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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

When computer games alter your perception of non-game reality

All Acting Regiment

14:27 / 05.12.05

Earlier, I saw one of my mates moving around across the upstairs gallery in my university building. My first thought was not to run and say "hi". No, I thought: press b to use the binoculars to get a track on his movements, and then drop to the floor using b and right click to target the sniper rifle on him. Press + to zoom in a couple of times, and when he's right in the crosshairs, piff bang and then make a getaway before his asshole buddies see the body.

Of course, I didn't really want to kill him with a sniper rifle. I was having a flashback to the previous night's Far Cry extravaganza. It wasn't the only one either- whenever I can't quite see something I now reflexively want to use the heat vision, and earlier I leaned round the corner of a doorway in my flatblock to see if there were any enemies waiting there.

Has anyone else experienced something simmilar?

14:39 / 05.12.05

In the past I've found myself driving a little fast if I'd just been playing a racing game. It was something that happened quite a lot when I first got my hands on Gran Turismo years ago but since then, it's never really been a problem.

It certainly adds some credence to the point some of the more sensational press makes about video games adversely affecting folks. I've always dismissed them out of hand never having had even the slightest urge to get into a fight after playing Tekken for hours but in retrospect, I suppose this is exactly the same thing here.

Mind you, that still doesn't explain my mates' vehement belief that he would be able to run along a wall after playing Prince of Persia : Sands of Time.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

17:05 / 05.12.05

In those far gone days which consisted of a combination of Quake and the wonderfully unreliable Windows '95 I did get to the point where I was starting to think whenever I did anything foolish in real life that I could just reload from the previous save and do whatever it was again. Things have never been quite as bad since.

17:08 / 05.12.05

The closest I've come is, after playing for so long time becomes meaningless, seeing the game under your 'lids when you close your eyes. I remember going to the loo after a long bout of Sim City 4 and seeing a spider's web of roadworks and building stretched out across the tiles, a jewel of the mind's eye. Glittering and obscene.

So, retina burn, or having my visual processes get clogged with game stuff is something that's quite common with me. Behaviour-wise? Nope. I never wanted to beat-up piss poor actors after watching Power Rangers, either.

17:33 / 05.12.05

After a few all-night multiplayer sessions on Tony Hawks 3 - taking it in turns, trying to beat each other's last high score - once led to me catching myself thinking about kickflipping onto the roadside curbs, then onto walls and telegraph wires that were going past when I was sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car.

I think it's only ever going to be the case that this sort of thing happens when the game in question has a certain fluidity of control to it - Prince of Persia is another good example. Letting you move a character around swiftly, elegantly, without ever having to pause for thought. That's how it seems to work for me, anyway. Maybe it's because I get a kick out of the whole 'flowing movement' thing outside of videogames - by the same token, it could be that games like Sim City (or puzzle games) have a similar effect on people whose brains are more tuned to tidying and ordering IRL.

Mister Six, whom all the girls

17:36 / 05.12.05

Every time I watch anything on TV and I see something from far away my right thumb twitches to zoom in.

Just to see what's coming, you know?

I'm not gonna kill 'em... just wanna see what level of health they're at... in case I have to.

17:52 / 05.12.05

Too much Age of Kings made my ex want to chop down all trees along the street. And I've experienced imaginary Tetris blocks falling to fill up real world doorways.

It's this type of thing that I think is the worst danger of games. That weird spaced, disconnected feeling after a long session, rather than any chance of game inspired violence.

18:27 / 05.12.05

I OD'd on Mechwarrior instead of doing my dissertation and had crosshair afterimages in the centre of my vision for days. And started walking around like I was a giant robot, and imagining proximity warnings and heat problems etc. etc.

