Dirt Rally

We started playing Dirt Rally 3 on the XBox One this month. It was a half joke —Albatross wanted to see if a rally simulator could teach anything about real roads — but it became its own kind of meditation.

There’s a strange beauty in the repetition: the same curve, the same patch of gravel, the same echo of a co-driver’s voice through digital air. We began to notice the rhythms —how a good run feels less like control and more like listening. You fall into sync with the road, trusting its signals through vibration and sound.

Sometimes the car drifts off course and spins into the landscape. The camera pans across a pixelated horizon — Scotland, New Zealand, Argentina — rendered in code but still somehow moving. The illusion of dust, light, and motion tricks something deep in the body.

We talked about how games like this are, at heart, exercises in embodied translation. Every flick of the joystick is a conversation between imagination and physics. Every crash is a reminder that simulation is only an approximation of touch.

But it’s also connection. We sit side by side, laughing, competing, narrating turns like old rally commentators. Left six over crest. Don’t cut. The screen becomes a shared terrain, a space where collaboration and chaos blur into one continuous line.