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Too Much Gaming, Anyone?
Nrik noted a wired story about too much gaming and how sometimes a few too many hours of gaming can cause your mind to blur some lines. For me it was Tony Hawk- I played so much that I started sizing up curbs for grinding while driving home from work. Katamari Damacy has been a problem too. I'm fairly certain my car is large enough to pick up the railings on the overpass near my house. I'm even more certain that these thoughts are bad.
God Bless Katamari!
For me it's the Thief series of games. I've been walking behind people and thought "I could blackjack him/her..." Don't call the guys in white coats, though, I've never lurked in shadows while wearing a black cape or muttered about "Keepers".
Trolling is a art,
I knew I was playing too much Armagetron when I kept scraping along the walls of my house to gain speed.
i remember playing tetris as a kid and seeing a skyling and sizing it up to see how the tetris pieces would fit into them.
that was 10 years ago. i still i feel i do that now.
Is it just me, or has GTA clouded the minds of others as well?
when you strafe around corners in the old office building
TI-85 Calculator Tetris.
I saw shapes falling everytime I blinked for quite a while.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I know I've had too much Quake III, when often used to dream of insagibbing my friends.
Although good dreams, I knew I needed to back off a bit.
thelikesofwhich.com
I see a firetruck and my fingers start twitching at the thought of taking it for myself.
I think everyone who's ever played Tony Hawk has done that...
Anyway, it's when you start having dreams about gaming that it maybe too much. But then again when you're dreaming, maybe you just haven't played enough?
This is a paradoxial world we live in isn't it?
FP!
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
as long as you don't start killing prostitutes with baseball bats to get your money back!
this happens to me all the time. i can hardly fly for ten minutes in my tie fighter before i think that i'm in a star wars game....
/* No Comment */
This started for me when I was heavily addicted to Quake. Red city post boxes looked like the 666, and some other obscure street items looked like the invis. Wondering now, perhaps the success to addictive gaming is centered around the similarities between the game you're designing and common items in daily living.
Playing Jeff Minter games in interesting states of head is exceptionally bad for you. My minds eye was full of Gridrunner++ like closed eye visuals for days!
Even worse was when I went on a burnout 3 binge. I would pull alongside a tanker trailer and start calculating the best angle to hit it so that i could bounce over the median into oncoming traffic.
It certainly did change my temporary assesment of situations.
Half-Life has forced me to keep myself and crowbars away from men wearing blue shirts and kevlar. :)
Every time I get in my car, I look down at my parking brake and think Carmageddon. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed to drive...
In addition to attempting to blow someone away with a nearby shopping cart at the grocery store while reaching for a flag wrapped in plastic I have been told I say, "owned" entirely too much.
Bah. If only I could grapple to work.
Too much gaming definitely caused me problems, for example I find it hard to focus after several hours because my wife is yelling at me.
I have to resist the urge to try and toss out weblines and swing around on the buildings near me.
It is kind of freaky.
Programming is simply the application of logic to creativity
I keep on dreaming about the games during day and night and keep wondering I am one of the characters. Way too disturbing when you wake up from sleep and you are tired of all the dream gaming!!
Nothing quite like sizing random furniture to fit between other furniture, then expecting it to blink, bloop, and points to be added to my hud on the top right.
Now, don't get me started about my dreams^H^H^H^H^H^Hnightmares.
- shazow
My girlfriend and I were so obsessed with trying to catch every fish and insect in Animal Crossing on the Gamecube, that we once saw a Butterfly go by in the park and wondered "if we had that one" ...
Games like Need for Speed are what get me. A car cuts me off on my way to work and the first thought that goes thru my mind is to run them off the road... that cannot be good....
All I wanted for Christmas was knowledge of where the respawn point is and how to quick save before doing something stupid...
Morale seems good, considering, although high spirits are just no substitute for eight hundred rounds a minute
Yes... working 16 hour days at my last job, we would sit and play xbox (tony hawk 4) for half hour at a time...
now being sleep deprived, over worked, and only having Tony Hawk 4 as an escape, on my walks home from work I would actually attempt to grind curbs (but I didn't have a skateboard)... resulting in some nice injury... I believe that is the definition of too much gaming... or is it too little intelligence... not sure...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
For days on end I was passing my hand over everything in the hopes of it unlocking a door or passage way.
