My first experience with a truly terrible car, dangerously unresponsive and slippery, came from the Porsche 356 Speedster in Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed. Not having driven the real article I couldn't say whether the game was accurate, but it felt accurate. The car had nauseating body roll, sluggish steering and brakes lifted straight out of The Flintstones. Trying to beat the game's early challenges in a car that actively tried to kill its driver taught me more about traction and power management than I ever learned from my Toyota Camry.
In many subtle ways, a good racing game puts you in touch with all the aspects of driving that nobody ever teaches you to notice. There are myriad noises that tires make as they fight for grip, and each one communicates a different meaning to the driver. Engines have a certain sound they make when it's time to upshift, and learning to hear that note means more time watching the road and less time staring at a tachometer. Even with only a fraction of the tactile sensations that accompany real driving, somehow these games can make you "feel" something that's completely illusory.
Having played plenty of racing games, I'm more attuned to real cars on real roads. The little details that sell gamers on the feeling of high speeds and living dangerously are not inventions; they're the genuine artifact. Cars talk to their drivers, but most of the time drivers don't have the experience or practice to understand the language. With so much sensory information stripped away, racing games can only communicate through that language. In order to succeed the player has to become fluent.
I might be overly romantic. After all, I grew up in a household where motorsports are a major part of life. On the wall next to our television my father hung a large framed photograph of Michael Schumacher's Ferrari. My mother objected, not because there was now a three-foot-wide picture of a Formula One car on her wall, but because she thought Schumacher was a cheater and therefore unfit to grace our living room. For my family, driving was about more than getting from Point A to Point B. It was a skill that people were supposed to learn, practice and perfect. To be casual or inattentive at the wheel was unconscionable, because the act of driving meant that you took responsibility for the people around you. If you were going to drive, then you had better do it right.
Racing games take that notion as their point of departure. In between car-chases and virtual Grand Prix, I discovered that reflexes were a poor substitute for carefully planning and smart decisions. I learned how easy it is to make catastrophic errors. Most importantly, my time behind the virtual wheel conditioned in me a number of hard-wired responses that have got me through nine years of driving and some horrific near-misses.
