When it comes to soccer videogames, the FIFA franchise has largely held the dominant position as the most popular and successful soccer videogame in the market through its heavy focus on simulated realism. Stephen Berkowitz writes a great game review on the latest FIFA installment, FIFA 19, and how it serves as the pinnacle of the series’ ability to mirror the real-life players, teams and tournaments of the professional soccer world via its rich graphics and up-to-date stats. As Berkowitz points out, this focus on realism comes at the cost of new or interesting gameplay mechanics. FIFA 19 might be a great simulation, but in terms of its playability, it’s no different than FIFA 18, 17, or so on and so forth. As such, the franchise is caught in a closed loop of gameplay progression in which each change or update made to the videogame must first be propagated by a change or update made to a real-life player. It’s an adaptive simulation that never truly evolves as a videogame. This is where Rocket League jumps in.
Released in the summer of 2015, nearly a year after the 20th FIFA World Cup, Rocket League leapt into the soccer videogame scene introducing a new vehicle through which gamers could play soccer: rocket cars. While this concept of playing soccer using cars might seem silly or indulgent at first, the gameplay mechanics by which players are able to interact with their cars, their surrounding environment and other players is radically inventive. It doesn’t just abandon FIFA’s dependence on realism, it reconstructs the game of soccer into a more fantastical and freewheeling form of play. The means by which it creates this new gameplay experience is twofold: it replaces fragile humans with robust cars and it turns a two-dimensional field into a three-dimensional space.
By changing the soccer player into a nearly indestructible car, Rocket League enables gamers to become more happy-go-lucky and physically assertive players. Within the framework of “collision detection,” written about by Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin in their theory on Defining Operational Logics, Rocket League pushes players to collide with others by way of a much more resilient avatar. As opposed to the player avatars in FIFA, which by virtue of gameplay continually lose their health and stamina, the cars in Rocket League never degrade in function as a result of basic play. Cars can crash with other cars and can fall seemingly out of the sky and yet never lose structural integrity. The notion of a car as a safe haven and protective barrier against the outside world is manipulated to push players to safely be more assertive with their environment and other players much like a game of bumper cars.
The only time your car’s security is ever jeopardized is when another player charges at you full-throttle and your car explodes. It’s a bombastic response, but its lack of consequence makes it another indicator of the player’s freedom from permanent danger. Whereas in FIFA a player is penalized for breaking strict rules of player engagement, mostly for players engaging in excessive force, in Rocket League there are no fouls for the number of explosions one triggers. Conversely, the near-instant regeneration of the exploded makes the act less of a transgression and more of a tactic to remove a player’s spatial orientation. By removing the punishments usually imposed on collision detection, Rocket League prompts more carefree play.
In addition to freeing up a player’s interaction with other players, Rocket League frees a player’s interaction with the environment via a player’s utilization of rockets. In mastering the gameplay inputs of “turbo boost” and “jump,” a player can use both to soar through the sky in order to hit the ball and traverse the space. The two-dimensional space of a soccer field is transformed into a three-dimensional world whereby a player’s ability to dribble the ball on the field is just as important as his ability to hit the ball mid-air. In fact, the more players progress in skill level the more they engage in aerial-based plays, as traditional soccer maneuvers-headers, juggling, bicycle kicks-are taken to new heights.
Moreover, the boundaries of the field are curved towards aerial gameplay. The edges of the field curve upwards to the metaphysical walls surrounding it. As such, were a player to charge a wall headfirst, the car would not be met with resistance and instead drive upwards. In normal game conventions, the boundaries of the game’s world serve as a clear and distinct limit to the player’s movement. Going back to collision detection, Mateas and Wardrip-Fruin discuss how collision detection in games creates spatial constraints. Yet, once again, Rocket League subverts the conventions of collision detection to allow players to interact with the game’s boundaries and even use it to their advantage. The walls become roads of their own, functioning as alternatives to the field in the center. As a result, Rocket League opens up a new openness to its closed spatial field, letting players move up and down multiple planes and all among the three-dimensional space in between. This breaking and manipulation of boundaries isn’t just freeing, it’s uplifting.
While Rocket League may at first appear as a parody of soccer or a soccer videogame, it is in fact a reconstruction and rejuvenation of the game. It defies and subverts the sport’s rigid rules regarding player interaction and space as well as FIFA’s sole reliance on mimicked realism. Rocket League is a comical premise to be sure, and its reference to its game as soccar rather soccer seems like just a play on words. But in actually, Rocket League plays like a whole new sport entirely.
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