For me, it was when I was at the mall with my girlfriend and we were passing under a 15 foot overpass and my initial thought was "I think I could rocket jump onto that". I knew then I needed serious counselling.
The first page, the very first page...
Yeah, the line blurs for me too... but I only play the Leisure Suit Larry games
This coupled with reading slashdot explain a lot.
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
Years ago now, when I got my first console (N64) with my first game (Diddy Kong Racing) I used to wish I had some of the missiles in the game to shoot at slow walking people. Not for violent reasons mind, just so they'd fly up in the air and I could walk undeneath them and get home a bit quicker.
Whenever I'm at the cinema, I always expect someone to jump out of the projectionist's window, blast a hole in the screen and run through it...
-- Steve
I can remember playing so much starcrack, that I couldn't close my eyes without seeing Zerg prancing around.
Little zergs scratching at the door.
Little zergs digging holes.
little zergs racing across the landscape.
It was wonderful.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
starting to become a fantasy on every commute when Crazy Taxi came out for the DreamCast. I looked at every traffic jam as an exercise in planning the best route, including a jaunt down the ravine behind my workplace to "drop off passengers" faster at work each morning.
Don't do it!
More
When I see a crowd of kids/ppl standing in a parking lot, I think about positioning for area attacks based on surrounding architecture and the shape of their group.
I also marvel at how long it takes to get around cities without superspeed (basically the ability to run 60 mph all the time)
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
"I've been using the computer for so long, and command-Z works for undo in all the software programs," Hoffman said. "So whenever I find something in my life that I want to undo, I reach for the command-Z keys and I find it weird that it doesn't work."
You need a fucking vacation. NOW.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
...caused me to start ducking down behind hills whenever I walked behind them. It also made me really good at spotting human-shaped targets...I mean people.
Well my current obsession is World of warcrack. My friends and I play quiet a bit and its bad since we spend a good deal of time in class talking about it and such. Now that I have a laptop will only make it worse since I can play in class...
Mostly it was Tetris Attack for the SNES for me. When I played a lot of that there were tiles in the bathroom that I kept rearanging in my head to make matches like in the game.
We won't talk about what too much Goldeneye made me think.
Oh, for some select modifications to my car! Making tailgaters slide of the road would be so much more fun than slowing down just to piss them off...
And how about some rocket launchers, too, for the morons that happen to be in front?
Too much Doom had me scared in the office.
Too much Quake2 had me strafing around corners (still do this a bit).
Too much Asheron's Call had me jumpy just from being outdoors (what was THAT? Oh, just a log, not a golem).
Too much Liesure Suit Larry, and I... nevermind.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
After playing many many hours of GTA3 I've found myself out sizing up cars, thinking I could go yank some guy out of it and take off. One day I was walking up the street and came across a car that looked really fast and I had to stop my self from going up and trying the doors.
GTA3 and above have to be the worst, just because it simulates doing crimes in the real world. Most other games are modeled in a fake place, somewhere there is no real parallel to here in the real world.
God, root, what is the difference?
I remember lying in bed trying to fall asleep with my head full of strategies for civilization. What units to build, what technologies to pursue.
;-)
More recently I've been having trouble letting Counter-strike go. Trying to work out attack and defence patterns.
Luckily, I haven't had problems keeping the real world and the game separated. Like having thoughts about sneaking up on people with a military grade blade trying to score another head shot... uhm, except maybe for... nevermind
With enough hours of Tetris or Zuma, the moment I close my eyes I can act as a living computer and see complete matches of these games to the tiniest detail displayed in the darkness.
Then I decided it was probably time to pay attention to the road and take a break from black and white.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
This happened for me with DaggerFall whenever I would hear a door creak open... But this should have a term associated with it. Say: gamebulist (from somnambulist and game)
After playing for a few weeks I started suffering from the delusion that if I joined an army, they would give me a gun and actually let me kill people! With no repercussions! I know it is crazy talk, but it's true. I had to put it away just to stay safe.
At least the versions where it was mostly just skating and not a 'World Desturction Tour".
