Real Life ≠ Video Games, Exhibit F: GTA-Style Third-Person Driving is a Bad Idea

Red vs. Blue masterminds Rooster Teeth do a lot of stuff with machinima — enacting real-life scripts with machinima — but in a pilot for their new show “Immersion,” they switch things up: by driving a real-life car in the third-person style popular among racing games and Grand Theft Auto-style action games. The driver inside the car has his windows covered up, forcing him to use a monitor hooked up to an external camera.

While it’s good fun to watch and must have been good fun to create, it’s a little scary how badly it goes from a ‘not hitting things’ perspective: One of the two testers hit every pedestrian on the practice course — not on purpose — and both of them hit lots of the cones marking the raceway.

Check it out:

One possible explanation: we’re used to the first-person cues we get in real life driving and used to the third-person cues we get in video game driving: neither is the way things have to be. Although some video games, like racing games with bug splatter effects, make it pretty hard to drive in first-person, you could presumably learn how to drive well in real life with third-person cues, with enough practice. Good luck discussing it with your insurer, though.

(Rooster Teeth via Kotaku)