Virtual Roads, Real Ecologies: Driving Games, Coziness, andPetroculture

It is nigh impossible to imagine a world without oil.Infrastructures of its extraction, distribution, and use are omnipresent in late capitalism regardless of where in the world we are.This is true whether we are looking at the macro scale of industries and organisations, or the micro scale of everyday life.While there is an increasing sense of anxiety associated with oil consumption ("petromelancholia" in DeMenager 2014), oil-fuelled practices are also deeply ingrained in the formation of identities, especially relating to gender ("petromasculinity" in Daggett 2018).Video games have long been associated with hypermasculinity, despite studies and market research consistently proving that they are no longer exclusively a male domain (Chess 2017; ESA 2024; Ruberg 2019; Video Games Europe 2023).The genre of driving games, alongside shooters, strategy games, and sport games, is especially interlinked with this assumption of who plays games and why.While some driving games, like Nintendo's Mario Kart series (1992-), can hide punishingly hard gameplay under a veneer of gleeful silliness, others, like Sony's Gran Turismo (1997-) and Microsoft's Forza Horizon (2005-) franchises typically feature male avatars, and glamorise cars, driving, and the consumption of non-renewable sources of energy for fuel and parts.By doing so, they contribute to the reinforcement of the connection between petroculture and masculinity, representing video games' reluctance to imagine a world beyond oil (op de Beke 2024).This paper looks at some counterexamples to argue that it is perhaps in nonhegemonic forms of play, such as slow play and coziness, that we can find video games distancing and letting go.I look at counterexamples that are nostalgic for different times: a time with functioning public services, playing a postie in the 1980s in Lake (Gamious 2021); and a time with less densely populated areas, cycling around in Season: A Letter to the Future (Scavengers 2023).Coziness is a nebulous aesthetic category that transcends boundaries of genre (Bdi 2024; Waszkiewicz and Tymiska 2024).Generally speaking however, it can be applied to games incorporating elements of safety, abundance, and softness (Short et al. 2018).This often results in gameplay experiences that are different from the usual rhetoric of competition, progress, and urgency found in most games.Cozy driving games challenge hegemonic expectations of genre and forms of play: while operating vehicles is a core mechanic, the emphasis is less on acceleration -of speed, of growth,