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

bbc.com

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

#51

Post by crtasm »

spacechild1 wrote: post #19
mojo74 wrote: post #5

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.

> Used to happen to me when I played a lot of tetris on the gameboy back in the day. Apparently, GTP has been particularly pronounced with Tetris and is therefore also known as "Tetris effect" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect ). This also shows that this is not a recent phenomenon. I was surprised that the article didn't mention Tetris at all.

PBF has an excellent comic on this https://pbfcomics.com/comics/game-boy/

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

#52

Post by dmos62 »

lupusreal wrote: post #50
dmos62 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this most vividly with kayaking. I'd slowly fall asleep rocking in the river, paying background-attention to keep balance in the kayak, even though I was in my bed or in a tent on shore. I'd then also dream about floating in the kayak.

Sounds like a variation of "sea legs". Standing on land after some time on a rocking ship very often produces an odd sensation of the land moving.

I get that with a treadmill as well.

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

#53

Post by BrandoElFollito »

wantoncl wrote: post #47
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving home after an almost-all-nighter LAN in the Quake 2 (maybe Quake 3) days, I nearly changed lines to line up a rail shot at a car up ahead. The realisation of what I was doing snapped me back to proper conscious reality like smelling salts. Thankfully / Luckily.

This reminds me of driving home after seeing The Matrix in the theater in 1999. I was on the parkway wondering why everything was moving so slowly, not quite bullet time but definitely slow. I look at the speedometer and I'm doing 95-100 mph on Southern State Parkway. I then had the "snap" and slowed back to normal. Everything felt even slower, the sensation lasted for about an hour after I got home. Inception also h…

Apparently you should take the public transport it a taxi when going to the cinema :)

But I had similar sensations after Matrix, fortunately I was walking back home.

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

#54

Post by dusted »

evertedsphere wrote: post #15
dusted wrote: post #11

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 o…

if you spend a lot of time on photography or visual art it affects your visual perception quite a bit in a fun way constantly, nearly subconsciously looking for framing elements, or hard edges in a scene that is mostly lit by diffuse light, etc

Photography is a hobby of mine, and this is definitely another situation where I feel this influence strongly as well!

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

#56

Post by johnea »

> "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.

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