The 'freaky and unpleasant' world when video games leak into the physical realm

I remember this happening a lot when I was a child and teenager, mainly during and shortly after LAN parties, where we'd spend one or two entire days almost exclusively inside one or two virtual environments (like Action Quake or later, Day of Defeat), I remember how my brain "quantized" many of the sounds from physical environment into their closest equivalent of in-game sounds, such as footsteps, character sounds or gun sounds, for example, laying my very tired and head, spinning from a lack of sleep and overstimulation, down to rest on a pillow, it would be disorienting at first, and then as my breath rose and sunk the covers, I'd hear the sounds of the fabric as small cracks, like the footsteps constantly in my earphones during gameplay.. I'd walk around outside and see surfaces as more or less ideal for performing strafe-jumps (something we did a lot in the glorious Action Quake days), and think about good corners to round for a one on one shootout.

But honestly, it didn't feel so different from any other after-effect of intensive out-of-the-ordinary stimuli.. Think about the evening after a day of snowboarding, as you drift asleep, your brain starts to work its way down imaginary slopes, everything becomes transformed through the lens of snowboarding, rooftops becomes candidates for drops, piles of snow becomes ramps..

or when you've intensely learnt a new concept, your brain tries around it, to see if it somehow fits into what you've learnt.. Like how people learning about neural networks, can't help but go through at least a phase, where the idea of brains being computers are very appealing.

I don't think this "Game Transfer Phenomenon" is that novel or interesting, and most importantly, not related to games in particular.

It's just what the brain does when it engages in something.. it attempts to map and transfer concepts and relations, it's how we learn and grow..

> While no-one has reported physical harm as a consequence of GTP to date – GTP could, in principle, endanger someone

This is a classic of how to write a moral panic article. It's fun to talk about GTP, but in order to be news it has to be made into a big threat so it can tie into pre-existing prejudices like "my kids are spending too much time playing video games".

(speaking as someone who had to consciously stop playing Factorio as it was affecting my sleep!)

This particular manifestation is interesting, although not surprising - it's just adaptation. I was in a psychology department in the mid 90s when people were experimenting with really basic VR, just a headset and a glove. When you pointed with the glove you moved that way in the virtual world. Even after a short time with the headset on, when people took the headset off, instead of walking out of the room their first move was often to point towards the door. The human brain is really prone to immersion.

I don't think it's specific to games. After I spend a whole day gardening, whenever I close my eyes, I see weeds, plants, etc. vividly. It just must be something monotonous.

Used to happen to me when I played a lot of tetris on the gameboy back in the day. When reading any books afterwards I would see the tetronimoes slotting in the spaces between the lines of sentences and words. Goldeneye (N64) had me eyeing security cameras in the real world and making silencer noises in my head for quite a while too.

Spend enough time in virtual worlds, especially (near-) photo realistic ones, and for some people, what's real / what's virtual may start to blur. Or aspects from the game leak into real life. Creepy indeed.

Although not quite what's discussed in the article, reminds me of the movie eXistenZ (1999). Well worth a watch if you don't know this one.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/

The fastest way to experience this phenomenon is by playing the Touhou games. After a few hours of gameplay, closing your eyes will almost guarantee that you’ll see bullet patterns unfolding in the static behind your eyelids.

> she was imagining peering at products on the shelves through a rifle scope.

> "I thought, 'Wow! This is interesting'," she recalls.

Yeah! That was my reaction too. It is not "unpleasant". Maybe "unsettling", I'm not sure, but it is a very interesting experience. I got it twice, one time with a computer game, and the other it was a geometry problem that did this to me. The second time was really mindblowing, because geometry provides not just a way to see the world, but also a way to think about it. To see my regular everyday thoughts and reactions to external stimuli expressed in geometric terms (with diagrams, additional constructions, and so on) is something that is hard to describe. But it was that experience which made me believe that our thoughts as we experience them are lies. Real thinking is done somehow deep in the mind, while consciously we see some representation of the process. The representations can be different for the same thought, it doesn't change the thought itself, nor its conclusions.

Pity, I can't trigger this Game Transfer Phenomenon anytime I want. I'd like to see in my mind a geometric proof that I want exactly two teaspoons of sugar in my cup of coffee. Or maybe a program in Rust that somehow implies that.

