The Life of a Rider
What strikes me about SSX as it relates to all of this is its ability to treat both immersion and the pursuit of high scores with equal importance. My routine when I switch on the game is pretty simple – I go right to Global Events and check out which drops have the highest payout for the day. I look them over, and if they’re appealing, I suit up and take them for a ride. I usually glance at what kind of score I’ll need to place in the Diamond bracket (my minimum standard before I’m allowed to move on to another drop), but in those early minutes it’s all about the experience. Being a skier/snowboarder myself, imagining throwing on all the gear and feeling the icy wind as I’m ferried up the big hill for a day’s worth of adrenaline is half the fun. The other half? Well, that’d be just playing.
“Just playing” is about the best way I can describe it, because once you come to master the game’s controls, it in many ways just plays itself. It’s like learning to improvise on an instrument. At first, you really can’t express yourself the way you would singing or talking, because the instrument is an obstacle; it prevents your true voice from shining through as you fumble with hand positions, fingerings, and the like. Once technical encumbrances have been dealt with, however, the instrument not only becomes an extension of one’s true voice, but an enhancement. No matter how wonderful of a singer or speech-giver you may be, you’re not going to replicate a virtuosic violin solo without a violin. Such is the case with SSX. It’s not just that I can’t snowboard at a high (read: impossible) level in real life – that is an implied and basic pillar of the game’s immersion. Games let me do things I can’t in real life. Wonderful. What’s going on here, however, is another layer entirely. Within this world where I’m a pro-grade destroyer of alpine terrain, I can actually choose my look, my style, and my approach. I can yell in excitement as I hurtle through the air, I can pull tricks at every bump in the road in a spastic, rapidly-spinning frenzy, or I can lay back and wait for the massive payoff, and literally fly as I swing from a helicopter mid-jump and admire the view. Maybe it takes absurd amounts of hours playing SSX to appreciate it this way, but I genuinely feel that such depth is there.
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