Racing games are not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s easy to forgive the average gamer for having little concern about the completeness of their trophy collection in Mario Kart, let alone their individual car manufacturer XP levels in Forza. Given their hyper-focused gameplay with often little or no story, there are plenty of perfectly acceptable reasons to keep it casual with racing games.

That doesn’t mean there is nothing to gain from a deeper proclivity for virtual racing. The genre has valuable wisdom to impart. What follows is a look at just a few life lessons from the track.

Scheduled for release on July 27, Need for Speed World (NFSW) is an ambitious racing-sim MMO developed by EA Black Box and published by Electronic Arts, based on the company's popular Need for Speed video game franchise. It's not the first to join the ranks of "massively multiplayer online racing games," or MMORGs as they're referred to in the MMO industry. The Trackmania series and Test Drive Unlimited are both successful titles in the MMORG arena, published across multiple platforms, from Windows to the PlayStation Portable.

Earlier this month EA hosted an open beta test for players, which ended last week. On July 13 and 14, the developers briefly revived the open beta for a final stress test and gave participants about $20 worth of "SpeedBoost" (the free-to-play MMO's version of RMT currency) to mess around with. We at ZAM thought this would be the perfect time to jump in-game and provide readers with an early preview of the MMORG's beta gameplay. In our first look at Need for Speed World, we cruise around the streets and find some familiar MMO staples and "level up" after winning a handful of solo and multiplayer races. We also get a little frisky with the police; it turns out that barreling through roadblocks and ramming cop cars off the road is just as much fun as it sounds.