Go get a board (or a bmx bike) and some safety gear and start taking your video game obsession to the next level!
The problem I have when I play Civ3 to much is I have a hard time getting propper sleep. After three hours of gaming I can't get the map out of my head, which takes me for ever to get to sleep. When I do get to sleep I have fuzzy dreams about playing Civ3, and when I wake up I donot feel very rested.
;)
And yes... after played GTA3 for the first time I thought about obtaining the FBI car while driving. This was a one time thing and after another play session I was desesitized. Maybe the problem with some people is that they didn't play long enough
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
We is was younger i played ALOT of transport tycoon. After 14 hours strait I started laying rails on the tiles in the bathroom in my mind. Cool games though, try OpenTTD.
"For me it was Tony Hawk- I played so much that I started sizing up curbs for grinding while driving home from work."
Thank god I'm not the only one. There are some bitchin' air transfer gaps into my bath tub, too.
DDR arrows are also the bane of my existence. Lying in bed with arrows scrolling past your eyelids is one thing, but when your legs start twitching instinctively at the sight...
Would evaluate people in a grocery line
Wonder why muds don't have grocery stores or shopping centers, maybe a Darth Mall...
Think about wearing a robe, until I realize I'd always be tripping on it, unlike in the mud where my 18 dex seemed to prevent such pratfalls.
Think reality is just too weird.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The Real World Doesn't have Respawn.
http://hughgordon.com/
What, you mean that when I see a red hue over the bumper of the car infront of me I *do not* have SRM lock on them?
Of course, I usually glance for their tires since all overflow damage doubles & goes internal...
"Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun."
I would take a break for a while, and head up to the store to get some snacks and a pack of smokes. I always had the urge to go to the counter and say "vendor buy." Good thing I never actually said it, I can't imagine the looks I would have got.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
After a semester of living in the dorms and playing lots of Death Track (weaponized racing game), I get into a real car for the first time in a while. As I pull out of the lot onto the road, I see spy a car in my rear view mirror. First thought that comes to mind- Deploy caltrops!
That's the same thing I told the judge this morning.
This is my one post.
After getting heavily into Half Life 2, I started strafing around corners, wondering if there were headcrabs behind trash cans and cardboard boxes, and basically looking for objects that I could pick up and throw at people if I needed to!
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
I've found that it can be dangerous to drive after playing GTA for a few hours. More precisely, it can be dangerous to be a motorcyclist on the same road with me after I've played GTA. It's just so fun to give them a little bump and send the riders flying!
Shades of Grayden
Sounds like Nrik didn't participate in one of the past polls: When Do You Know You Play Too Many Video Games
I know that after playing 6 hours of WoW and stopping at 4 a.m. I dream about levelling up and gaining items. The issue is, my mind believes that I HAVE gained levels and I DO have the new items. I am sadly mistaken when I play again.
You whipper snappers with yer new fangeled 3-D games. Try a game that repeats itself exactly the same way (with very little variation) like old school coin-ops. I remember sitting in the back of class working on my PacMan moves. For me, it was the audio of those games. Who could forget the PacMan 'death', the Galaga 'yellow ship tractor beam', the sound of the Defender ship blowing things up, or the relentlessness of Space Invaders.
They still haunt me.
Seems like a large portion of people commenting so far have (fond?) memories of Tetris completely taking over. I haven't played Tetris in years and I can still conjure up games in my head.
I know also that I became really suspicious about social interactions while I was playing the Sims. I'd talk to people and know they were just doing it so their social meter would rise, and would leave feeling used and resentful. It was really terrible, because while it's generally not so hard to curb violent impulses, I started feeling like none of the people who talked to me throughout the course of the day actually had any regard for me and get really discontented.
This is honestly like almost any other phenomenon... If we do something enough, we start thinking of the world in those terms. If you do art, you begin to see things as an artist does... Colors, relationships of spaces, etc.
By no means is this limited to gaming, and it's also what makes interactivity such a powerful tool for learning. Most people I know prefer to learn by doing. Doing in a properly engineered virtual world is a great way to prepare people for doing in the real world. That's what simulations are all about... And most games are simulations.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
during the height of my minesweeper addiction, I would play imaginary games for hours in a semi-sleep state. Then I started wondering if the games I was playing actually made sense. ie...were the formations I was clicking actually valid, or was I just making it up as I went along, and not actually following any rules...since i didn't really ever hit a mine, I think it was all bogus.
