From todays Telegraph.
Computer racing games 'make riskier drivers'
By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent
Players of computer racing games are more likely to drive aggressively and take risks, psychologists said yesterday.
German researchers found that people who play these games reported acting more competitively and having more accidents than others.
Two studies showed those who enjoyed games such as Grand Theft Auto admitted taking more risks and having more aggressive feelings after playing. A third study found the games made men, but not women, take more risks on a driving simulator.
advertisementThe research was published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Dr Peter Fischer, of Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, said: "Risky media content, as provided by racing games, activates feelings of arousal and excitement related to increased risk taking . . . at least in men.
"We conclude that playing computer games could provoke unsafe driving.
"Road traffic practitioners should bear in mind the possibility that racing games indeed make road traffic less safe, not least because game players are mostly young adults, acknowledged as the highest accident-race group."
Personally I think they must have an effect on most of the players. Many will not be able to realise the difference between a computer game and reality. Unfortunately in real life a crash damages cars and lives.
What do you think?
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Roger
A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
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Yes, I think it is true to an extent!
Young drivers appreciate speed, experienced drivers enjoy torque!
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Probably correct, several industries use advanced simulators for training (airlines, law enforcement, armed forces etc.) if there was no carry over from the simulation to reality there would be no benefit.
Games are not yet sophisticated enough to use as training aids though.
Remember Clarkson trying to "learn" a circuit on the Playstation then drive it for real?
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The time to get worried is when they start playing with battle tank simulators.
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One or two might be affected in such a way but, frankly, I can't believe that it applies in general.
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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Yeah, only this morning I drove the wrong way down the M3 shooting people's tyres out with an Uzi before ducking into an alley, gaining carnal knowledge of a prostitute before blowing her head off, and stealing her money. I then decided to hijack a truck and drive it round the city's one way system the wrong way, mowing down pedestrians and sending oncoming cars bouncing to the edge of the road in flames. To finish off my entertainment I found a helicopter gunship in a compound and after strafing random pedestrians and road traffic, decided to fly a few feet off the ground with a heavy nose down tilt, shredding bystanders into a bazillion pieces with the rotors.
Have these people ever played Grand Theft Auto?? I just cannot believe there is anyone out there who could even equate it to real life, much less allow it to modify how they drive. Games are games, reality is reality. 99.9 % of the population realise this, and the 0.01% that don't are the kind of people who would be a menace to society whether games existed or not.
Rant over! :-)
Cheers
DP
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I just cannot believe there is anyone out there who could even equate it to real life, much less allow it to modify how they drive.
People start playing computer games at an early age and often continue it into adulthood. What happens if the aggressive atitude becomes part of their personality?
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L\'escargot.
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Have they established that hitherto ordinary safe drivers can be turned into aggressive maniacs by a course of playing on these games, or are they merely observing that aggressive drivers probably like aggressive games?
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Whenever I play Grand Theft Auto (not a thing I have done often) I mow down lots of pedestrians and other vehicles until my car catches fire and the police drag me out of it and execute me on the pavement then and there, and serve me right.
I find the cars very difficult to control properly. I would do a lot better in real life. Fortunately however I am too wimpish to try anything like that.
I do wonder though whether some brainless teenager who is very good at computer games but has a flimsy grasp of social and political reality might not be influenced for the worse by constant electronic stimulation. L'escargot could have some sort of point.
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I have been playing GTA-SA (with hot coffee mod) since its release. I routinely indulge in murder, mayhem and bloodbaths in every episode.
I have yet to, or had the urge to, nor will I have the urge to mow down streetloads of pedestrians.
(the bus was a genuine accident despite it being very GTA-esque in execution)
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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(the bus was a genuine accident despite it being very GTA-esque in execution) ------------------------------
Yeah, yeah.
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Why don't you shut up and stop asking stupid questions?
Don't even think of criticising my driving, or I'll come round there and etc. etc.
LOL. (not lots of love).
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People start playing computer games at an early age and often continue it into adulthood. What happens if the aggressive atitude becomes part of their personality?
