Virtual fun or real crashes

Abigail Goldman, Las Vegas Sun

Tuesday, May 8, 2007 | 7:38 a.m.

It's Friday afternoon and Curtis Perry is driving 148 mph with one hand on the wheel when his car flips, rolls, rights itself and starts again, now faster - 150 mph and gaining.

Really, the 27 - year - old isn't driving. Isn't even moving. Just dreaming about it from the seat of an arcade game in Henderson. Pretending keeps Perry from racing in real life. Or so he says.

A study recently released by a group of German psychologists suggests that playing virtual racing games leads to aggressive driving and risky behavior behind the wheel.

Perry scoffs at the study. Then his race car catches an edge and splinters into a thousand pieces. Game over.

Racing games promote aggressive thoughts mixed with feelings of arousal and excitement, a virtual stimulus that seems to breed higher-risk behavior on real roads, researchers reported in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

For the study, men were asked to play racing games won only through wild violation of traffic rules; driving on the sidewalk, crashing into cars, speeding.

The sort of stuff that Perry says helps him work out his real road aggression.

After playing, the research subjects showed a tendency toward risk-taking thoughts and feelings. Another group of subjects, asked to play a racing game and then complete a computer simulated driving course, took higher driving risks than a group that played a non-racing game.

And people who told the psychologists they regularly play racing games also reported getting into more accidents than those who don't.

Perry says he's a good driver. With prodding, he admits he got two tickets last year - one "was the other guy's fault" and one for wiggling in and out of lanes. Just "messing around," he said.

"For me, playing this kind of game deters me from driving all crazy on the road," he said, hitting a hard turn. "Doing this takes away the urge."

In fact, he only owns one racing game, one also referenced in the video game study: Need for Speed. It was the seventh best-selling game in North America last year, according to its manufacturer, EA Games.

(The same game was found in a Mercedes driven by an 18-year-old Canadian student who T-boned a taxi cab last year while driving about 90 mph, killing the taxi driver. Police called the accident a horrible irony but couldn't confirm whether the student had been playing the racing game before he took to the street.)

EA Games wouldn't wade too deeply into the controversial connection between racing games and bad driving. In a written response to a Sun query, EA Games marketing director Brian Coleman said : "Similar to movies and television, video games are an entertainment experience. Our racing games have been recognized by millions of fans around the world for the entertainment experience that they are."

In a description of the latest Need for Speed release, players are promised an "all-out war" - the "ultimate test of skill and nerve, where one wrong turn could cost you more than the race."

In March, the most recent statistics available, Metro Police issued an average of 270 moving violation citations every day for anything from reckless driving to unsafe lane changes.

But mostly for speeding, traffic Sgt. Monty Hall said.

Hall, who can hear street racing sounds in the residential area around his home late at night - "loud mufflers, pedal to the me tal" - says it's hard to police the underground racing community, which flees from police fast as it guns down the track.

Crashes confined to a computer screen are without consequence. Hall wonders whether this explains the connection between racing games and aggressive driving; the crash-bang virtual world blunting the rough and real.

But Perry's just playing in the arcade while he waits for his movie to start. Nothing serious.

And besides, he says, "I have a good - well, pretty good - record."