Training to be a fighter pilot

There is one of those urban legends that suggests the US air force used to go to video arcades and look for future fighter pilots.
Personally I have my doubts that this ever occurred but I am sure it made the kids wasting their time and quarters feel better that rather than skipping school they were training to be fighter pilots.

When I was at university I did a fair few hours training to be a fighter pilot myself. Specifically on a game called Defender the premise was you were defending 10 people on a planet by flying your fighter ship against the alien invaders. A pretty generic set up.

The mechanics of the game involved a landscape that stretched past one screen full meaning you couldn't see what was going on across the entire battlefield only the bit you were currently in. There was a radar screen where you could get an idea of the remainder of the battlefield activity.
You had control of your ship for up, down thrust forward and reverse direction and of course shoot with a couple of less important bomb etc options thrown in.
The aliens were varied in their speeds and abilities and all attacked simultaneously across the battlefield. In a nutshell it was pretty complex and fast paced.

I was reminded of all of this the other day when driving which in some regards is just like the game without the shooting bit, I have control of left, right, thrust, brake etc and there are any number of aliens on the roads of varying speed and ability trying to get me. Well perhaps not trying to get me but it can seem that way.

And I tend to treat it just like the game, I watch all the variables and estimate collision points and track a safe path through the obstacles. Compared with the speed of the defender game, driving has less variables and is much slower paced so not that difficult.

My wife is not always comfortable with my decision making and tends to wish I braked or slowed down earlier, or at all, as sometimes I have calculated the car will be gone before I reach that point and don't brake at all. She worries that the driver will not act as I anticipate and so I should be more cautions by braking earlier. To a point she is correct, sometimes people don't act as I have predicted and I have to adjust sometimes quickly and it is very annoying. If I suffer from road rage at all it is this "stupid" choice that a driver makes that annoy or the other trait I notice is slow decision making or incomplete data decisions, such as arriving at a give way sign, coming to almost a complete halt and then looking for any traffic, why not look while approaching?

So I have now realised that the apparent lack of driving decision making skill exhibited on the roads is actually a lack of time playing video games during your younger years when your brain was still developing.
Did playing video games enhance my ability (such as it is) to handle a variable data set and make decisions, I would certainly love to see some research on the topic, or is this just a case of personal bias after all we know from surveys that just about everyone thinks they are better than average when driving. So potentially I am an undiscovered Top Gun candidate or deluded about my driving ability.....