Race to the Finish
I’ve been known to play some games. I can thus attest to the truth of the the statement above. In fact, I was playing Burnout 2 with some friends the other night and a very similar discussion came up.
Now, if you don’t play Burnout here is the basic premise: You have cars, you blow stuff up. Ok, not there are some races, but the parts we love playing are events where the goal is simply to wreck as many cars as possible within a time limit.
This skews your image of reality after awhile. You start looking at intersection as chances to score points and your fellow drivers as targets. I also used to play Forza Motorsports a lot. By a lot I mean that I had unlocked the vast majority of cars and memorized most of the courses. Driving at over 100 mph and taking sharp corners at 60+ began to feel like a natural thing to do. Luckily my city is on a grid system and provides few places that would seem remotely race worthy in the Forza sense of things.
Fortunately for the world, games don’t shape minds to the degree that the media would like you to believe. I still drive the speed limit (generally) and have not been involved in a single street race. But when I hit the open road, I like to check that mirror and look at all the people who won’t be winning any races that day.
