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."

Games vs. Real Life

[Nidi62]

Well, FPS's turn everyone into real-life Delta force operators, and makes them all experts on weapons and combat tactics. Certainly playing racing games will make you an excellent driver in real life too, right? Right?

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:WTF?

[Altus]

Even without that there are certainly benefits. Tracking multiple objects, extrapolating the path of other cars, watching the road ahead.

Sure, driving thrid person in the real world is extremely hard. Lots of people find it harder to drive a car in a video game compared to real life, but there certainly are some basic skills that video games can teach.

If you want to find out if driving games make people better drivers you have to test the real world, first person driving skills of people who play games vs people who dont.

All this proves is that driving from the third person is difficult. No kidding, its a hack to get around the fact that in video games you cant turn your head to change your view.

Re:What about this guy...?

[eth1]

Speaking only for myself, I can say that Gran Turismo greatly improved my real-life driving skills. I learned about following a line, about preloading suspension, and just about how to generally handle a car. When I first got my Subaru Impreza I was already able to go fast because I knew how an AWD car behaved from playing that game. Some of the skills are clearly not applicable to street driving, but some equally clearly are.

Some skills like following a good line that you might not think applicable to street driving actually are. Just because you're following a racing line doesn't mean you have to be going at racing speeds. Those same lines (or slight modifications), when driven at a lower speed can reduce tire & break wear, and give you a bigger margin of safety if you happen to hit a road hazard that reduces grip (bump, pile of leaves, sand from last week's snow, etc.).

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.

Re:What about this guy...?

[UninformedCoward]

As an avid Impreza driver, I would love to agree w/ you on all of these points but the limiting factor in learning how a car actually handles from a game is feedback, particularly steering. Don't get me wrong, braking, lines, and shift points are all things you can learn from a game but I would disagree that you can learn exactly how your car will handle. As a great example, I was making a right turn into traffic and floored it. The car over steered and required a steering correction which was much more difficult than the initial turn. In your standard GT game, your controller, or steering wheel, would easily correct the over steer but in an actual car it will take much more force and you have the inertia from the turn throwing off your movements.

I think the big part of faster times from drivers who practice in games is that they learn the track, lines, braking, and shift points. They should know how their car handles from RL practice.

Side note - GT doesn't tell you that Impreza first gear and reverse are terrible.

Re:What about this guy...?

[stupid_is]

Possibly a better ratio than considering the number of real cars in the world vs number of highly skilled racing drivers :-)

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 [desertbus.org] is actually a more accurate simulation of driving than any Gran Turismo.

Also, bad test. Wrong angle and FOV.

[denzacar]

Compare the angle and field of view of GTA shots (27 seconds into the video [youtube.com]) and the angle and field of view they've used for the test.

Over half of the screen is missing and the driver is trying to navigate the car from a "frog's-eye view" as if sitting on a chair being dragged behind the car.
Ergo - he can't see anything directly in front of him in the radius of about 50 meters.

What's next?
"Proving" that you can't drive a tank through a wall by trying to do the same with a van?

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.