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..
The realisation of what I was doing snapped me back to proper conscious reality like smelling salts. Thankfully / Luckily.
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 had a strange drive home after, not speed, but the trees didn't seem real, the sky, everything was heightened, almost dreamlike. It had rained too, so there was some more similarity to the movie, minus the car chases and rollovers.
constantly, nearly subconsciously looking for framing elements, or hard edges in a scene that is mostly lit by diffuse light, etc
I think the effect was the strongest for me after that graphics programming actually - probably because I obsessed over such small detail for so long, and I played with fine-tuning the variables, so my brain constructed a model for it inside :)
It's not exactly that I "see" the healthbars or the ball trajectory, or the tree outlines on the same rights that I can see real things - it's like it's on another switchable layer.
Like when you see someone and imagine they have wings - it's not that you actually see the wings, but you can see them in your minds eye superimposed on that person in real-time. This "additional layer" is independent and can be turned on/off for me.
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!)
Driving was the first thing that came to my mind. It's also dangerous to drive when tired, distracted, drunk, or one of a hundred other conditions. Yet somehow GTP is portrayed as the problem here when, in fact, driving a car is simply one of the most dangerous daily activities, even absurdly dangerous compared to other tasks.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
Pervasive Games 2009
Edited by: Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waern
Description:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123748539/pervasive-g...
Reviews:
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.
With the pervasive rise of deepfakes, generative AI based content and the overall volume of 'slop' across social media and video sharing in general, distinguishing between the real world and the virtual world already feels like it's becoming increasingly difficult.
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.
