Editorial by James Cullinane;

If the latest study about the link between videogames and anti-social behaviour proves one thing it's this: Nobody cares.

Quote: BRITISH TIRE MANUFACTURER Continental Tires released a new study this week reporting that gamers are twice as likely as their non-gaming peers to be pulled over by the police. The study of 2,000 gamers and non-gamers between the ages of 17-39 also suggests that gamers are twice as likely to suffer from road rage, take risks, run a red light, make a claim on a crash, scare their passengers, and speed. The headlines wrote themselves: “Report: gamers make terrible drivers”; “Study Says Video Gamers Are Dangerous Drivers”; “Game players are more reckless drivers – study”; “Gran Turismo 5 Can Wreck Your Car”; “Playing Video Games Makes You a Terrible Driver”; “Videogame Players are More Dangerous Drivers, Says Study”. These and other such headlines were remarkable for two reasons.

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" twice as likely to suffer from road rage, take risks, run a red light, make a claim on a crash, scare their passengers, and speed."

I can accept the road rage part but... What does, taking risks, make a claim on a crash, running a red-light, scaring passengers and speeding have to do with being a terrible driver, i know just as many if not more non-gamers that do all of the above.

haha very funny study

Let's also repeat that correlation isn't proof of causation. Going on the impression from this article, it could just as easily 'demonstrate' that bad driving causes people to seek gaming escapism.

Now I've looked up the results. Since the study only talked to people, it could in fact only demonstrate that gamers are more honest than non-gamers. It also says non-gamers crash more than gamers, and they fail their driving tests more. That last sentence was not backward.

Not one to be all serious though. I like the conclusions of this article!

The thing is you can make up a study to prove anything you want.

Look at the Tobacco Industry.----Enough said!!!

Thanks to GT3/4 I am a much better driver, I know simple things like driving lines on corners and where to accelerate which a lot of aged (obviously non gamers) seem to have no idea about. I am also more confident when something unexpected comes up. I do speed, but I sure as hell am not going to overshoot that carner, ****ed if I want to be in the dirt and limited to ~30k until I get out.

aged drivers*

chaosorder wrote: The thing is you can make up a study to prove anything you want. Look at the Tobacco Industry.----Enough said!!!

Totally.

These phony studies do little more than make a penny out of the ill informed.

Hamish_West wrote: Thanks to GT3/4 I am a much better driver, I know simple things like driving lines on corners and where to accelerate which a lot of aged (obviously non gamers) seem to have no idea about. I am also more confident when something unexpected comes up. I do speed, but I sure as hell am not going to overshoot that carner, ****ed if I want to be in the dirt and limited to ~30k until I get out.

On public roads your driving line is your lane/side of the road.

Hamish_West wrote: Thanks to GT3/4 I am a much better driver, I know simple things like driving lines on corners and where to accelerate which a lot of aged (obviously non gamers) seem to have no idea about. I am also more confident when something unexpected comes up. I do speed, but I sure as hell am not going to overshoot that carner, ****ed if I want to be in the dirt and limited to ~30k until I get out.

I agree with this, gamers are inherently going to have greater and quicker reflexes when it comes to real life situations because that is what our fun hobbies do. If you have slow reaction you get your ass beat down by some noob with a trigger happy AK-47 in CS. So when it comes to real life scenario's we have increased reaction's and we know, you don't go around a corner fast next to the middle lane, cause hey, you gonna slide out and tackle that big 18 wheeler coming towards you.

As well as being a gamer in the online market you know that a good 85% of all people out there are complete and utter retards and so therefore become much more weary of every person on the road, and stay away from them while driving (hence our low crash records).

Rezoken wrote: I agree with this, gamers are inherently going to have greater and quicker reflexes when it comes to real life situations because that is what our fun hobbies do. If you have slow reaction you get your ass beat down by some noob with a trigger happy AK-47 in CS. So when it comes to real life scenario's we have increased reaction's and we know, you don't go around a corner fast next to the middle lane, cause hey, you gonna slide out and tackle that big 18 wheeler coming towards you. As well as being a gamer in the online market you know that a good 85% of all people out there are complete and utter retards and so therefore become much more weary of every person on the road, and stay away from them while driving (hence our low crash records).

On reaction times you speak of, I have for a the last while thought it was curious, how some people have trouble navigating 2+ lane roundabouts with cars whizzing around, like a large clock on its side.

I'm sure the years of gaming make a big difference to judging speeds, trajectories and so on. Not to mention countless other skills.

Thank you Arsonic! This seems to be the big misconception here: correlation does not imply causation.

To use some examples from the wikipedia page on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correl...imply_causation

The more firemen fighting a fire, the bigger the fire is going to be.
Therefore firemen cause fire.

It's pretty obvious here that in fact fire causes firemen.

As ice cream sales increase, the rate of drowning deaths increases sharply.
Therefore, ice cream causes drowning.

Here it is actually the case that summer causes ice cream sales, and summer also independently causes more drowning deaths to occur (due to more people swimming).

So coming back to gaming and road-rage, I would argue that the type of people who suffer from road-rage, are likely to be attracted to gaming.

"The inability of Continental Tires’ study to gain any traction..."

Ba da boom pssh
Go the pun

What a load of garbage. I'm a gamer, and a near-perfect driver (in real life).

Oh yeah socialism is good

Rezoken wrote: I agree with this, gamers are inherently going to have greater and quicker reflexes when it comes to real life situations because that is what our fun hobbies do. If you have slow reaction you get your ass beat down by some noob with a trigger happy AK-47 in CS. So when it comes to real life scenario's we have increased reaction's and we know, you don't go around a corner fast next to the middle lane, cause hey, you gonna slide out and tackle that big 18 wheeler coming towards you. As well as being a gamer in the online market you know that a good 85% of all people out there are complete and utter retards and so therefore become much more weary of every person on the road, and stay away from them while driving (hence our low crash records).

Was thinking of how to word my opinion but then read your post.

I agree with it all. As we have gamed in many scenarios; first person, third person, shooters, simulators, sports etc. we mentally are prepared for such scenarios in RL; desensitizing our brains.

I went skeet shooting at my cousin's farm when I was 18 and had to say I found it so easy to aim and hit each disc, compared with my cousin who said it took him a couple months to become a frequent. I have been playing FPS's since ROTT and Heritic days and he was no computer user (being a farmer and all), is it safe to assume the easy shooting was from years of FPS's on a PC? How else (honestly, I can only assume this)

And this just has to be repeated for effect: "you know that a good 85% of all people out there are complete and utter retards".

I would say that games also sharpen reaction times, and quick thinking, why all the bad things?? Someone should do a study saying how good it is !! Way more ammo there don't you think?

Zzz yet another lame study which doesn't apply to me and many others.