Opinion: Are video games ruining real driving?

Real life is turning into a video game. And video games are turning into real life.

Except neither of them is real. And also, both of them is. Has that got you confused? Me too. At the recent SEMA show in Vegas, Hennessey unveiled their Venom F5... which was essentially a video game car made real. It was a giant plastic toy of a car – not only was it not a production car, it wasn’t even a semi-functional prototype.

It was an immobile plastic model. It had eye-popping specs designed to make the crowd ooh and aah, without being able to demonstrate in any way how they would ever become real. Hennessey is, for example, still trying to find a tyre supplier... because there is no rubber currently available able to glue down the sort of performance they’re touting.

In other words, the car only exists on a computer. And that’s the real life car. Meanwhile, the latest incarnation of the Gran Turismo video game series looks the business, but the joy is somewhat hampered by having fewer cars in the garage than one might wish, and suffering other drivers behaving like idiots.

Basically, it’s too much like real life. And that’s the video game. So which is to blame? Are video games spoiling real life, or is real life spoiling video games? It wouldn’t be the first time that gaming ruined the real world. Boy did Grand Theft Auto spoil my real-life experiences of stealing military jets and killing drug dealers.

Who knew there would be so much blood in real life? Who knew that getting my car resprayed a different colour wouldn’t erase my criminal record? Yeah, thanks for nothing, GTA. Now I’m stuck in super-max with no one but the ghost of Carl Williams for company. Great.

Honestly, car makers know that paying for their ranges to feature in video games shifts units – it’s a new age of win online, sell on Monday. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine that the cars themselves are tailored to the expectations of the players they’re courting?

Once we all discovered we were opposite-lock heroes in the safety and security of our lounge room, the hero cars of the real world went from Widowmakers to having “drift modes” coded right into their wiring.

Games like Gran Turismo and Forza are the millennial equivalent of a Countach poster on the wall – instead of simply gazing at a still photo of Italian metal (and, ah, a bit of gazing at the leggy model in the high-cut neon-yellow swimsuit standing next to it) and imagining what it would be like to drive it, now you can fang it around the Green Hell or Dubai streets with “hyper-realism” or “sub-centimetre accuracy”, according to the game makers.

Except, no – driving in a video game is not like driving in the real world. I’ve driven half a dozen laps around the Nurburgring in real life, and probably 300 in Forza, and only one side of that ledger resulted in mild staining of my underwear. On the other hand, who wants too much real world in their video game?

I want to play video games to escape from real life, not run head-on into it. I like being able to jump supercars without suffering spinal injuries on landing, or being able to drift further than a Hoonigan-sponsored hobo.

Hell, I still have loving memories of fanging a Testarossa across the Alps and Death Valley (not even the rules of geography intruded on the fun) in Out Run with the jaunty strains of Magical Sound Shower ringing in my ears. That may be the most unrealistic driving game ever created.

And not least because the blonde in the passenger seat never complained once when I stuffed the car into a tree.

So I look forward to getting on the freeway tomorrow and to be stuck behind the same people I was stuck behind on Brands Hatch last night. And I look forward to driving the Hennessey Venom F5 around Willow Springs next year.

Both will be completely unreal.