I was having dreams of those pointy headed guys running around my house... when I woke up and for about 5 seconds I thought I saw one... must have been that cheese steak I ate before bedtime.
Fear Is the Only God
After an intense session of Burn-out 3, I was driving to pick the wife up from work. Comming up on a sharp intersection, I instinctively reached for the e-brake, ready to power slide around the 90degree turn at 50mph. Luckily I caught myself, but it gave me quite a scare.
"For me it was Tony Hawk- I played so much that I started sizing up curbs for grinding while driving home from work."
if you skate already you tend to do this all the time. never has impared my every day functioning.
A few years back I went on a bender with some old Sierra collections (Space Quest, Police Quest and the like). For days afterwards, I would find myself usually in the car, contemplating a dangerous manuever like pulling out into traffic, and telling myself if I crashed I could just restore my last save.
It's kind of a scary feeling when you realize what's going on.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
I'd say it's pretty bad when you hear a techno tune, close your eyes and you can just see the arrows...
I remember the first time I played Crazy Taxi in the arcade. It was one of the machines where you sit down at the wheel and go nuts. After playing for a couple hours I hopped in my car and almost killed myself. It turns out you can do "Crazy Drifts" in a Buick.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
Do I need to kneel, or even lie on my stomach to make this shot?
Ghost Recon can do this to you. Every person is a potential target. Too bad there's no IFF IRL...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
liek sometimes when i play a game and there are interesting stories on it i then goto sites like slashdot and expect to see the same.
Talk about a slow day in the news.
A few years back there was a pretty sick game called "Postal", where you basically went around killing people in lots of twisted ways. Your arsenal included the usual pistols, shotguns, etc, but also a moltov cocktail that I could never really find a good use for on any the levels.
Until... the "Marching Band" level (cue nefarious laugh) If you lobbed the flaming moltov cocktail just right into the marching band you'd set a bunch of the band on fire, who who begin flailing and screaming, setting other band players alight in the process. At no other point in the game could you take out so many so quickly, with such panache.
Ever since then I've always cast a curious eye towards the (albeit few) marching bands I've seen, thinking, "hmmm.. that Tuba guy really looks annoying.. where's a moltov when you need it?"
Puts a whole new spin on "this one time, at band camp.."
12 years ago, we used to play battlezone on our SGI workstations in darkened offices during lunch hour. I remember having trouble negotiating corners when walking down the hallway immediately afterwards, constantly trying to do it in efficient curves and back and forth movements, and trying to stay on the sides, behind bookcases, to avoid being "seen".
I used to hear the music even when I wasn't playing the game. Yea you can play a game too much.
you already posted it
I realised I was playing too much GTA-VC when I was driving aroudn the town and wanted to crush hookers and bitches, when I heard some of that evil 80's music bullshit I wanted to beat up some idiot fuck ass... whenever I saw a whore I wanted to rape her, throw her out of my car and then beat her shit up and get my fucking money back... After hours of gaming...And oh well... I remained violent, and I'm talking posting the Puerto Rican county jail...
WARNING: DO NOT LET DR. MARIO TOUCH YOUR GENITALS. HE IS NOT A REAL DOCTOR!
I always thought I had been doing too much gaming when I started dreaming the games. I guess have it leak into "real life" is one step beyond where I consider too much and time for a break.
"It is not my intent to offend, but if offense is taken, the fault lies with the audience." attributed to Patrick Henry
Waaay back in grad school, the original Diablo. The console bar + blue/red orbs... I found I was subbing those into my peripheral when later using Solaris in the lab (with the desktop manager at the bottom). I caught myself trying to check the red ball when I got tired.
While I can understand that things in the real world might make you reminisce about something you saw/did in game, does it really get to the point where you can't tell whether you are in-game or not? Not very plausible (unless you've played for like 48 hours straight, in which case its not the gaming but the fatigue) This story sounds like they are trying to make another "gaming is bad for you because..." argument.
