Keep Driving is an evocative turn-based sim/role-playing game about going on road trips as a shiftless youth in the early 2000s. But perhaps the Swedish developers at YCJY Games were adopting the attitudes of turn-of-the-millennium slackers a little too keenly when they were making it — because the game design subscribes to the notion that, while driving drunk is a catastrophically bad idea, driving while high is basically fine.
In Keep Driving, you don’t control the car, but instead manage your resources as you cruise across the country on randomized long-haul road trips. The key resources are money, gas, your energy as a driver, and the durability of your aging car. Road events — potholes, an argument between your hitchhikers, birds on the road that won’t move — can sap all of these resources dramatically if they’re not handled well. You are also subject to all sorts of status effects applied by situations or items: happy, sad, stressed, hungry, inspired, and so on. The icons of these have red borders if they’re negative status effects, and green if positive. Two status effects that can be gained just by consuming items from your inventory are “drunk” and “high.”
Drive while drunk, and not only does the whole screen adopt a queasy, seasick roll, but road events become dramatically harder. The number of threats to your resources increases twofold, almost all of them are set to attack every turn, and the amount of time you have to choose your skills each turn goes from basically infinite to mere seconds. It’s a disaster. I sank one can of beer in-game before a short drive and, while I did make it to my destination, I did so with no gas, a car that was falling apart, a stack of negative status effects, and only cents to my name — so I had to call my mom for cash anyway. Oh, the humiliation.
If you manage to find a black market dealer you can also buy some weed. (As an aside — I’ve never been so shocked to encounter a gun for sale in a video game before. In Keep Driving’s relatively chill world, it’s scary.) I bought a couple of joints and tried one. This applied the “high” status effect, which — rather pointedly — has a neutral, gray border. It’s the only neutral status effect I’ve encountered in the game, and it doesn’t really do anything, other than also apply “hungry,” (because munchies, of course). You can drive while high and it’s totally fine.
It’s funny, and it totally fits the game’s worldview. But is it a terrible double-standard? I assumed so — cannabis hugely impairs reaction time, just as alcohol does. This medical paper, reviewing the evidence of many other studies, found that “marijuana causes impairment in every performance area that can reasonably be connected with safe driving of a vehicle.” But, to be fair, it also found evidence that cannabis users — very much unlike alcohol users — tend to overestimate how impaired they are from being off their faces, and compensate by driving more carefully, resulting in fewer accidents. So maybe Keep Driving isn’t so unrealistic.
That’s not exactly a recommendation, though, is it? (The paper recommends high people should have a designated driver, or wait at least three hours after smoking before assuming command of a vehicle.) And given how long it takes me to make a decision about what kind of tea I want when I’m stoned, I’m not sure I should even play Keep Driving while actually high. Stay safe out there.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/gaming/528544/keep-driving-drunk-driving
