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

Night Driver FTW

[plover]

I still credit the training I received for playing long hours of Night Driver with saving my life in 1981. I was cresting a hill late at night on a two-lane country road when I was suddenly faced with an oncoming car in my lane. Using the exact same right-left swerve that I practiced so many times in the video game, I avoided a head-on collision by hitting the shoulder just in time, and got off the shoulder before sliding down the ditch.

The real question should be "Would I have still missed him had I not played so much Night Driver?" There's no way to answer that, of course, but for now I'll stick with the "my anecdotal evidence runs counter to your theory" attitude.

Re:Night Driver FTW

[Adrian Lopez]

I used to play a lot of Rad Racer as a kid. While taking my first driving lesson the driving instructor chided me for turning the wheel left and back to center then right and back to center in order to keep the car going the way I wanted it to. She immediately grabbed the wheel and strongly suggested the car would go the way I pointed it, at which point I realized a wheel doesn't behave the way an NES d-pad does.

True story.

Re:Night Driver FTW

[Monkeedude1212]

When I was younger one of my favourite games to play was Road Rash. and it saved MY Life back in 2005. I was riding along one evening when I was suddenly found riding along another motorcyclist. My natural instinct was to whip out my 5 foot chain, beat him with it senselessly until he wiped out into a traffic sign, and continue along at breakneck speeds, only to stop for some hookers and booze.

The real question should be "Is there any chance Jack Thompson is going to read this post?". There's no way to answer that, but for now I'll stick with the "By God I sure hope not" attitude.

Re:Night Driver FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

same thing here - driving skill doesn't apply because the input controller is totally different, but the vehicle handling experience is pure gold.

the problem is that in the current driving school they teach you to drive in the fairly non standard conditions, at low speed and with good grip. you never get to experience what a car will do when understeering, oversteering, skidding, or on low traction surfaces. that on the assumption that you should always drive safely.

but you can foresee everything and always be safely driving - going on 20mph on interstates is unsafe as going at 150mph, as you're a sitting duck waiting to be tramped from the random right-overtaking truck.

the only way you get to experience the rubber effect of a car suddenly recovering from oversteering is in games. and that saved my ass:

I was overtaking a car, he was at 40mph and the road speed limit was 55, so I started overtaking him when suddenly one car coming out from a garage invaded the lane I was using for overtaking (which was totally clear without any other car incoming)

I hit the brakes with to much force, while turning to return into my lane, and that caused my smal subcompact car to oversteer and this is where a gamer experience came into place: instead of panicking and braking even more, I downshifted and floored the throttle, while counter steering, preventing the car to spin out. which is still something that an unexperienced driver could pull out, but then I anticipated the sudden grip regain putting the steering wheels straight so that when the suspension rebounded from the sudden force now again affecting the wheels, the car was on a neuter configuration and didn't had any sudden change of direction.

by then I had slowed enough to safely get behind the car I was overtaking and dodging the one that invaded the lane. and this happened in a fraction of a second - you can't think about this sort of stuff, you need to have the experience of how car handles while on extreme situations and you just don't get that on real life.

sure, if I had that playing need for spede by now I would be dead, thank god I played a lot of simulators of low power cars, much like mine

Re:Night Driver FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you've joking about Rad Racer but it reminds me of a game that really did help me once.

So as for the main title, i.e. @"Videogame Driving Skills Don't Apply In Real Life" ... I totally disagree with this idea. Games really do help.

When I went to America (for the 1st time), I got a hire car. Problem was I had never driven on what I consider the wrong side of the road! (I'm from the UK). That plus I had never driven an Automatic car and I had been awake for over 24 hours straight, which made my first faltering few miles scarily interesting (to say the least) until I happily found the first hotel, which I jumped at the chance of stopping at.

The next day I took a cab into the city and during my initial exploring I by luck found an arcade and so I spent over 2 hours solidly playing Crazy Taxi, driving like a psycho around every road. After 2 hours solid my brain was reprogrammed enough so that I automatically took left and right turns correctly for American roads etc... I wanted to get to the point it was totally second nature for me to do the right thing.

That game helped me so much. After that point it was automatic for me to drive ok on the roads and my 2 week holiday out there, I didn't even attempt to make one mistaken turning after my training on Crazy Taxi.

So games really can be very helpful.

WTF?

[TheKidWho]

What? When I play my racing games I'm in my seat with a G25 steering wheel playing "games" like iRacing.

And yes, the skills translate very well into real life. But don't take it from me, take it from the pros.

Many real life racers, including Justin Wilson, Alex Gurney, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Marcos Ambrose, Martin Truex Jr., AJ Allmendinger, Scott Speed and Jacques Villeneuve have subscribed to the service and given positive comments especially about the accuracy of the track modeling which makes the simulator useful as a tool for learning tracks.[15]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRacing.com

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: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.

Re:WTF?

[MartinSchou]

The other way around doesn't necessarily hold true. And even the best of the best can have problems against the hardcore gamers:

Video

This is a Danish language video, but it pitches Tom Kristensen, Mr. Le Mans, eight time winner (a record) in the 24 hour Le Mans, including six times in a row against a Danish hardcore gamer and national champion in GT for the PS2. Game is GT for PS2 on the Le Mans circuit.

Granted, not exactly a fair match-up, as Tom doesn't have much (if any) experience in that game, but he manages to do a 3:23 lap, which is pretty much what he expected to do before they played. By comparison the qualifying times for the 2009 Le Mans was 3:22.888 for pole position.

The gamer ended up at 3:15, which is an insane lap of Le Mans. Obviously not doable in real life, and I suspect most gamers would be scared shitless the first time they ended up in a situation where they feel the back-end sliding a bit, but the point remains - gamers can beat the pros at the games.

Easy.

[fractalus]

Stop playing your driving games in third-person view.

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.

What?!

[Chameleon Man]

You mean banana peels DON'T make cars spin out?!

i beg to differ

[corbettw]

On the ride into work this morning, I drove over several pedestrians, flipped my car twice after hitting guardrails at the wrong angle, and took 5 minutes to get unstuck when I drove through the plate-glass window of a coffee shop. I'd say I've learned everything I need to know about driving from video games.

Re:i beg to differ

[Vectormatic]

i played a fair bit of PGR4 on the xbox, this game also have motorbikes as adversaries, but if you drive a car you can easily bash them into the guard rail, setting them back an easy 10 seconds.

Then one day i sat at the lights, and a motorbike stopped next to my, and "if i bash him as soon as the lights go green, at least i wont have to worry about him" flashed through my head....

What about this guy...?

[mayko]

http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/12/04/1516204/Gran-Turismo-Gamer-Becomes-Pro-Race-Driver

Granted in his case the main thing that helped him was practicing consistency in hitting braking points and adherence to a proper racing line. I doubt the game actually improved his physical ability behind the wheel.

Forced? No.

[GPLDAN]

You were very rarely forced into 3rd person, it just gave you an advantage of situational awareness, wrt other cars and seeing into corners. And it was better, because the perspective of 1st person was so shit because of tech (640x480 and even 1024x768 does NOT cut it), and so now - take EA Need for Speed SHIFT or GT or Forza, those games give you working cockpits that still have enough resolution out the windscreen to see into corners and feel speed properly, and dirve in a more realistic manner.

The death of 3rd person is coming, the tech is now here to simulate proper driving - so we are doing something in real life that was anachronistic to begin with....

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.

Credit where it is due: Roosterteeth did this

[millisa]

Rooster Teeth Shorts, Immersion (Pilot)

Not cool that Gizmodo didn't give them credit. These are the same guys that do the Red Vs Blue machinima.

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.