Turning Video Games Into Road Awareness: Do Video Games Help Learn Driving Skills?
Turning Video Games Into Road Awareness: Do Video Games Help Learn Driving Skills?
Turning Video Games Into Road Awareness: Do Video Games Help Learn Driving Skills?
Contributed Article
Do video games help drivers sharped their skills behind the wheel? Does playing games actually make you a worse driver? There are two schools of thought in this argument, but which side is right?
Some people may argue that spending time behind a virtual wheel lets you learn many of the soft skills that you’ll need behind a real wheel. You can spot dangers and learn how to navigate many of the hazards that you might usually come across on the roads.
But on the other side of the coin, there are those that would argue that using video games as a jumping-off point count actually impair someone’s ability to drive. It could be debated that driving on video games teaches drivers unreal expectations. You might be driving rally cars such as the Nissan 180sx Vs 240sx, and these are not necessarily the types of car that you would be driving on the street.
It could be argued that video gaming might actually make you a reckless driver.
There are many different ways that this could go. So far there have been some tests to show how video games affect people’s ability to drive in real life.
Let us explore the evidence.
In this article, we’ll discuss whether or not video games can be used to improve driving skills such as road awareness. We’ll also look at the potential experiments that could be carried out to further test the theory that video games can be useful in the enhancement of driving skills.
Sharpening Cognitive Skills With Video Games
There is a growing body of evidence that playing video games may actually be a good way for people to improve several key cognitive skills.
A study a few years ago found that older adults (aged 60-85) could improve their ability to multitask significantly after they played a specially designed game car racing called NeuroRacer.
In another study from the University of Rochester, researchers found that playing action-based video games improved the player’s abilities surrounding rapid decision making and also to ignore distractions around them.
But is it true to say that video games can help drivers with their abilities behind the wheel?
Video Games and Real Life Driving: An Experiment
In one study from, researchers Maria Rita Ciceri and Daniele Ruscio of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan compared the driving skills of people who were avid gamers with those of experienced motorists. The aim of the experiment was to see whether video games which are commercially available might be useful in training players to identify hazards quickly.
The researches had a particular interest in the effect that the video games might have on people that were not trained to drive, to see whether they had the same kind of visual search techniques that regular experienced drivers would rely on to keep them safe on the road.
In previous experiments, it was revealed that notice drivers will keep a narrow focus with their eyes and look directly in front of them, while drivers with more experience would scan the entire road and far ahead and spot potential hazards.
The type of skills needed to scan the roads and spot hazards that were far ahead is something that tends to develop after hundreds of hours worth of experience behind the wheel.
The researcher’s hypothesis was that after spending hours of time driving in video games, trying to get the best scores, video game players might be able to develop the exact same visual search techniques needed for this level of road awareness.
In order to carry out the research,they found 40 hardened male video gamers who averaged around 10-15 hours behind the joypad each week playing realistic video games that centred around driving. Fifty percent of the gamers would have at least five years worth of experience behind the wheel of a real car, while the other fifty percent of the gamers had no actual real driving experience at all.
In the lab, all of the participants were sat down with a steering wheel and pedals. They were told to follow a series of driving videos and to turn the wheel as though they were the person who was actually driving the car in real life.
In one of the videos, there was footage filmed from real driving within an urban area of Milan in Italy. In the other video, there was the same type of road interactions only this time it was recorded from the video game “crash time 2”.
While playing the video there was a device tracking and recording the eyes of the players to see where the looked throughout the video experiment.
The researchers were keen to see how much attention the gamers who were not drivers and those that were would pay on key safety areas such as stop signs, intersections, and whether or not they were using their rearview mirrors.
The Verdict: Do Video Gamers Make Good Drivers?
After several hours worth of practice playing the driving video games, the non drivers demonstrated the same limited visual search that was typical in other drivers that have limited experience on the road. The experienced drivers checked key safety areas more often and for longer periods of time that the non driving gamers did.
“Unlike experienced drivers, gamers’ virtual driving attention is focused on only a few elements of the driving scene for only a short amount of time, and every scene is approached in the same way, without any evident differentiation in levels of attention,” Ciceri and Ruscio
The data that came back from the eye tracking of the gamers that did not drive in the real world showed that they were nearly all focused predominantly on what was happening on the road in front of them. On the flip side of this, the data gathered from those test subjects that were experienced behind the wheel of a car showed that their eyes moved around, back and fore, and were capable of watching the entire road.
This was still true, even when viewing the video game driving versions. The drivers who were experienced on the road were still able to maintain their distinctive visual search style while continuously looking out for hazards in the road; as though they were looking out for hazards in real-life traffic.
Those gamers without the experience of driving exhibited the same habits both in the real-life video driving and on the video game portion of the experiment while the real life drivers still replicated their normal driving behaviour and scanned the road. This indicates that there is no benefit for non-drivers when playing video games.
Examining the Biases
Just because there were differences in where the test subjects looked when they were in the experiment does not necessarily mean that they would exhibit the same behaviour on the actual road.
Another bias within the test was that the drivers who had experience behind the wheel in the experiment tended to be older than those who did not have any driving experience. This could have had some kind of an impact on the results. This is because drivers in their twenties will demonstrate safer driving behaviour than those in their teens.
Taking This Experiment Further?
It should be pointed out that this experiment only examined the experiences of two different subsets of gamers; those that had the real world on-the-road driving experience, and those that had never driven a real vehicle before.
Further experiments could pit gamers with driving experience against drivers without gaming experience. This would identify whether gaming would, in fact, enhance driving abilities within gamers.
This is because in video game driving you will only have to look at one screen dead ahead of you. There is no need to turn your head to perceive hazards that may be in your periphery because generally speaking, video game technology doesn’t work like that. A fairer assessment may be possible with virtual reality or with three-dimensional gaming.
Another potential experiment could look at the age of the gamers and drivers involved. By ensuring a fair age match throughout the experiment it may prove to be a better example.
Conclusion
It is evident that video games can enhance the cognitive abilities of the players. This was demonstrated in the NeuroRacer game and throughout other experiments.
Although this video gaming experiment does set out to challenge the question of whether video games enhance the driver’s abilities behind the wheel, the experiment does not compare non-gaming drivers to gamers. It does not also mimic the real life driving conditions that it sets out to measure.
The test does not ask whether the driver has seen the danger, it just looks at how the driver recieves the information in the first place.
Perhaps further experiments may show that there are definite benefits for video gamers to develop real-life driving skills. Until that time, it appears that real world experience is still needed.