Gotta go fast!

            Learning how to drive really changes your perspective.  Things you’ve seen one way for decades you look at completely differently once you’ve spent some time sitting in a metal box, nervously looking at all the metal boxes speeding around next to you.  Before I learned how to drive, I was decidedly pro-pedestrian. 
           The roads were mine; I didn’t appreciate the man telling me when or where I could cross the street, I didn’t like how bikers had to live in tiny, narrow strips of the road like they were second-class citizens, and jay-walking was a crime in the same way that Faramir relinquishing the One Ring was a crime.  Now, though? Bikers seem like adrenaline junkies, who can only get their high by riding to certain, horrible death in lanes so close to the road they might as well be considered government-assisted suicide.  Pedestrians are less sentient human beings than they are drunken toddlers who found mommy’s pills and compete to see who can defeat the wholly inadequate child-proof lids first.  “Do you know how close you are to dying!?” I find myself shrieking at pedestrians who take slightly too long to cross at a crosswalk, or those who walk one foot adjacent to the sidewalk instead of on the sidewalk, or those who look like they aren’t in a constant state of horrible, crippling fear.  “Why aren’t you in your homes, huddling as far from the road as possible? Do you want me to crush you?”  Looking back, it seems shockingly irresponsible that our sidewalks were built without seven foot tall barbed-wire fences to prevent people from throwing themselves into traffic.  Jay-walkers should be drawn and quartered without trial, as an example to others.

            But these changes only become obvious when I’m driving.  The change in my perspective I notice most comes with the activity I perform with far more frequency and enjoyment than driving: playing video games.  To some extent, especially recently, video games have been pursuing the shiny, speeding car of realism, barking excitedly as the car slows down at the stop sign of graphical advancement but whimpering when the acceleration kicks in and the metaphor becomes unwieldy.  To me, pursuit of “realism” in a video game, while sometimes important depending on the story, is usually ill-advised.  It’s a problem graphically, as photorealistic graphics age much, much faster than their less realistic, stylized counterparts, but less often discussed is how the attitude is a problem gameplay-wise.  The thing with reality is that it’s not always that fun, and that’s the point of most video games.  That’s why in first-person shooters you can take several bullets to the face but be fine after hiding behind a rock and wiping the jelly away, where in a “realistic” game you could take maybe one bullet, but subsequently have to clear twelve grueling levels of physical therapy.  It’s why the Mafia games are criticized for having cops that ticket you for breaking the speed limit.  People don’t want to forget about work by pretending to be punished by authority for breaking a rule that they could very easily be punished for in real life.

            Nevertheless, driving in games like Mafia now seems much more familiar than driving in Mario Kart or Grand Theft Auto.  In those games, where you only stop because you’ve fallen off a cliff and an orange cloud-man has to save you and collect your auto-insurance information, where a careful driver can maybe only kill three people per drive, it’s hard for me to even consider what you’re doing as driving.  A big part of this is the fact that I’m having fun instead of being either bored or terrified, but it’s also the differences that contribute to why I’m having fun, which are significant in their own right.  Not only do video-game drivers benefit from third-person vision, they benefit from centered third-person vision, meaning that in addition to the ninja-esque omni-awareness they receive from being able to look down at themselves, their perspective isn’t always skewed to the left like being a driver is.  Video game cars are sturdy; in Grand Theft Auto I frequently find myself driving on three or more flats.  Sure, I can’t turn, but I’ll just effortlessly jack another car when I need to.  Tasks that are easy in real-life driving are almost impossible in video games.  Show me someone that can actually stay in their lane or parallel park in Grand Theft Auto and I’ll show you a smelly liar.  Conversely, in real life I find myself unable to flip my car over merely by wiggling the steering wheel.

            Most of all, learning to drive has made me appreciate driving in video games even more.  It captures the one thing I like about driving in real life—going from one place to another quickly—and takes away the constant fear that I’ll crush somebody to death or crash into a wall.  Instead, those outcomes are a given.