I've never been into video games but it seems like a lot of people are and our cars are getting depicted on some of them and becoming part of these games.
My sportscar addiction traveled an irregular path. As a kid, I wanted a mini-bike so bad that I began working as a 10 year old (for my dad, a plumbing contractor) to buy one. A mini-bike became a motorcycle, which was sold to pay for a car when I was 15. I loved speed and anything with an internal combustion engine.
I paid for everything (clothes included) as a high-school kid, and couldn't afford the car I wanted, so I bought the car I could afford and learned to work on it. I built a couple of muscle-cars before I fell in love with a beautiful girl and sold "the car", bought a 15 year old motorcycle and satisfied my need for speed with something that cost 25% what the car(s) did.
We married young, had kids and sold the motorcycle. Sedans, minivans, and white work vans became my transportation. Life was practical and utilitarian - if it got the job done, I rolled it. I lost track of what was happening in Indycar, stock car racing, and (most surprisingly) drag-racing. I dropped my Hot Rod subscription, but kept C&D - even in the leanest times, I wanted to read Brock Yates, etc.
Vehicles underwent an electronic revolution, and neither I, nor the car friends my age followed the curve. I made friends with guys 10 to 15 years younger who understood the symptomatic difference between a bad crank position sensor and a plugged injector. I sometimes fixed my own vehicles (with their help), but mostly just paid somebody else.
I started a business and it was an instant success. I paid down debt, saved money for my kids college, started an IRA and funded it aggressively. Once I felt like the world wasn't going to open up and swallow me and my family whole, I started wishing for a cool car I could work on and improve with no outside help
... and that's how I landed here. These cars, as delivered 25 years ago, were laughably bad, with room for improvement literally everywhere - suspension, transaxles, brakes, and especially: engines. I learned to love the T1 flat 4 because it was so laughably terrible, and so immensely improvable. I dove in and kept diving, down to the murky depths where nobody I knew was going. I found some treasure down there and a lot of mud and old tires.
I also learned to drive in this car. I grew up in the snowbelt, so drifting a RWD car was something every kid learned. I knew how to keep a muscle-car pointed straight down a country road with another car straining in the lane next to me, but we've got no mountains, so what to do when a rear-engined car starts to slide (either end) was something I learned by doing.
The point of this long and boring story is that in today's sanitized and hand-wringing, pearl-clutching world learning to do this on the street as a young man is an invitation to financial and social ruin.
... and so today's kids with my tendencies learn by buying Gran Turismo (or whatever). Apparently, the software is good enough that aspiring (and actual) F1 hotfeet use it to sharpen skills and learn tracks.
I follow @DannyP's exploits jealously, and think about if that would be possible for me - and know I'll never do it, because deep down - I'm still a practical and utilitarian man, and that the time and expense of it would drive me off. Still, I'd love to have the experience, and wonder (a lot), if the quality of video game racing has gotten to the point that it would provide some sort of weird, dare I say, "virtual" gear-head experience. There are simulator controllers that offer tactile feedback. That seems pretty cool, even to an old analog driver.
Maybe Ed is right. I don't know, but I wonder - and I wonder how a guy tries this without spending a million bucks. I wonder how I can become better, without spending $50k on a track car and everything I know would come along with that.
But hey, to each his own.