague, perhaps the best way I can describe it is that it’s like having vivid dream featuring a beautiful location - one of those dreams where you’re sad once you wake up. Then imagine if you one day fire up a game, and that place from your dream is actually there, waiting for you to explore it.

When driving through Oregon and Washington, it’s almost like I recognize and remember all the locales, from the lonely beaches to the sleeping villages I drive by during my journeys.

And yes, these ‘memories’ are tied to fictional media, so this is ultimately just romantic projection, but this matters little for the emotional impact of it all.

At this point, it may not surprise you to learn that I am a sentimentalist.

For my entire life, I’ve been extremely sensitive to the overall atmosphere of a place. Whenever I go somewhere, my mind makes a split-second decision on whether the vibes are good or bad. And once that judgment has been cast, it’s almost impossible to change my mind.

This applies to both the real world and virtual ones.

In my daily life, I prefer to take certain routes while traveling because they simply feel better, even if this preference increases my travel time.

That same sensibility means that I’m able to enjoy a game much better if the world it presents is one I enjoy existing in. I may even keep traveling back to a certain town in a game not for gameplay reasons, but simply because it feels good to be there.

Likewise, American Truck Simulator turned into such a mentally soothing game not just because of its low-stakes gameplay objectives and overall freedom, but because it allows me inhabit a very specific comfort zone that I subconsciously created for myself from an early age.

It’s part of what makes these Sunday evening trucking sessions the ideal wind-down for me. Even if I don’t do the amount of hardcore gaming I used to, my time in the simulator still neatly counteracts much of the real-life stress I experience from time to time.

I would not quite call it therapy as that old friend did, but I do see how something as seemingly mundane as a truck simulator can occupy an emotional space for someone like me who is deeply attracted to certain landscapes and specific vibes.

As the game’s map keeps expanding into the east with each new DLC, I find myself returning to this neat little area where the vibes are just right.

Of course, many of my hours in the game are simply spent having fun as I drive and listen to a cool song or funny podcast.

But once every so often, I get a taste of that vibrant energy that used to be so abundant when I was a child. Just a hint, like a pleasant smell carried by the wind.

If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.