19:00 / 05.12.05

skateboarding.

tony hawk's made my perception of the terrain shift quite dramatically. i would be skating, or even walking, and i would see impossibly large shit off which to 360 flip.
i would see things as polygon-based structures with artificially crafted lines and i have ever since caught the cityscapes around me filling out and reduilding in a neversoft style.

anyone who has wandered the streets of glasgow will know buchanan street and sauchiehall street. both of them have been given the most perfectmarble benches in the last few years; poppable if you are hangtime mental and grindable if you are super fearless. they are exactly the right length and just slippery enough to be perfect.
by st enoch there are more of them, and they have even built a huge semi circular bench out of the same stuff. kids do skate bits of it, but i cant help seeing myself grinding the whole thing salad, something not even rodney or the gonz could manage in real life.

the peak of my reality slippage was when i was in perth, WA. the top of the telstra building has a perfect quarter pipe launch that would land you neatly on one of three rooftops, one of which is sloping.
the only catch would be that it is at least thirty stories up and you'd have to make it at least a block and a half out to stick it.

there are other examples of the world reshaping itself as skate heaven, but for the most part its harmless fantasy on my part.

i havent really had the urge to drop in offa the roof of the st enoch centre or carve the M8's hills and banks, but i do see the lines in my head everytime i pass them.

murderous FPS and the like dont seem to make my trigger finger as itchy as tony makes me twitchy for some reason.

20:37 / 05.12.05

I've never had any actual altering of perception, but if I go into the city after playing any of the GTA games, there's an image in the back of my head of just hopping into a car and going. I've had the Tony Hawk thing going a bit too.

21:04 / 05.12.05

Too much SimCity makes me see hust how pretty real buildings are and how sharply defined their edges are.
Probably the worst (and, I believe, quite common) problem I've been afflicted with is after playing MUD for a long time. I tend to find myself thinking that "wh key0" will find my car keys for me. Something to do with the experience being unmoderated by graphics and going straight to the brain, I think, so the stupidity of it is unmoderated by the usual reality shields.

22:22 / 05.12.05

gee, can someone not give legba a gun with tab buttons or space bars...

'least, not near me...

but the phenomenon is not restricted to playing computer games. you immerse yourself in a world like middle earth, narnia or any other fictive place richly constructed, and the real world about you seems dull and you hope any moment a tree might offer you entwash, or a witch offer you turkish delight [mm, yes please!] and the universe is twisted an nth degree to one side... a bit of your head stays in the fantasy and there arises a conflict with reality - like being half asleep, only wide awake.

scary, what might be possible in this twisted brain state...

All Acting Regiment

00:40 / 06.12.05

gee, can someone not give legba a gun with tab buttons or space bars...

It's the left and right mouse buttons you want to worry about. One click to aim, one click to shoot. Hohoheehee.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

07:25 / 06.12.05

I dream I'm in games all the time... which is probably not good. I've also caught myself post-GTA-sesh scoping out cars that stop at traffic lights, thinking "well, the nearest cops are miles away, and they're not looking in this direction..."

And after spending far too many hours playing F.E.A.R. recently, there's a part of me that is always on the lookout for grenades bouncing down from above as I go up the stairs at work (I sometimes avoid the lift now, but that was after watching The Grudge... I'm far too suggestible to ALL types of media for my own good, it would seem).

There's a big difference between letting the playful side of my mind think about this stuff and actually coming anywhere close to doing it, though. That's quite interesting in itself, I reckon.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

07:27 / 06.12.05

Oh, and The Sims- totally. When I was thoroughly immersed in the first one I was constantly picturing the bars over my head- "I need food THIS much, I need to go for a piss THIS much, I need to have THIS much more fun"... that was a bit weird, I'll admit.

09:46 / 06.12.05

It has to be spatial things that stick in my mind - puzzle games (tetris particularly, but lumines, columns, or anything else like that) have my mind trying to arrange real-world objects in the correct way for the puzzle. When you look away from the game and realise you're trying to fit your SO in with all the rest of the furniture in as small a space as possible, you know you've been playing too much tetris (though this did turn out to be good training for my most recent visit to Ikea).

When I used to play FPS games a lot (Counter-Strike in particular), I became aware of cover and exposed areas of the street - By habit I'd walk behind things, close to cover, and make sure that I wasn't exposed to any good sniping spots or large amounts of windows. It's either warn off now, or become such habit that I no longer notice it.

11:23 / 06.12.05

Having suffered horrendously long car journeys to France with my family as a kid, there were a few choices to alleviate the boredom

1. Listen to my Dad's Fleetwood mac and Dire Straits tapes
2. Play Tetris on the gameboy.
3. Read - this made me car sick though

I played Tetris so much that I ended up dreaming I was playing the game. A convoluted mess of a version of the game. The blocks made no sense, came in the wrong order (at least, they bore no relation to the next block proeview) and didn't fit properly. I'd wake up reasonably confused and try and get back to sleep, and no sooner had my eyes shut than another round of BonkersTetris had started. I packed it in for the rest of the holiday and decided to put up with my dad's tape selections.

