Videogame Driving Skills Don't Apply In Real Life

the digital nomad writes "When driving cars in videogames, you're often forced to see everything from a third-person perspective. Now, what would happen if you tried to drive while limited to that odd view in real life? These folks decided to find out."

Comments

Misformulated argument, misformulated article

[unity100]

In real simulation games you are forced to view the game through driver's view, which is LOWER than the field of view you would have in a real car, because 2d screen cannot accommodate a human's fov from a first person perspective.

so, argument is formulated wrong. its not 'videogame driving skills dont apply in real life', but, 'videogame driving skills in games that allow 3rd person view do not apply in real life'.

otherwise, all the simulators the military is using to train tank drivers, pilots, captains etc would mean bullshit.

Re:WTF?

[HopefulIntern]

I would say it depends very much on the game in question. God help us if a bunch of kids learned their driving skills from Need for Speed Underground series....

Play Gran Turismo, inside cab view, with a steering wheel, pedals and a shifter, then were talking actual training.

Re:Easy.

[pushing-robot]

Not only that, the position of the camera is wrong. Notice that in the shots of GTA4, the camera is high enough that you can see the ground a few meters in front of the car. With the rig they set up, there's a massive blind spot that stretches 20-30 meters in front of the vehicle.

If they wanted to really duplicate the average video game, they would have had to make the camera boom a couple meters longer... and turn the boom into a hydraulic actuated arm than can be raised, lowered, and swung around the vehicle.

But the whole thing is rather silly, as the reason third person perspective is used in driving games is to get back some of the field of view that's lost when you're limited to a small computer screen. The video is cute, but all it proves is that a poor implementation of a poor substitute for real-world perspective isn't a good way to drive through an obstacle course.

Re:WTF?

[MikeBabcock]

Actually, they're the same thing.

The learning of the track without the vehicle simulation is called a map.

If the skills didn't translate between the two, doing the in-game version wouldn't be useful at all.

Note that professional race car drivers up against the best gamers almost always win in Gran Turismo "shoot-outs" despite not being hard core gamers themselves; their in-car skills translate to in-game as well.

Re:WTF?

[ehrichweiss]

What's somewhat worse about this "experiment" is that they didn't have a workable 3rd-person view. They wanted the drivers to navigate between the cones but didn't have enough of an angle to differentiate between them easily. I mean the camera view was mostly the truck, not the road; if it'd been about 10-20 ft higher, their results would have varied massively.

Driving = world's most boring video game

[DNS-and-BIND]

I have often said that driving is the world's most boring video game. Get to your destination, while avoiding a multitude of hazards. Think about it: there is nothing positive that can happen during a drive, and the media keeps us relentlessly up-to-date on the negatives. Driving: "stay between the lines, stay between the lines, stay between the lines...*sigh*..." And if you don't pay attention for just one moment: tragedy. The famous video game Desert Bus is actually a more accurate simulation of driving than any Gran Turismo.

jeremy clarkson

[ProfBooty]

There is a top gear video a few years back where Jermey Clarkson ran laguna seca in gran turismo then drove the same car on laguna seca. His gran turismo time was something like 15 seconds faster per lap which he equated to the fact that you do not get the same sensations as you do in a car, and that you don't have to worry about any self preservation in a game itself so you take risks that you would NEVER do in a car.

As a track junkie i pretty much agree with this.