Had to remember not to drive after playing GTA back in the day!

I've experienced this before - not only with games such as Tetris (I could "feel" my brian working in a different way) - but also with looking at trees etc when engrossed in Lindenmayer Systems [1] that I was working with at the time.

I assumed it was basically something along the lines of your brian adapting to a "new" reality/situation and engaging the pattern-matching parts that work best for the challenge at hand. Then afterwards it remains on just in case you need it again, like a warm boot.

As I type about it, I realize it likely has relation to things like anxiety - useful in some situations (such as actual danger) but remains "on" when it doesn't have to and becomes intrusive.

> Ortiz de Gortari's studies suggest that GTP induces distress and dysfunction for around half of those gamers who say they have experienced it, with confusion, hyper-vigilance and irrationality among the symptoms. For others the only notable response may be a feeling of embarrassment that their game-play has spilled over into "real life".

Can anybody here relate to these negative reactions? For me, the tetris effect only causes mild amusement, not embarrassment or worse. It kind of seems like she's playing up the supposed harm to make her research sound more important.

I'm not really a gamer, but I experienced something maybe similar with the ipad. When I first got one, of course, I was reading news and swiping away and it was completely natural.

Then I'd go to a restaurant and when reading the menu, I'd start swiping at the paper or vinyl menus like it was a tablet. It's a curious phenomena to have that brand new tablet gesture overtake decades of behaviors and perceptions with real paper.

Kudos to Apple, I guess.

A while back, I saw "Pervasive Games" in the bookstore and bought it.

Pervasive Games 2009

Edited by: Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waern

Description:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123748539/pervasive-g...

Reviews:

https://pervasivegames.wordpress.com/

When watching 24 season 9, I saw Catelyn Stark sick a horde of dragons (drones) on King's Landing (London) to avenge the murder of her husband Eddard.

My fanciful mind makes me mix series, movies and games with each other and reality in my head, just as a point of entertainment. I do miss the Monster Truck from GTA San Andreas when stuck in traffic but so far I've managed to behave in a civilized manner.

I dream vividly and extensively every night such that sometimes my memories of the dream content start to displace older real memories

Hopkins-Brie Ontology Syndrome (usually just called Hopkins-Brie Syndrome) is a mental illness caused by overexposure to virtual reality, in which the sufferer becomes increasingly unable to distinguish between the real world and the virtual world.

I remember this happening to me after playing King's Quest IV. It was due to the way you interacted with the graphics. I would want to interact with real world objects as I did with the game objects.

As a fan of Puzzle and Dragons and a semi-regular commuter, I can never not see the Moquette patterns used on some of the London Underground lines as orbs that need re-arranging to make combos.

I have one anecdote of such thing happening. After intense evening session of The Witness, I had very surreal dream made of brightly colored grids, lines and geometric shapes. Wild experience

I’ve definitely had it bleed into dreams but nothing awake yet. Didn’t even know that’s possible. Seeing health bars above people’s heads is wild

We don't even need video games for freaky and unpleasant now, just run-of-the-mill politicians. That's what progress means these days.

I played the original Civilization until I thought of walking and having a conversation as taking turns. This must have been ~1994-1995 :P

> "Game Transfer Phenomenon"

There was a phrase for this in the "old days" too, it was called "Lost in Make Believe".

As pointed out in numerous other comments, this phenomenon is not limited to video games. It can also happen after seeing movies, or even reading books. Especially with long series of books, I knew several people in high school who started living "The Lord of the Rings" and even "Clockwork Orange".

There are significant differences though:

1) As mentioned in the article: the extreme realism of video games

2) Often under emphasized: the amount of a person's waking hours spent in the activity

3) Of very serious consequences, i.e. modern incel-ism: the extreme violence of many video games

4) Something certain to get me downvoted: the significantly increased susceptibility to "Lost in Make Believe" of people raised in the internet/"phone" era (this point is very intertwined with point 2)

I can see how these factors can cause the "Lost in Make Believe" phenomenon to be much more serious with a modern gamu than with previous media. The extreme violence is certainly not unique to games either, books and movies also exhibit it, and bad behavior from role playing Clockwork Orange could rival Grand Theft Auto in some people.

I'm disappointed that the term "Tetris effect" [1] was not mentioned in the article. It's not a particularly new phenomenon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect