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Video Racing Games May Spur Risky Driving
kiwimate writes "A study concludes that people who play car racing games may be more likely to take risks and drive aggressively when driving in real life.
According to the article, "The study appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, published by the American Psychological Association"." Just because after I play Grand Theft Auto I want to ram other cars does not mean I'm a worse driver. Honest.
This is a pretty stupid assertion.
Wouldn't the people most likely to enjoy this genre be predisposed to this behaviour?
Why don't these "researchers" understand the importance of self-selection?!?
And who, according to insurance companies, is the riskiest group? Teenage boys.
Next study! People who date teenage girls are risky drivers!
People who play racing car games may be more likely to be seagulls.
Question everything
Crashing constantly in GTA actually makes me more careful by fear of having as many accidents as in GTA
You just got troll'd!
watching 'care bears' for an extended period of time will make you a more caring and sensitive person.
Any time i see the 'video games made me do it' excuse, I think that the appropriate sentence should be forced to watch 'Barney' for an entire month. Since the person is so easily influenced, this should work perfectly for rehabilitation.
People who like to drive cars really bloody quickly and dangerously, surprisingly, also like to play computer games where they can drive cars really bloody quickly and dangerously. Other people on the otherhand, who are less interested in killing themselves in flashy cars, prefer other types of games. Sounds a bit like reverse causation? Really should be a cohort study.
I played GTA pretty seriously for awhile. The sense of freedom was amazing.
When I first played (and when my wife first played), we tried to obey the traffic laws and stay in the proper lane. After realizing how pointless that was, we were driving on sidewalks, ignoring pedestrians, and laughing with glee when running red lights.
Your brain is very good at unlearning old skills and relearning new ones. The catch is that when doing very similar things, it's easy for one set of skills to bleed into another. Switching from throwing a whiffle ball to a softball requires a period of adjustment. Driving like an insane maniac to a law abiding citizen requires a degree of concentration.
The vast majority of people will likely use caution, focus, and not have any problem at all. Some folks, however, may have difficulty making the switch. Ban all driving games? That seems a bit silly. Banning cell phones or music in cars would likely have a more concrete effect.
We could live in a world without excitement. A world in which we are not stimulated or thrilled. A world in which we could only watch movies or play games approved by the Flanders family of the Simpsons. There will be unbalanced people who will be inspired by what they watch. So instead of collecting cat skulls, they pretend they're the hero of GTA. Or Manhunt. Or Barbie Horse Adventures.
Note that they found a correlation between driving fast and people who play racing games. Maybe people who like to drive fast can't drive as fast as they want, so they pop in a racing game simulater. As far as the shooter game comment, most young men are aggressive to one extent or another. If someone blows off some steam by playing Halo 3, I would prefer that to them blowing off someone's head in real life.
I don't know why GTA is always mentioned when somebody talks about games involving cars ...yes it's a driving game, but there's a big difference between driving a car to mow down people and driving a car to win a race. The former is just silly and uses the car as a vehicle (pun intended) to drive (pun intended also) a story or a plot. The latter is, depending on the game, a true test of how driving is supposed to be done, or not done.
True story, as it just happened a couple of months ago: For the first time in my life my car severely fishtailed on me and without ever having experienced it before in real life, I knew what to do in that I had slammed enough rally cars into the snow in various games like GT4 to know "oh, when the car goes like this, I should do that..." and I translated my controller movements into real turns of the wheel. And it worked! I got out of it and kept going.
In this case I feel like my time with GT4 made me a better driver because I recognized a situation I had never experienced in real life but had so many times in the game that I was able to "figure it out". I'm not even going to pretend I'm ready to take an Aston-Martin Vanquish out on the Nurenburg, but I get the difference between "real" driving and "fantasy ha-ha no big deal if I crash a $600k car into the wall at 200mph" type.
Frankly, if I really had a Vanquish, I'd be too nervous about getting it into an accident that I doubt I'd ever leave the garage.
But isn't the simulator just another video game?
Say it with me: Correlation does not imply causation.
Yes, it does!
What it doesn't do is prove causation. Of course it implies causation. Then you investigate that implication.