When I got hooked on Morrowind in middle school it occurred to me to quicksave before a test at school.
What’s yours?
That is a pretty bad description of the Tetris effect. Also incredibly misleading. The very short description from Wikipedia reads:
The Tetris effect occurs when someone dedicates vast amounts of time, effort and concentration on an activity which thereby alters their thoughts, experiences, dreams, and so on.
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Sounds pretty accurate to me. The phenomenon op is asking about is a facet of that effect.
Really? “Urge to do moves/actions from it in real life” is the same as thinking or dreaming about it?
From my experience with the Tetris effect, not one occurrence fits his description, but I experience the Tetris effect in most weeks in my life. That’s why it feels like such a disconnected description for me.
I agree they’re not 1:1 but imo you can’t feel the “actions in real life” part without being heavily incepted by a video game’s loops, like in your thoughts and dreams.
But I get it a lot less because I don’t game as much these days
My dad found a OG gameboy in a train when I was a kid so when I actually played tetris lol. Close my eyes and see the bricks fall. (which is what the tetris effect is.)
Then I had it with Mario Kart, close my eyes and see the track move.
And the weirdest thing is when I finally got properly used to vr and played 3 hours of half-life: Alyx straight. I had to physically touch a wall to convince a part of my mind that this was real life, and not vr.
Played a lot of minecraft and then took a walk. There was something behind some trees I wanted to check out but it was fairly large so I thought “I should just switch into creative mode and fly over there to get a better view”
I dream about the motion of inserters. My mind sees the assemblers’ animation loop in inanimate objects. The biters swarm at the edges of my vision. I hear the alert that they’re attacking when I’m in my kitchen. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
I always feel like I should throw a turtle shell at the idiot driving in front of me
VRChat of all things. I have caught myself a few times doing the various finger gestures used to control expressions.
Deep Rock Galactic. I kept wanting to toss a flare anytime I walked into a dark room.
“A flare”?! So you don’t throw 3 flares in rapid succession and then complain that flares take too long to recharge? Just me? …okay.
I got access to a really nice VR system through work and binged through Half Life Alyx. I was in a room that was large enough to walk around in, but for larger moves you use the controller to teleport a short distance. Also you can gravity attract items within a few yards with your gloves.
After playing the first time I went to cook dinner and got embarrassingly frustrated when I tried to summon a spoon with a hand gesture.
Yes! The telestep-urge happened to me with RE4 VR. I was trying to move around my house with my thumb!
When I caught myself planning exactly how I’d scale that building wall, AC style.
When I visited Italy for the first (and last) time a few years back, I kept thinking the same!
ah yes haha, rings a bell ! gothic churches especially have a ton of protruding, grabbable details
Yep, I do remember this with AC. I posted about the one that hit me harder, which was Crackdown.
If I spent a lot of time training I could theoretically move similarly to the characters in AC. No matter how much training I do I’ll never be able to leap multiple stories in one jump up.
GTA when I saw a school bus
Having grown up on Sierra adventure games, I still have a part of my brain thinking about saving and loading in bad situations from time to time.
Not exactly the same thing, but when I got my first VR HMD, for about two weeks afterwards I had to fight the urge that my real hands were the fake ones rather than the ones I would see in VR. Supposedly it’s something like 25% of first time VR users who get a similar feeling, but it didn’t make me feel any better about it. Never happened again, even with how rare I play VR games, but it was rather off-putting.
Oh just thought of another one: when I was playing WoW back in 2005, I got so into it that it was effecting everything. My social life died and it was effecting work enough that my boss had to have a long convo with me to get my shit together. But what really made me realize how bad it had gotten was having dreams where dialog with people I knew IRL was all in text and I would have to type responses to people when face to face with them.
This is a really common experience for a ton of VR gamers. The thing I remember the most is how white text on a black background (usually my phone) made it seem like the text was really 3D and coming out at me. It fades away but I’m sure we’re going to find out some interesting things about the brain from this phenomenon.
I had been playing Minecraft back in the Technic modding era, lots of item tubes and machine blocks, and I remember looking at my actual real life washing machine and thinking “I bet I could use a wooden pipe to extract that into the dryer”
Not a video game - after using OneNote on an iPad with a stylus for a lot of time, going back to using paper I tried to undo pencil strokes very often at first.
I think it was Tomb Raider 2, one of the first games I played. The character movements were so etched in me, I began viewing the world subdivided in blocks, small steps and large steps
