Motormouth: Racing games taught me how to drive as a teenager, but driving in real life was a different ball game

Video games mask the impact of your simulated driving actions, so you shouldn't take your vehicular gameplay onto public roads.

The surge of sim-racing games from the 1990s have only proved to be the start of a global phenomenon that spans over 30 years, even into the current age. For parents, it meant dragging your child from the television then, or dragging them from their huge monitor screen out of the house now. Wow, how things haven't changed so much.

With such a big market potential for creativity comes so many genres of games, and I had my formal introduction to motoring with the Forza Horizon series on the Xbox 360 console. For a kid who had little access to online entertainment, this then-outdated game felt like heaven.

Heaven was driving the cars of my childhood dreams, using cars that nobody in their right mind would allow a 1# year old anywhere near the driver's seat, and there I was, modifying them beyond conventional economical reason and treating speed limits like bedtime curfews - who would want to follow that?

Several years on and I never really learnt to sleep on time yet, while that gaming console of old was replaced by a beefier computer setup, playing more recent and up-to-date racing games. What didn't change was the purpose and general fun of these games - me playing hooligan and cutting up traffic, or worse still, crashing into other cars in the game..

When I finally got my Class 3 driving licence, I was definitely scared $%&@less. Up to my driving lessons, driving test and then my first time behind the wheel, suddenly it became surreal. 

Yes, I was excited to finally drive on the road instead of in a room at home, but now that I am no longer hogging a lane while learning to drive, how should I drive?

In the racing games, my experience was mostly synonymous with racing, speeding, overtaking - the list goes, on. Sure, there were some instances when driving normally did happen, primarily for leisure, but because this wasn't my normal style of sim-racing, I suddenly found myself worrying over how to do just that in actual road traffic.

Gear into Drive, handbrake down, lights on, off I went. First time on the highway and fearing being the fella blamed for road-hogging, I upped my pace to around the speed limit. 

That go-fast instinct came back to me in a flash - gaps in traffic I knew were possible to slip through, emptier roads that were seemingly egging me on to mash the throttle, other drivers doing well under the speed limit, blocking other lanes and eventually my own lane too.

So familiar was the mental imagery in my head - pass the two cars on the right, filter to the extreme left, move to the middle and zoom!

Wasn't going to happen, though. I didn't know the car, the brakes, the turning capability, anything. All I knew were signalling, throttle, brake, clutch, steering wheel. Yet, the little devil in my head that was so familiar with those childhood acts of defiance in racing games kept nagging at me to stop taking the chill pill.

Ultimately, luckily, happily and thankfully, two hours later, I would park back at a different spot in the carpark where I first started the drive. The car, miraculously and definitely counting its lucky stars, was still in one piece. 

Turning around to look at the car I just drove, my mind ought to make a conclusion out of this real-life drive - at least I didn't treat driving like a video game.

The 20-year-old columnist grew up and sped up on a diet of realistic racing games.

Read More: 5 motoring games to fuel your automotive obsession

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