A year ago when Vice City was the hot GTA title, I went driving with my girlfriend and she asked if I would change the radio to K-CHAT. I actually reached for the dial before we both realized that we had been spending a bit too much time playing/watching the game.
Shades of Grayden
Rush hour traffic is now a delight after a few hours of Burnout 3... you spend the entire ride plotting in your mind "If I just push the firetruck there... off the gas tanker, through those volvos, crashbreaker there..."
:)
Fun.
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
Try Carmageddon for size. Jeez, I'm glad I didn't have a license back then.
The game even invaded my dreams, so all night I was running over sheep (some prefer to just count them) and and frying people with the Zombie electro-bastard ray.
All rites reversed 2010
Something's not right... After every article that suggests game-players may be subconsciously influenced by their games, we're supposed to reply with outrage that "I can easily distinguish games from reality."
Yes sadly I no longer use that exclamation. My wife tells this story way too much.
Add me to the ranks of people who played Tetris waaaaay too much. Any time I'd close my eyes for an extended period of time I'd see the shapes falling. After Tetris came MUDs, where I'd play so much that I'd visualize myself typing whatever I was saying during normal conversations. A few times I actually caught myself attempting to type when I was nowhere near a keyboard.
Last Thursday I spent the entire day playing FFXI. When I finally went to sleep, my dreams all involved my normal party activities in the game.
After playing a few hours of the Need for Speed (any version) my '89 Subaru suddenly is a Ferrari and I'm weaving in and out of traffic, downshifting, going well over the speed limit, or at least as much as that tiny 4 will push.
After a few rounds on Socom Navy Seals II, I find myself thinking "That's a pretty good sniper spot." Good thing I don't own a rifle.
hack a day
About 15 years ago, I was a BIG tertis fan, playing it at any opportunity I could get on my amiga. Though it got to the point I saw, and played the game in my dreams while asleap.... aghhh.... and non of the pieces fited either.....At this point I decided to cut down a bit! :)
My girlfriend and I have been playing way too much katamari damashii. She makes the hand motions everywhere and always remarks where good places to increase the size of her katamari might be. For example last week at an escalator she thought that waiting at the top would be the best place as it supplied an infinite number of japanaese people (which are small). Also, here's a video of her playing katamari with my head: my head is the katamari
Anyone remembers the old Windows version ? I used to dream about arranging blocks after playing that for hours .
The first sign was when all of my free time was spent playing the game.
The second was when I neglected aspects of my life in order to play the game. (Skipped a class, was a no-show for a social engagement, et cetera.)
The third was when I looked forward to sleeping at the end of a night of gaming, because I could dream about the game.
The scariest thing was that I was playing Strawberry Shortcake Amazing Cookie Party. I didn't even know I needed help...
I don't think this is always bad. I consider flight sims to be an enjoyable genre to play, and it has the side benefit of reinforcing the stuff I need to know when piloting a real plane. This of course assumes that the sim is accurate, and most of 'em are pretty good at that. The benefit is that I can get a taste of what a situation might be like without the risk of doing it for real. Like instrument flying. I'd rather practice on the game a few hundred times before I bet my ass in the seat of a Cessna.
I did about a 2 week crunch on the game, staying up late to complete it. I got stuck on one of the levels where you had to shoot out all the security cameras without being detected. Of course, this was time based so you had to do it quickly.
Next morning I'm walking down the office hallway when I look up to see a security sensor and for a split second my body tensed up and I tried to react until my higher brain kicked in and went "whoa partner! This is *reality*"
Gave me a new appreciation for practicing and training for things.
I had this the other day with Progress Quest. I just kept expecting things to happen all by themselves. Too bad the dishes just kept staying there, and not being cleaned automatically just by watching at it. It is the most addictive game I've come by in recent time.
This article reminds me of the news stories about the effects of Doom on the guys who killed so many kids at Columbine.
While I do not, in any way, believe that this sort of thing could bring about a reduced culpability for crimes committed, I wonder if there was any truth to the news claims about a link between Doom and Columbine.
When visiting pretty medieval churches in Belgium or France i always imagine bouncing quake 1 style grenades off the walls.
Quake actually helped me appreciate their architecture.
