Virtual car racing game

 

Realistic racing games are becoming increasingly popular. However, experts warn: Players also tend to be more willing to take risks in real life.

The red Ford GT, flat as a discus, shoots at top speed into oncoming traffic, misses a bus by a hair’s breadth, touches a small car head-on, and flies over a guardrail in a high arc.

Then the wreck ends smoking and spraying sparks on a massive wall. Crashing end of a business trip. But there are no victims to complain about, no blood flows, and nothing has happened.

Because the crash did not take place in real life, but on the screen. Instead of an emergency doctor and accident recording, it says succinctly: Mission failed, game over. Then you just press the reset button and the race-like life starts all over again.

Virtual reality and interactive entertainment have long been a mass phenomenon, and video games like Minecraft are on the rise with power.

Mobile in front of the monitor

If you wanted, you could see for yourself at Europe’s largest relevant trade fair, the Games Convention in Leipzig. 183,000 visitors, most of them younger than 20 years, provided active proof on 90,000 square meters of exhibition space over four days that you can also be highly mobile sitting in front of the screen.

Because thematically, in addition to the inevitable shooting games of all stripes, the action on two and four wheels is the focus of the scene.

Fueled by a well-oiled marketing machine, in which a large number of relevant magazines make the believing crowd of video gamers hots many months before the release of the latest games, the most youthful (and male) freaks stormed the halls at nine in the morning like the housewife squadron stormed the department stores at the beginning of the summer sales.

And that’s just to try out games like “Test Drive Unlimited”, “GTR2” or “Forza Motorsport2” before they go on sale. With the mass purchase of software for PCs and game consoles – unit prices between 50 and 70 euros – the affluent target group has brought the industry something pleasing.

 

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Increasing sales

In the first half of 2006, for example, computer and video games generated sales of 469 million euros, according to the Federal Association of Interactive Entertainment Software (BIU).

According to this, video games, in particular, proved to be growth drivers compared to the declining PC games: plus seven percent compared to the same period of the previous year – this corresponds to 250 million euros compared to 231 million euros in sales in the first half of 2005.

Reality as a game, the game as reality – electronics make it possible. For the layman, it is especially amazing how realistic the animations of the interactive software are.