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This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Witness. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
The Peloton bike is a run-of-the-mill exercise machine connected to a tablet that runs the Android software platform. It has sensors to monitor how fast you’re pedaling and what level of magnetic resistance you’ve added to the wheel by way of a big red knob. In theory, the tablet opens up a range of possibilities beyond the instructor-shouting-in-a-studio model of traditional cycling classes, which in turn is only a playlist away from P.E.
One of these possibilities has been realized in a video game, Lanebreak. Peloton introduced it almost a year ago, but did so quietly enough that I didn’t realize it until this month. I gave it a try, because—as someone who found little to like in athletics for his first couple of decades—I’m always curious about ways into movement that don’t follow conventional forms.
The game was exactly engaging enough to play once. You use the red resistance knob to navigate among several lanes of a road. A sequence of challenges appears in one lane after another, and you’re lofted along by cheery pop music from a standard playlist. Peloton is working with the interface it has—the knob is one of two things that, as a rider, you have physical control over, the other being your pedaling speed—but the metaphor is a little strained: The real-world effect of your “steering” is to make it easier or harder to pedal, not to change direction. I had chosen a hard setting, but the game didn’t give me enough time in the right-most lane to feel like it was much of a workout.
I don’t think I’ll play Lanebreak much, but it did make me think about what’s drawn me to my real-life cycling class for close to five years. I’ve mentioned before that this class is centered on competition, with a leaderboard. But the competition is also broken down into games. As a rider you measure your accomplishment by your total power output for the class, but also by your results within each individual stage of the ride—such as Avalanche, where your pedaling intensity correlates to the number of circles that drop like boulders from the sky onto a mountain assembled by your team. Or Power Pairs, where you join with a classmate in a relay race against everyone else.
The word “metaverse” depresses me—I don’t think most of us need anything to invite us further out of our own bodies. Yet my go-to gym class, an abstraction from conventional athletics at least, is not just fun and addictive, it’s where—avowed non-jock that I remained even long after movement became a major force in my life—I discovered myself as a competitor. The value of such competition, in my view, is that for those of us who respond to it there is, in rote physiological terms, no greater motivator. It illuminates our outermost reaches, to see what happens at the apex of trying; it expands the map. But first the psyche has to be onboard.
One promise of simulation is that it multiplies the chances for this to happen, for diverse minds to find more ideal stages of play. How many of our bodies might finally find their full expression in a reality invented for the purpose? I find the question profoundly uncomfortable, but I think those of us who are most committed to the value of embodiment, even or especially, are bound to ask it.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.