Remember Marilyn Manson? Remember God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols? Remember when Mick Jagger was the evil alter-ego of the charming parent-friendly mop tops? Remember when Bill Haley was the devil incarnate? Remember when jazz was going to corrupt the young and turn girls into promiscuous flappers? Remember when bodyline was going to ruin cricket? Remember when the Gothic novel was going to corrupt the youth of nineteenth-century England? Remember when the young hunters came back and painted pictures of their exploits on the cave walls for the kids to admire? Corrupting. All very corrupting.
Old folks (over 30s) don't understand what the young get up to and they never have. Incidentally I started playing aggressive computer games at an early age nearly 30 years ago and remember adults having exactly this argument. This is not new.
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I started playing aggressive computergames at an early age nearly 30 years ago and remember adults having exactly this argument. This is not new.
Animated utility symbols jerking along consuming unidentifiable objects, Baskerville? Hardly GTA...
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> Animated utility symbols jerking along consuming unidentifiable objects,
PACMAN - YAY!
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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I started playing aggressive computer >> games at an early age nearly 30 years ago and remember >> adults having exactly this argument. This is not new. Animated utility symbols jerking along consuming unidentifiable objects, Baskerville? Hardly GTA...
Space Invaders. My mate's Dad's pub. 1979. We used our imaginations, unlike young people these days. Harrumph.
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Remember when Bill Haley was the devil incarnate?
He so was not!
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L\'escargot.
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Remember when Bill Haley was the devilincarnate?
No - I was but an embroyo
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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Hey TVM I thought you were going to tease L'escargot that it took him nearly 3 hours to reply to that post on Bill Haley. :-)
--
Roger
A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
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A senior moment you mean?
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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I'm so glad to see that the majority on here aren't taken in by the ridiculous media knee-jerk reaction to anything computer game based.
I'd be interested to see the details of this study. How exactly was it randomised? Did they ensure that they had a similar demographic spread in each arm? Or did, by any chance, the evil computer game players all come from the 18-30 male demo, and the lovely fluffy, salt of the earth non computer players mainly come from different ones?
Give me strength, but they talk rubbish. As others have said, I regularly cause death, destruction and mayhem on my computer, in all sorts of ways, and guess what? I've yet to do it in real life.
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I saw a programme a few months ago about car modding and cruising. One of the owners broke his leg (by crashing his car!) and couldn't drive - he spent his days on the Playstation learning how to take corners 'properly' so he could be a better driver when he got back on the road. The fact that the correct way of taking corners on the road is the totally different to taking them on a racetrack (visibility v speed) was a message he obviously didn't want to learn.
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I saw a programme a few months ago about car modding and cruising. One of the owners broke his leg (by crashing his car!) and couldn't drive - he spent his days on the Playstation learning how to take corners 'properly' so he could be a better driver when he got back on the road. The fact that the correct way of taking corners on the road is the totally different to taking them on a racetrack (visibility v speed) was a message he obviously didn't want to learn.
I would suggest this is because he's an idiot, not because he plays games.
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Hey TVM I thought you were going to tease L'escargot that it took him nearly 3 hours to reply to that post on Bill Haley. :-)
Bring it on! I'd much sooner people took the mickey than pretended I didn't exist and ignored me completely!
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L\'escargot.
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A soon to be "yet another excuse" for the insurance companies to hike up the premiums of young drivers. You can just see the question on the proposal form :
Does you console/pc game collection contain any of the following .....
Followed by premium hike depending on the game. Theres another story doing the rounds regarding young drivers being priced out of the insurance market, this research will probably just exacerbate the problem :
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6465731.stm
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>>>A third study found the games made men, but not women, take more risks on a driving simulator.
Did I read that aright? People who play car racing games play car racing games (simulator) more dangerously. So what does that prove?
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I bumped into a journo I know in a pub - he was sinking a few pints as part of a before and after story involving a driving simulator at BSM. Next time I saw him I asked him how he got on. He said his score was much better after the beers. Oddly this was not reflected in the article he wrote.
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That type of research is carried out by people who earn a very good living carrying out research. You can manipulate the data to come to any conclusion you like, but if it is sensational enough to catch the eye of the press then your status and value as a researcher goes up.
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I agree with much of what's been said to poo-poo the research.
And yet..... there may be dangers in spending too much time in a consequence-free virtual world. I don't necesarily mean aggression, but does anyone else find themselves * genuinely surprised * that the real world doesn't have an "undo" button? I don't mean a wishful thinking daydream, I mean that horrible sinking feeling that goes with having done something dumb and the horror that it can't be rectified at the click of a mouse.
