According to a bunch of German researchers (wow, I would like to be a fly on the wall at one of their parties - imagine all that dry skin flying everywhere…) the more you play racing games the more likely you are to drive like an idiot when on real roads. 

The research, which appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that men who had been playing computer games were more likely to overtake or race other drivers once they leapt in their electric horse carts. (It is not know whether women who had been playing computer games waved their steering wheel around like they were diving for water with it before mashing every single button on their dashboard.) 

To be honest, this sounds fairly obvious. I can remember when the Sinclair 48k came out and I found it impossible to complete a simple mining expedition - in the real world - without getting into confrontations with elephantine creatures or hopping over rapidly disintegrating platforms. I can't help but wonder whether if I had not been playing Manic Miner all weekend I might have avoided such situations. 

What is next I wonder? The staggering revelation that after playing a computer game you are more likely to be very gung-ho and lob grenades about with wild abandon when fighting off hordes of invading aliens with spiders for faces and laser beams for legs? 

Probably not.