Racing Games Teach Bad Habits

Sun Herald

Sunday April 17, 2005

Tim Colquhoun

Video games may be influencing the way drivers behave behind the wheel. Tim Colquhoun reports.

ROAD safety experts are examining how various forms of media are affecting driving behaviour, with some concerned that car racing games have a subliminal influence on already overconfident minds.

Dr Sarah Redshaw, postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Western Sydney, said some young drivers believed that playing car video games made them better drivers on the road.

While most did not consciously try to play out game scenarios when they started driving, she said it was likely that game play could influence their real-world behaviour at some level.

"What concerns me is what I would call unconscious effects," Redshaw said. "When you see a P-plater zipping down the M4 doing multiple lane changes, it makes you think of computer games.

"There do seem to be some flow-on effects."

Teenage drivers would "have to work pretty hard to think 'no, this isn't like a game' when they are actually driving a car", she said. "Some of them probably do that, and others aren't necessarily thinking about it."

Redshaw is conducting a three-year study of young driver behaviour in conjunction with the NRMA to determine how culture, gender and different forms of media affect the way young people drive and approach road safety.

She cautioned that it was not just young drivers who adopted car game behaviour in real-world driving situations.

"Some of the kids have said things like 'my father played that game and then he was driving and said he didn't know what had happened to him, he was driving differently'," Redshaw said.

Ian Luff, a driving instructor who has been training motorists since 1972, said young people were getting mixed messages from racing games, which could influence their behaviour behind the wheel.

"I believe [some car racing games] are sending the wrong messages to young people; they are almost saying it's acceptable to crash with almost no consequences," Luff said. "In the real world, you get one go at a corner and if you get it wrong there is a consequence of that action.

"Young people have an invincible attitude of saying 'I'm all right, it's OK, it won't happen to me' and yet a lot of these games are condoning very high speed, risk-taking and foolish behaviour. It would have to be having a subliminal affect on the brain . . . and thinking is followed by doing."

Luff said learners had become more aggressive in the past 30 years, particularly young women, a change he attributed to society speeding up.

"We're seeing a lot more aggression . . . more road rage and people just not being patient," he said. "There is a lot more risk taking."

© 2005 Sun Herald

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