Driving games are too good for their own good

The latest in a long - and frankly tedious - line of shock horror research aimed at maximum publicity in the media and thus generating more cash for further pointless research, reveals that people playing driving games are more likely to take risks on the road in real life.

Naturally, this elicits the usual hand-wringing from pressure groups seeking a blanket speed limit of 15mph in order to prevent the carnage on our roads.

The British School of Motoring is even calling for a pop up on driving games warning of the risk. This will no doubt lead to further calls for a ban on pop up blockers. The German research, published in a US journal of experimental psychology, says that drivers were asked how safe they reckoned they were and how often they played video games. Driving game players were apparently more likely to display aggressive behaviour and take more risks. This is what scientists refer to as detailed and objective research. Ask anyone if they're a good driver and they'll say yes. Ask a young, male driver if they take risks and they'll probably say yes because they think it's a cool thing to say.

Let's examine some of the issues here. The drivers found most likely to take risks after playing video games were males aged under 24. This maps precisely onto the demographic for drivers most likely to take risks anyway, a fact reflected in their insurance premiums. And staying up all night playing driving games is hardly likely to reduce the tiredness and increased reaction times that lead to many accidents.

Driving games used to be pretty hopeless and basic in the extreme, but these days the graphics and the physics involved enable them to depict real roads and scenery and extremely accurate simulations of a wide range of vehicles. But as few people want to drive a simulated Citroen Berlingo van, the cars on offer are invariably exotic, high performance Ferraris, Porsches and Aston Martins. The modelling of the performance and handling of these cars is, in many cases, so accurate that the dynamics of the actual vehicle are accurately represented.

But your average driver, having raced a virtual Porsche all night then climbs into their real car - a knackered 1.2 litre Vauxhall Nova which, sadly, lacks the performance and handling they have just experienced. Little wonder, then, that when they pull out to overtake, they are suddenly made all too aware that they're short of about 500 horsepower and get hit by a truck coming the other way.

Video games have far less to do with making people drive faster than coming over the crest of a hill and seeing an empty, winding road leading off to the horizon or having Ace of Spades suddenly appear on the radio.

So we have a problem with video games - they're too good. Nobody used to play Pong and then go out imagining they could win Wimbledon, but today's driving games offer an extremely realistic simulation of the real thing which could, conceivably, lead to unsophisticated gamers forgetting they're driving a 15 year old Mondeo rather than a Porsche 911 and ending up in a tree. Making games less realistic might be an option, but that's not going to happen. As a result, we can expect to see increasingly-hysterical calls from do-gooders for warning stickers and pop ups and, potentially, a complete ban.

The answer to improving road safety is proper driving tuition and examining, not a knee-jerk call for legislation on gaming. But my preferred solution is to use the driving skills these young people have learned and to replace the pathetic, clapped-out cars they own with modern high performance vehicles that have the acceleration, handling and braking to get them out of trouble on the road. Give every chav in the UK a free supercharged Jaguar and just watch those accident rates plummet. µ

See also
Video racers drive badly