I spent about four hours over the weekend turning a steering wheel that
wasn't connected to anything, driving a car that didn't exist through
racetracks filled with mushrooms, bananas, and turtle shells that
weren't really there.

This particular steering wheel was a game controller – more specifically, a new plastic housing for the "Wiimote" used with the Nintendo Wii. I was using it to play Mario Kart Wii, the newest version of Nintendo's popular series of racing games. And the hours just sort of disappeared.

As you'd guess from my description of the mushrooms and bananas, the Mario Kart series
isn't exactly realistic. The tracks are fanciful – castles, jungles, or
ski slopes named after the various characters that have appeared in
different Mario games. (At this point, there are too many to keep
track.) The go-carts and motorcycles share the same demented design
sensibility. And the races are regularly interrupted by unlikely items
that the competitors can throw at each other – from bananas that make
the karts skid out of control to mushrooms that give them bursts of
speed.

To me, these are all good things. In fact, every Mario Kart game I've ever played has been my favorite racing game at the time – precisely because it's so unrealistic.

Developers
making video games that simulate a real activity – baseball or football
as opposed to, say, space combat – face difficult choices about how
realistic those simulations should be. Many gamers treasure touches of
reality, like the painstakingly re-created cars and tracks in Gran Turismo 4.
Others, like me, just look for fun. Realistic driving games have more
crashes, since real cars can't take hairpin turns at top speed – much
less get a speed boost from a mushroom. And I love that. If I want to
drive a car, I don't need a video game to do it.

If I want to drive a go-kart and race against a gorilla, however, where else am I going to go? And Mario Kart Wii
does have its own odd sort of internal logic, in that items behave the
same way they do in other Mario games. The new title even features
tracks from older versions, along with some new ones, which gives the
series a kind of connectivity.

All this makes the game as
addictive as it is unrealistic. And now, if I see a turtle shell come
toward me on the highway, I'll know how to handle it.