Pros & cons: Video games & the influence they have on real life driving

I was an avid PC gamer for a long while and used to sit on the PC for 6-8 hours everyday during vacations to the ire of my parents.

BHPian Dr.Procastinate recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Hey everybody, I wanted to start this new thread just to know about everyone’s opinion on something that’s been bugging me for quite some time –> How driving in the virtual space affects the road manners of the drivers in real life. In my eyes, this is going to important as the current bunch of people (including me) who are getting their licenses now are from a time where access to a computer/console was easy in their childhood and have had the opportunity to play a multitude of driving/racing games and might have spent a lot of time doing it.

I was an avid PC gamer for a long while and used to sit on the PC for 6-8 hours everyday during vacations to the ire of my parents. As far as I remember, I started gaming on the PC when I just turned 4 years old on my parents’ old Pentium single core PC from ’98-’99, with a rather obscure game called “Boss Rally” and the evergreen Midtown Madness, then progressed to games like Need for Speed, Midnight Club, Grand Theft Auto (mostly). As I grew older, I moved on to games like Forza, Dirt for racing and games like Spintires and Beam NG Drive just for the driving dynamics and for offering wider variety but still held on to the GTA and NFS series coz, well, they are GTA and NFS .

Well, Now to topic proper, speaking for myself, it would not be an exaggeration to say that I learnt the basics of vehicle dynamics from video games and the dynamics of road traffic.

I have tried to summarize the positive and negative effects of video games on my real-life driving style, as perceived by me:

Pros:

• Better understanding of vehicle and the road: I would say this is one of the major points in favour. I find people with extensive ‘virtual’ driving experience taking lesser time to get comfortable on the road. I felt myself able to drive the car passably on the first day of my driving lessons and learnt from a few gaming buddies that they had a similar experience. I don’t know if this is due to familiarity or confidence, but it definitely has made a difference!
• Better reflexes: Well, people with gaming experience do better in unexpected situations against non-gamers with similar real-life road experience, as far as I have observed. I believe this is from the familiarity of handling similar situations in the virtual space.

Cons:

• Throttle control: This is a purely personal one. I have only played on PC, where there is no option to maintain your throttle at a steady pace. You just hold onto the Up arrow or W and accelerate to the hilt. During my initial driving days, this habit took over in real-life too and a couple of days of conscious effort got this out of my system for good.
• A certain disregard for rules: It is often complained that video games promote rash driving. I still remember a pic on one of the threads( I think Weird and wacky mods) I saw a while back, of a WagonR with a caption on the rear windshield that went like The driver learnt driving from GTA Vice City so people should approach him at their own risk . Jokes apart, I don’t know if games do make people drive rashly in real life but one thing that’s true is that none of these games are targeted to make the player driving like a normal, law-abiding citizen. I still remember a challenge between my dad and me while I was on GTA 5 to drive according to the traffic rules and not hit anything/anybody for as long as possible. After doing it for a while, I felt very different from the way that I usually go about with the game . After this, I turned towards games focused on the nuances of driving rather than outright racing.

Well, I would love to know what everyone thinks about this.

Here’s what GTO had to say on the matter:

Video games & good YouTube videos most definitely help newbie drivers understand road conditions better. I think they are fantastic familiarisation tools.

Do that. Top it up with a driving school simulator from Maruti and you will start your first drive better prepared.

Here’s what BHPian Kkumar had to say on the matter:

In pilot’s training, a part of the training is carried out in simulators, this is to familiarise the student pilot with the layout of the cockpit and improve his hand-eye-leg coordination. But one really learns to fly when he is doing it in a real plane in a real world.

When it comes to video games such a thing is not there because it has been purely developed for entertainment and not for teaching. It’s true that they may have better reflexes but they will be learning more to do the wrong thing than the right thing. This can be seen by the way the youngsters ride their bikes. So my take is that video games are a bad influence when it comes to real world driving.

Here’s what BHPian Everlearner had to say on the matter:

The line between real and virtual world is blurring. This also means that the line between reality and fiction is blurring. If you have a look at all the AI generated images circulating on social media, you realize that they can be easily mistaken as real ones.

How is this relevant to driving?

The human behavior is shaped by experiences whether real or virtual. If you keep driving a car rashly in simulated world, there is a high chance (not always though) that some of it may impact your behavior in real world because of how the brain is configured/conditioned.

Here’s what BHPian roy_libran had to say on the matter:

A couple of points from me:

Playing a modern, realistic Driving game (e.g. Forza) goes a very long way in developing good understanding and approximation of car behavior in a variety of situations that can crop up in real life. Something akin to what pilots go through in flight simulators. The brain and muscle memory gets trained to finely calibrate the required set and sequence of actions. I have introduced this to my daughter as well, and she has fantastic lines through corners.

Twice it happened that I was driving within the city, whilst the Forza soundtrack started playing and somehow for awhile I lost the sense of reality and started living in the game driving like I would in the game – not good! Since then I make sure that the said sound track is not part of my driving song list.

Here’s what BHPian Jeroen had to say on the matter:

For quite a while, most type training for commercial pilots is done primarily on full motion simulators. They are so good, it doesn’t make sense to use a real airplane, which is hugely expensive, for training purposes. On some types, you can actually obtain your type rating without flying the actual aircraft itself.

Training hours on the SIM count towards your total time and are logged in your personal flight book. E.g. up towards 20 hours can be simulator time towards your Instrument rating and even 50 hours towards a commercial rating. At least that is how it was some years ago. But the general direction is actually towards more and more simulator versus actual flying.

It also is the only way to train for all kinds of emergency situations, without endangering anybody’s life.

Even for a Private Pilot license you can log some simulator time. However, and here is the catch, all of the above requires certified simulators, which are very very expensive.

And this is the thing, a home computer or even a dedicated game controller doesn’t come anywhere near the real driving experience. An important part of learning to drive is to get a feel for the pedals, various levers, acceleration forces etc. Very few simulators offer that level of realism. Most of the car simulators out there are games and we’re never designed with teaching to drive in mind.

I have driven a professional car simulator at Stanford university and I was not impressed, some of my colleagues got motion thickness, almost immediately.

It doesn’t stack up to a full motion level D Flight simulator.

Still, it can be a very useful add on as part of one’s training. Even as a pilot I used Microsoft Flight Simulator to help me prepare my route and familiarise myself with the airports and terrain enroute.

There is quite a bit of research done on this topic around the world. They all come to more or less the same conclusion.

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