The notification flashed up in my peripheral vision as I hurtled through the streets of Baku in a Formula 1 car – past the monuments and minarets of the oil-rich city, Azeri flags and billboards flashing by in an artful haze.
“SCToken unlocked,” it said. I didn’t know what this meant. I had downloaded F1 22– the latest in a long-running sports simulation game I’ve been playing for decades – without really looking at the new features, and I assumed this cryptic note had something to do with the blockchain† No matter how fast you go, I thought, you can’t outrun NFTs†
In fact, the message was my entry into what the game’s developers have called the “F1” Life” – no NFTs, just good old-fashioned unlockables, the kind that can only be bought with gaming skill or fiat currency (converted, with sickening inevitability, in in-game “PitCoins”). This was shocking at first, but the more I get into it thought, the more logical it became – F1’s sport has always been under the spell of commercial interests, so it’s only natural that the official game should be too.
For my efforts – mainly driving very fast into the landscape – I was rewarded with a supercar token, which allowed me to unlock a vehicle for my avatar’s virtual showroom. There are eight to choose from: McLarens and Ferraris and Aston Martins in various shades of neon, the kind of cars you hear racing through central London on summer evenings or see in YouTube videos shot with a GoPro on a selfie stick and uncomfortably low. The kind of cars that F1 stars can drive between sponsorship deals.
The demands of the “F1® Life” are many and varied. A virtual garage begets a virtual apartment – a minimalist box – and a virtual wardrobe. Everything must be decorated. You can choose from soft furnishings and abstract wall art, or you can create a driver in your likeness and wear them with Beats branded headphones and casual wear. (There are thousands of permutations, but somehow everyone looks like a crypto influencer on Instagram on a flight to Dubai, very much the F1 aesthetic.) You can even invite friends and strangers to your virtual pad to basking over your range of officially licensed and branded items – a horrifying vision of what the metaverse will look like in reality.
Useless microtransactions and skins are nothing new, but they usually get sewn to the underlying game with more effort. Apart from being able to drive your supercars on a limited number of points on the track during the season – in the Pirelli Hot Laps Challenge! – there are very few occasions where your PitCoins make a material or even visual difference to your gaming experience.
Fans of the series can blame this on developer Codemasters, which was recently acquired by EA, the undisputed kings of the money-making business. Reviews say it’s the one thing that affects an otherwise solid racing game – one that’s visually pleasing, rewarding to play, and delivers the rare feat of being accessible to newcomers without alienating the die-hard fans, thanks to a wide variety of customizable difficulty settings and assists. You can switch everything on and be gently guided to victory as if you were going around the block, or you can switch everything off and crash into the rear of Yuki Tsunoda if you miss your braking point at the first corner – and so on options in between.
Undoubtedly, the “F1® Life” only increases the accuracy of the simulation. Formula 1 often owes its popularity as much to the circus surrounding it as to the sport itself. The human element was what made F1 so gripping in the 1970s, with the rivalry between Niki Lauda and James Hunt (as depicted in Rush), and so dull during Sebastian Vettel’s four-year dominance in the 2010s. That’s why the sport has had a renaissance since the Netflix series Ride to survive, which brings out that personal rivalry. “F1® Life” more or less captures that, although perhaps not in the way the developers intended – rather than adding a sense of glamour, it plays a game of the empty consumerism that surrounds the sport (and finances).