For example, there was a Clarkson article about his son crashing a go-cart. The son couldn't believed that he'd suffered real, actual pain (not a serious injury IIRC) without a person or some technology saving him.
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I don't mean a wishful thinking daydream, I mean that horrible sinking feeling that goes with having done something dumb and the horror that it can't be rectified at the click of a mouse.
Yes, I get this. Such as when I lose my keys and for a split second think about what search terms I'll have to use to find them. Sad. Very sad.
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Interesting link sir_hiss.
It still makes me ask why do so many youngsters have accidents?
Are they properly trained or is the driving test missing something?
Are cars in the lower insurance groupings just too powerful? They certainly are compared to those I drove after my test 35 years ago.
With all the safety features built into cars of today, do youngsters think they can walk away from an accident without any injuries? Perhaps this is where computer racing games make an effect or possibly make a young person feel invincible.
I certainly agree that we will see even more young drivers, especially young men, not bothering with getting insurance as the punishment and fines do not seem to have a sufficient deterent. Possibly a first offence of driving with no insurance should be an automatic £2,000 fine. A second offence would be a £4,000 fine and 12 month driving ban followed by an extended retest. A third offence should be a 3 month jail sentence and a driving ban of 3 years and followed by an extended retest.
Instead of all other insurered drivers having to pay the approximate £30 to cover uninsured drivers accidents, would it not be simpler for a fraction of a penny be added to every litre of fuel to cover 3rd party risks - then at least those who now avoid paying insurance would have to pay. The end result would be to lower all insurance premiums and hopefully make it slightly more affordable for everyone.
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Roger
A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
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You can never ascribe blame for soemthing like this to one factor alone.
AFAICS it is a basic biological fact that young males of ages 17-24 or thereabouts are far more willing to take risks than pretty much anyone else of whatever age or gender. Certainly I did some stuff around that age bracket which now (at the age of not quite 31) makes me think "Crikey, that was a bit silly". Perhaps the fact that I now have responsibilities (mortgage, dependants) has hastened the process.
Also, there have always been idiots within that gender/age group who drive cars badly/too damn fast/both. In the past I could have been tarred with that particular brush.
When you combine that with
1) an educational culture which in recent times has tended more or less to instil the message that nothing is ever anyone's own fault, whilst striving as far as possible to ensure that no-one is exposed to any sort of risk; and
2) computer driving simulations in which you can bash a car head-on into a wall at 150 mph and then simply back the car up and drive away,
you end up with a group of people who are completely ill-equipped to recognise genuine danger, and who are therefore an even greater danger to themselves and others than would otherwise have been the case.
And as Artful Dodger correctly points out, small cars these days are substantially more powerful than they were even 15 years ago, when a power output anything much over 75 bhp in a small hatch was fairly unusual.
Problem with the testing system, or at least the theory part of it, seems to be that there is the usual bwad-boy badge of honour thing going on among 17-year-old boys which makes it cool to scrape the multiple-choice part by as narrow a margin as possible. Admittedly this is based only on my own observation of the behaviour of other test candidates when I went for my bike theory test last autumn (along the lines of "I just clicked total random stuff an' I still passed, innit, hur hur hur"), but I can easily believe it's a general thing.
I'm prepared to accept that computer games are an aggravating factor to an extent, but it's not reasonable to try yet again to blame them for society's ills.
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>And as Artful Dodger correctly points out, small cars these days are substantially more powerful than they were >even 15 years ago, when a power output anything much over 75 bhp in a small hatch was fairly unusual.
Its very simple. Young men are reckless. 99.9% of them. Its biological. Its showing off, feather preening, call it what you like, it happnes and has always happened.,
The only thing that changes is the tools to do it. In my day and for a large part of the centrury i was boern in it was motorbikes. Tell me one person of the late 40's 50's 60's who didnt know someone who was mangled or killed on a motorbike. And yes when I spilled my bike and broke bones, i was suprised that a: it happened and b: it hurt and c: proud to boast about the number of stiches I had.
Trace it back all the ways to duels and fights. Young men with too much testosterone will do stuff. Computer games has no influence over that at all.
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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