More recently, Lumines started doing the same thing. That's been consigned to a drawer for a while as well.

13:00 / 06.12.05

I'm sure there are more, but I can only think of one:

During the first time I played System Shock 2 I noticed myself avoiding security cameras around Glasgow.

13:52 / 06.12.05

I had terrible trouble with Thief a couple years back. Whenever I heard anyone whistling I had to stop myself leaping forward and cracking them on the back of the head! Oh and accidentally referring to people as 'taffers'.

More generally though, a lot of Looking Glass games had this effect, especially System Shock 2. I think it had a lot to do with the atmospheric sound, and the very clever way they linked it to the game world. Footsteps, random small-talk, draughts of wind and the humming of computer panels. Incidentally, whatever happened to Warren Spector?

14:03 / 06.12.05

I remember after some marathon Civ sessions I had dreams where everyone moved one tile at a time in one of 8 directions.
The only similar thing is after playing Spiderman when walking through the city I used to imagine how I would web-swing my way around, but that is more idle day-dreaming than altering my perception of reality.

15:06 / 06.12.05

A friend once told me a funny story that happened during a driver's education class after he had been playing a lot of GTA 3. He was riding in the backseat while another student was driving, and the instructor was in the passenger seat; my friend saw an overpass and casually remarked, "That would be a great place to throw Molotov cocktails!" Of course, he immediately realized what he'd just said and was terrified, but the other two people never said anything about it.

rising and revolving

19:40 / 06.12.05

As an amusing side note to this, when I was working for Ubisoft Montreal (the Splinter Cell studio) it was shortly after a bunch of people defected to the newly formed EA Montreal with a bunch of assets. So, they'd basically put in place an obscene security system - cameras in the hallways, card operated turnstiles etc etc.

The thing is, working on SCIII at the time, and working with a group of level designers it was pretty much our full time day job to work out how to circumvent these things. After all, that's what Splinter Cell is all about.

This made "How do you avoid this set of security?" the lunchtime game of choice for the level design team. And the whole security measures irrelevant. Set a thief to catch a thief, for sure ... but don't lock your locksmiths up with the locks they designed...

23:06 / 06.12.05

I discovered that it was in everybody's best interest if I didn't play GL Tron before driving home when I caught myself trying to get ahead of the sonofabitch on my left so I could swerve in front of him in order to make him smash into my light trail.

My car doesn't make a light trail.

It's a good bet that the person driving on my left was, in fact, a sonofabitch.

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

23:25 / 06.12.05

Ha. Glad to see the skateboarding mentions here...

It seems Tony Hawks has given skateboarding minds to many who probably wouldn't have pondered whether you could grind that rail in the shopping centre or not previously, and made those that probably did slightly more suicidal in their imagining of great skate lines.

I always liked that about skateboarding in reality, anyway. Looking at things a bit differently, getting excited by certain pieces of architecture, appreciating the, y'know urban environment and like, finding a use for it maaan. Totally like, putting meaning on to the soulless media culture which surrounds us dude! Because it would be awesome to wallride up, like, sick! Sticking it to the man! I take your stale landscape and make it REAL FOR ME! Pretentious, possibly. Fun and interesting also, oh yes.

Truth be told, I was thinking about doing skate combos from the passenger seat of a car long before Tony's, and in fact, in a sense - long before I knew about skateboarding. I used to imagine Spider-Man performing ridiculous web combos and flips from trees and telegraph wires and the like.

And there was that time I made a bow and arrow in the garden and wore a green hat. Robin Hood? Fuck off. Dude didn't have pixie ears and an ocarina.

01:20 / 07.12.05

That's interesting, though - Zelda's always been put forwards as Miyamoto's attempt to recreate the games he used to play as a kid, going off on an adventure in a park or a garden and discovering holes and hidden grottos along the way. If you were then reliving your experiences with the Zelda games when you were younger, the whole thing's come full circle.