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'Mario Kart' players may be better at driving than you: study

Mario Kart

Turns out all those hours spent playing “Mario Kart” as a child – and let’s be honest as an adult – were good for more than bragging rights.

A recent study published in the Association for Psychological Science says that players of action video games, in this case, the classic Nintendo game, for at least five hours a week over the previous six months, fared better in driving simulations because of increased hand-eye co-ordination, or visuomotor skills, than their peers who abstained from these games.

“Our research shows that playing easily accessible action video games for as little as five hours can be a cost-effective tool to help people improve essential visuomotor-control skills used for driving,” Li Li, lead author on the study, said in a press release.

The study randomly split participants into two groups, both of whom had no experience playing action video games: one trained by playing "Mario Kart" using a steering wheel controller to drive a go-kart on a track during 10 one-hour sessions; and a control group played "Roller Coaster Tycoon III," a simulation game on PC where you build and run an amusement park, for the same amount of time.

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All of the participation also took part in 95-second driving simulations that asked them to steer their virtual vehicle down a road with lane markers and to stay a close as possible to centre while dealing with crosswinds that forced them to compensate.

The researchers found that "Mario Kart" players showed improved hand-eye co-ordination after an initial five hours of training and even more so after 10 sessions.

Meanwhile, their roller-coaster building peers showed no improvement over time.

“Experienced action gamers showed much greater precision in keeping to their lane, and showed less deviation from centre in the face of increasing headwinds when compared to the participants with little to no action video game experience,” said the press release.

However, the researchers also conducted a similar study to see if training with different kinds of action video games varied in their effect.

So they tested the visuomotor skills of participants with no action-gaming experience after they played the first-person-shooter game, Unreal Tournament.

They found that the players showed improvement, but in different aspects of hand-eye co-ordination.

The paper said this indicated that the two kinds of action games may be suited as training tools for drivers of different skill levels.

“The differing effects of driving and (first-person-shooter) video games … suggest that for experienced drivers, who have stable control but need to improve their ability to predict input error signals, training with FPS rather than driving video games is more effective,” Li said in the press release.

“In contrast, for novice drivers, who are still struggling with obtaining stable control, training with driving rather than FPS video games is more helpful.”

Unfortunately, the study did not analyze whether “Mario Kart” players who could successfully navigate Rainbow Road have the devil's own luck.