Out of all my friends only myself and two or three others have not played MMOs. Actually I'm playing puzzle pirates, but I haven's signed in in months. Most of my friends are now addicted to WoW. It's really sad. People who used to come out and socialize all the time now sit and repeat monotonous computer inputs in order to increment some numbers in a database far far away. At least they are communicating in something like IRC with 3d avatars at the same time.
Someone really needs to make an MMO that isn't scientifically engineered to addict people and get them to keep paying monthly fees. Maybe one that's actually a good game would help too.
As far as I'm concerned too much gaming is when you take time away from other activities to do it. For example, right now most of my time is spent doing schoolwork, coding, eating, sleeping, cleaning, socilizing and otherwise maintaining life. Then subtract the time I use to read news, learn things, read things mostly on the internet but also books, etc. I don't watch tv so the rest of that time is spent watching DVDs, and playing games. If I start say subtracting time from sleep, eat or schoolwork to add it to game time, then we have a problem.
Oh well. 50 years from now when there are no more cigarettes or other companies selling addictive things, we'll go after the MMOs.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Note to self: Do not, while driving the car, describe to your girlfriend how easy it is in "Halo" to flip over a Warthog jeep.
after playing too much carmageddon (a really tasteless game where you overrun people with your car in a first-person perspective) I came to know its dangerous effects when considering while driving in RL how many points the inline skater at the side of the road would bring...
and after playing loads of "need for speed 2 underground" and flatout (also a racing game) which is especially fun on icy roads, i had to remind myself that i wasn't playing it anymore when really driving on ice covered roads after the game session! these things can get really dangerous when you overestimate your driving skills or the car configuration right after having played a racing game.
the effect usually fades within an hour or so, but technically it should be forbidden to drive just after having played a "realistic" car related game!
also, after many, many hours of counter strike i found myself checking out rooms for possible cover and would think ahead for strategies to use when ambushed. this was actually fun even in RL but without doubt shows how very attached one gets to the patterns learned during hours of continuing immersive gameplay!
jethr0
When I play too much Civ3, it isn't that I dream about it, no. I dream about normal stuff, except that these dreams become TURN BASED! Trust me, this is weird enough to try to slow down playing civ3.
perception is reality
All the replies so far seem to be talking about how the posters have been affected by gaming - so how come whenever a story comes up linking too much gaming with something bad we all jump on the "all sane people can keep games and reality separate" argument?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I remember a story that came out about somebody who did the "restore game" finger sequence after doing something embarrasing at work -- they had the same reaction I did -- time to give it up.
I'm still addicted to games, I just avoid ones that change my brain in such a noticeable fashion.
Seems to me, when you get that engrossed in a game... it affects your thinking that much (as in the Tony Hawk example) then there has been an excellently crafted game. Tony Hawk did it to me, along with games like Need for Speed, CS and others. Doesn't mean I think about speeding, or shooting people IRL - but it did change how I looked at enviroments.
Anyway, you don't have to spend a lot time gaming for an extremely well crafted game to change the way you look at the world. I think it just means the design team accomplished what they set out to. Create a fully engrossing enviroment.
I planned on inserting something witty here but never got around to it.
It hasn't happened since, even with possibly more hours logged in WoW, but I used to recreate the battles in War2 over and over again in my dreams. It was horrible, not because of the content, but because of the endless repitition. Like Groundhog Day, but with nothing I could change!
I think this was because of the challenge of the game. Your save game point would be at a certain place where you might have a very difficult time micromanaging all the tasks you had to do to win. RPGs have a more varied challenge and I think that the repetition is what triggered my brain to go a bit crazy.
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
I've found the PDA with access to the Slashdot site, the same lame trolls and demons are staggering around. BUT FINALLY A LEVEL I CAN SEE WHAT'S HAPPENING!!!
after reading some of the examples and realizing that I live in an area with three major colleges (housing who knows how many gamers) within 10 miles or so of each other... uhm, I'm not leaving the house anymore, and am instructing my wife to do the same.
--
There is no giant ball of tape - you have been lied to.
Could a person seeing violent behaviour in a game have one of these videogame intrusions and do something they might not normally do?
