Researchers discover that you shouldn’t text while Mario Karting

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Games By James Plafke Feb. 3, 2014 2:25 pm
As we’ve previously stated, texting while driving is a serious matter. A new (totally legitimate) scientific study has found that the act of texting while driving is unsafe whether or not the reality in which you’re performing the act is virtual.
A group of nine composed of children and adults took to*Mario Kart Wii, the sixth installment in the main series. Each driver was limited to Toad (with no boosts) as the racer, and Moo Moo Meadows as the track where the experiment would be performed. The experiment was not to test the limits of the human psyche with those limitations, but to hand each driver a phone and have them coherently respond to text messages that asked specific questions they had to actively think about answering, such as what their favorite movie is, or what they ate for a previous meal. Each driver would first race three laps without texting, then another three while having to reply to a text once per lap.
The results shook Mushroom Kingdom to its turtle-infested core.
Without texting, the average time of completing the three laps was clocked at two minutes and three seconds. With texting, the average time of completion was three minutes and 31 seconds — about a minute-and-a-half longer than it took the drivers without distraction. However, the added time was not the only result of texting while driving. Fences were bumped into. Bright green grass sustained skid marks. The cows of Moo Moo Meadows were never the same.
The drivers attempted various complex maneuvers in order to mitigate risk while texting, such as holding the phone’s display in the same line-of-sight television, holding the phone to the side and glancing between the two displays, and not paying attention to the road at all in favor of the phone. The average time to complete a lap did not raise because the drivers slowed down in order to text, but because they either crashed into fences and cows, ended up disoriented and driving backwards, or had to drive across the grass, which slows down the kart.
In the end, these intrepid pioneers of virtual kart science found that if you value Toad’s life, you should keep your eyes on the meadows and save your texts for when you’re safely ensconced inside Bullet Bill.



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