... like when drive home after skiing or downhill mountain biking, you often realized that you're mentally conditioned to go fast and take corner quickly ... This has always been an unsettling affect, and I have no doubt that video games could have the same influence on the mind.

Do you think actual racing drivers make bad drivers?

If not, why would you think video game racers are likely to make bad drivers?

Personally, I would expect faster reactions and improved machine control to both be correlated with superior driving ability (by whatever metric you choose to measure it).

There's a difference between mechanical ability (command of the vehicle and awareness of surroundings) and quality of behavior (speeding, moving unpredictably, etc). It's possible to be very skilled as a driver and also be a very bad driver by essentially being a dick.

I don't know whether racing drivers are bad drivers when on the normal streets. It wouldn't particularly surprise me if they were.

The kind of game that I think is most likely to cause problems isn't the one that's simulating Formula-1 style racing or rally driving. I saw a game once (I don't know what it was called, but I expect it's a whole genre) where the players were choosing normal-people cars and racing through normal-people streets, with an emphasis on realism.

That's when I thought « If the people complaining about video games damaging people's brains were serious, they should be concerned about this much more than pretend warfare. ».

There are a couple that come to mind that satisfy that criteria; Midnight Club and its sequels, or the (admittedly not at all focussed on realism) Burnout series, both are/were fairly mainstream during their time and featured racing through fictional city streets. So did the Need For Speed: Wanted games, I believe. I assume there are plenty of others that I just didn't play or don't remember (Grid, perhaps?); there's never been a shortage of games that feature driving environments and ways that would be suicidal in real life, even if you ignore the obvious absurdity of games like F-Zero or Extreme-G (Or Mario Kart :))

Anecdata: I'll admit to having the experience of, after playing Burnout: Revenge for many hours, continuing to view streets and traffic on my way to work through the lens of traffic-checking and drifting for extra points/boost. I hasten to add that I never felt the urge to -act- on that view; so much of driving is subconscious and/or automatic that I suspect we have something of a built-in buffer working in favor of normalcy here. But it was pretty surreal.

That’s a fascinating question, and it strikes me as having subtle dimensions. I’d expect racing drivers to have a tendency to speed or be somewhat overconfident, but I’d also expect them to have exceptional situational awareness, reaction times, and skill.

Maybe they make for better drivers in their prime, but as they age they would tend to have the negatives outweigh the positives. Maybe my assumptions are all wrong.

Do you know of any studies on this issue? It really does seem intriguing...

It's very easy to wreck in racing games which could easily have the opposite effect.

Consider, the normal case with driving is nothing bad happens until you get desensitized. Regularly losing control in a video game makes that possibility far more visceral. I don't play racing games much, but I found my reaction was to both pay more attention and drive slower after the fact.

It could. Or more simply practising lots of driving in games could improve your reflexes and hand-eye coordination and also make you a safer driver.

When I say I think it would be valuable to research this I really do mean it. The results might be interesting. More interesting than this priming stuff anyway.

I don't think there's a real correlation there either. I spend a decent amount of time playing DiRT Rally in VR, and it really hasn't changed my day to day driving because the two situations are just so different.

In game, I'm the only one on the road, I'm pushing the car to its handling limits, and I'm taking risks because I know I won't actually get hurt.

In real life, I'm not pushing the car anywhere near its handling limits, and my main concern is keeping track of everything I share the road with: pedestrians, bikes, motorcycles, traffic lights, road signs, and most of all other cars.

Maybe if I'm driving through snow and have traction problems, the in-game reflexes I've built up around counter-steering and shifting the car's weight might kick in? But that's such a corner case.

You must not live in the north then. With 6 months of winter every year, and several feet of snow, the practice I've had in racing/driving simulators has given me a markedly improved understanding of how cars and tires can react in traction-limited situations. I'm not saying it's the difference between life or death, but I feel more "connected" to the machine that is my car.

This of course ignores the fact that 98% of cars made after the early 2000s have electric throttles and other controls, and often non-direct responses to control inputs

How is that different from a 1st person shooter?

Most people aren't frequently in a position where they have to make a split-second decision about whether or not to fire a gun.

I'm worried about people training themselves, in marginal cases, to accelerate rather than brake to avoid possible conflict, or to go round corners a bit too fast.

A lot of near misses take place when people make mistakes and then freeze up and get hit. It's kind of like when two people try to pass each other in the hallway and go the same way.

Within certain sets of circumstances I can see hammering down and nope-ing out of there being a good default response.

Hitting the brakes too hard can be just as bad as hitting the throttle too hard.

If you're hydroplaning, or if your car is sliding on ice or snow, the last thing you want to do is hit the brakes. The only real course of action is to try and ride it out, especially in a rear wheel drive vehicle.