WipEout HD (2008) is based around the future sport of anti-gravity racing, which pits competitors in various spaceship-like anti-gravity craft against each other in high speed races around futuristic circuits. The player is cast in the role of a pilot in the developmental FX350 Racing League of 2206, the goal being to win races via a combination of skillful piloting and the use of weaponry. Futurism is an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in 1909 with the publication of F.T. Marinetti's The Founding And Manifesto Of Futurism (Marinetti, 1909).
As a movement, Futurism is notable for its glorification of speed, power, technological progress and nationalism, its use of 'force lines' and vivid, expressionistic colour to represent motion, power, scent and emotion in static images, its numerous manifestos and the cross-disciplinary nature of the work of its members, which encompassed every available field of art. It is almost a certainty that if the movement had come into being at a later point in history its members would have made at least one video game given their attempts to work in all mediums, desire to reform every section of the arts and adoration of new technology.
With the technology and setting involved, it is inevitable that WipEout HD is, to some degree, a futurist work, as it makes certain predictions about the future, but is it also a Futurist work? In order to disentangle Futurist elements from futurist elements, to assess the degree to which the game is a Futurist work and to thereby reach a conclusion regarding this matter it is necessary to consider the arguments in favour of the game as a Futurist work and the arguments in favour of the counter-position before making any attempt to resolve the inherent contradictions between the two.
WipEout HD revolves around inherently Futurist elements, namely speed, struggle and violent conflict. At all times a player's preoccupation is to travel faster, to out perform rivals and to triumph. The game rewards jostling, aggressive driving and involves players in a hybrid of motor racing and a contact sport. Player agency is limited in terms of many decisions: attempting to leave the predefined track and find a different route through the game world is penalised, on many tracks it is only possible to travel in one direction for any extended period of time and attempts to avoid combat and aggressive actions are likely to result in a player being at best disadvantaged and at worse destroyed. The overall effect of this limited agency is that players have to submit to the game and allow themselves to be overwhelmed by its central theme of speed and power.
Although player agency is limited, the game's interface allows the player a great deal of control over their moment to moment actions, offering extremely responsive visual, auditory and tactile feedback that is closely bound to both player input and the moment the input occurs. Thus victory and loss is due to the player overcoming the competition, not the interface or a complex game system.
A good deal of feedback is given via the game's HUD (Head Up Display), which appears as an overlay to the game world, constantly reminding players of the speed they are travelling at, the fastest recorded lap time for the circuit they are racing on, the amount of time that has passed during the current lap, the force they can project and their position within the in game hegemony - time, and thus space and being, is considered solely in relative terms to speed.
The game revolves around the pursuit of glory via sport, all that matters being victory, the defeat of others, the knowledge of superiority over them and the demonstration of such primacy via score tables, online ranking systems and the collection of virtual badges, medals and trophies.
The soundscape of WipEout HD is also unmistakeably Futurist. The game's soundtrack consists of fast, artificially created music that does not rely on traditional instruments or vocal elements (Pratella, 1910). Musical and non-musical sound is given equal precedence, as in Luigi Russolo's 1913 manifesto The Art Of Noises, with the sound of craft and weapons constantly interacting with the sound of music (Russolo, 1913). The boundaries between diegetic and non-diegetic sound are blurred by the treatment given to music; although there is no difference in volume when the player viewpoint is inside or outside the craft a filter is applied to the music when the player craft is mid-air or inside a tunnel. This would suggest that the player craft is emitting the music. However, proximity to other craft does not cause other music to be audible. Therefore, the only sensible position to take is that the music is subjectively representing the sensation of anti gravity racing, a supposition supported by the way that while the shield and autopilot pick-ups are active the music is dulled, paralleling the inherent decrease in excitement of the activity caused by greater safety. From this, it can be assumed that the purpose of the music is to inspire in the player the feeling of being an anti-gravity racer engaged in the masterful control of a powerful craft. This assumption is supported by the nature of the other event that triggers the dulling of the music, the depletion of the energy reserves of the player craft to a critically low level, a state of affairs which leaves the player vulnerable and in a much less powerful position than usual.
There are only two human voices in the game's standard soundscape, the most common of which is an in-craft pilot-assistance system, which speaks in disjointed phrases reminiscent of Marinetti's notion of words-in-freedom. (Marinetti, 1913) The choice of a female voice for the system is another link to Futurism, specifically the importance placed on "scorn for women"; although the system appears to be omniscient it is also somewhat cowardly, speaking only to warn the player of threats and danger. The other voice, which is male, speaks only to affirm the award of medals. Thus, a female voice is associated with avoidance of hazards and risk while a male voice is associated with victory and glory.
Even the pick-ups are constructed around Futurist notions; the auto-pilot pick-up, which assists weaker players, takes an inefficient route and results in a lower speed, suggesting that the weak deserve to be scorned and left in a poor position, not assisted.
