I don't know if this is due to familiarity or confidence, but it definitely has made a difference! I felt myself able to drive the car passably on the first day of my driving lessons and learnt from a few gaming buddies that they had a similar experience. I find people with extensive 'virtual' driving experience taking lesser time to get comfortable on the road. Better understanding of vehicle and the road: I would say this is one of the major points in favour.I have tried to summarize the positive and negative effects of video games on my real-life driving style, as perceived by me: Pros: Well, Now to topic proper, speaking for myself, it would not be an exaggeration to say that I learnt the basics of vehicle dynamics from video games and the dynamics of road traffic. As I grew older, I moved on to games like Forza, Dirt for racing and games like Spintires and Beam NG Drive just for the driving dynamics and for offering wider variety but still held on to the GTA and NFS series coz, well, they are GTA and NFS. As far as I remember, I started gaming on the PC when I just turned 4 years old on my parents' old Pentium single core PC from '98-'99, with a rather obscure game called 'Boss Rally' and the evergreen Midtown Madness, then progressed to games like Need for Speed, Midnight Club, Grand Theft Auto (mostly). I was an avid PC gamer for a long while and used to sit on the PC for 6-8 hours everyday during vacations to the ire of my parents. In my eyes, this is going to important as the current bunch of people (including me) who are getting their licenses now are from a time where access to a computer/console was easy in their childhood and have had the opportunity to play a multitude of driving/racing games and might have spent a lot of time doing it. Hey everybody, I wanted to start this new thread just to know about everyone's opinion on something that's been bugging me for quite some time -> How driving in the virtual space affects the road manners of the drivers in real life.

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