Disc drive Playing computer games made me better motorist
jessica.mercer@reachplc.com
GAMER Nick Davis regularly plays Grand Theft Auto for four hours a day and the 21-year-old reckons his dedication to gaming has helped him become a safer driver. has made the claim that video games have made him a better driver.
The 21-year-old from Cheltenham is a freelance videographer and TV runner says that playing computer games such as GTA and Forza Horizon 4 have helped him master the roads in real life.
He claims: “I would say that my years of playing video driving games has probably made me a more aware and conscientious driver.”
While some may be skeptical about the value of chilling out on the sofa playing games, Nick says it’s helped him hone his parking skills.
“Whilst practicing for my driving test I found it very useful to be able to hone my reversing and bay parking skills on Grand Theft Auto,” he said.
“At first this was purely as a joke, but I did genuinely find it a great way to visualise the movement of the car, analyse the lines on the road and understand the implications of my actions from a birds-eye view.”
Nick is not alone - over a third of Brits think that agreed that playing driving video games could improve skills like reaction times, found in a study by Carwow .
However, as many as a third of those surveyed disagree, saying that driving games make people more dangerous on real roads.
The survey also found that Southwesterners ranked their skills as eight out of ten,w ith the average UK motorist scoring themselves close to nine out of ten.
Ranking his own driving ability as a solid seven out of ten, Nick says it can’t be a coincidence that he is also an avid gamer.
“As I’ve never had a speeding ticket
or been involved in any accident whilst behind the wheel, there is certainly a chance driving video games have contributed to this,” he added.
Indeed, the influence of video games on motorists’ driving skills is easy to see - more than one in five drivers confessed that they’d tried out a move from a driving video game in their car in real life on at least one occasion.
However, the figures are working against them as over a quarter of everyday gamers admitted to having two or more speeding convictions, compared to 19 per cent of all drivers, and an even lower 17 per cent of those who did not play driving games at all.
Mat Watson, motoring expert at Carwow, said that the survey showed “some “extremely interesting insights”: “Whilst those who are playing video games every day rate their abilities higher than those with a lower play rate, they also emerged as those with the highest number of speeding tickets and were amongst the top in terms of accident frequency.
“At the very least this research could indicate that heavy players of driving-based video games are overconfident in terms of their motoring skills, with a propensity to put their foot down on the open road. “One thing was very clear when it came to the general feedback of the impact that driving video games have on motorists, there is a belief that they do impact your driving in real life, whether for better or worse and makers of popular driving games need to consider their responsibility for games targeted at younger people to stop them picking up bad habits before they even