Or is it just the whackos who obsess over this shit? When I was in HS the original doom was the controversial game. We all played it, but only the weird ROTC kid with a gun rack in his truck (in california), the one who had that "im a crazy mofo" look in his eyes obsessed over it. Eventually he joined the marines so he could shoot at stuff legally...
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
The subject's a joke, but I've had dreams inspired of video games many times. I've been hooked more than once on games like MUDs, AC (Ashersons Call/Crack), Diablo II, Halflife, etc. I routinely have dreamed about these games. Killing Zombies in AC with my level 15 mage, or kill mephisto over and over again with my sorceress in Diablo.
This shit gets into your head and it won't come out. I lost a serious relationship due to AC, and I just kept playing. The game made reality seem harsh compared, even though I was getting beaten by monsters relentlessly.
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Guns in specialists mod often times have laser sights that project a red dot on the walls. Every time I'd see a hint of bright red out of my peripheral vision in real life I'd tense and prepare to spin around, dive (in slow motion), and blast the sucker with my deagle.
.... almost though...
Not that I ever actually did that
Photos.
Interesting how most people who have posted so far, have cleary admitted that too much gaming has affected their conscious thought processes. Although not to a point they have acted on it, what about others who "have" allowed it to affect their lives?
I'm sure many of you have said previously, that video games do not make people kill other people. But there is clear evidence here, that it CAN! The only difference is the level of self-immersion. It very well may be that some younger, lesser developed minds end up -not- being able to separate reality from fantasy, and they end up buying a gun and blowing people away. It's all part of the gaming experience.
THINK ABOUT IT A WHILE! The only thing keeping you from going postal on the freeway is that you have a greate knowledge and bring yourself back to reality faster. The only thing that keeps you from mugging the guy in front of you, is the same "reality check", the only thing that keeps you from buying a gun and blowing people away is that same "reality check".
Some people aren't capable of that "reality check". And most of you have already admitted to having the lines between reality and fantasy blurred. So have I.
But the next time some kid is arrested for shooting up their school, and they blame it on video games. You had damn well better listen, because you have all but admitted, it's TRUE!
Here you go...
"I'd play it, then walk out into the office corridor and realize I was looking at my co-workers as potential targets," said Taylor.
... and I don't even play video games.
In Anachronox there was an NPC that collected moss. Give him moss and he'll give you something useful. Walking back from the shops one day (in the real world) I found my self looking at a clump of moss, deciding whether it was worth making my way back to this NPC. And Half-life 2... there is no grav gun in reality
Will cause you to take gaming too far by imagining you are the guy who took gaming way too far.
After playing Quake on company network with 30 others for like 5 hrs straight, its impossible not to dream of fragging others and all. I used to get up when I blew up myself launching rocket on myself.
Also, a room-mate had the habit of shouting "Quad damage!", "fragged!!", "f*ck you, @$$hole" and things like that in sleep!!
I still remember the time, after playing many hours of Quake, that I walked into a door at work. It's a true story. I litterally slammed into the door because I just naturally expected it to open like the doors in the game had done.
I've thought about that a lot and I think I know why it happened. See, I wasn't playing the game at work, so it had been several hours at least since I'd played. But at work, I was deep in concentration and most likely what happened was that my subconcious, instead of staying in real-world, open the door mode, reverted to game-world, just walk through mode.
I bet similar connections are possible while driving, because so much of driving is subconcious
Years ago, I was intrigued by an arcade version of the game Ataxx. I had spent hours in the arcade watching the computer play itself, and also other players. The player would place one of his pieces in an open square, and all adjacent opponents pieces would turn the player's color.
After watching this for hours, I decided to go home (by city bus). As I was sitting in the back of the bus, there was the 3 seats over the wheel well that ran sideways. There was a passenger on each of the end seats. As the bus started to fill, more people started to move towards the back, and I found myself thinking "Hmm.. If that guy sits down in the middle seat, those other two will turn his color."
It's a good thing that game didn't last long in the arcades.
Why is that bad? Maybe running your car into a railing isn't the best idea, but the fact that a game is making you look around and think about things differently is not a bad thing at all.
After the US pledge of $350M for Tsunami relief had been topped by Japan and Australia, my first thought was that we should go all in..... Is that a bad sign?
From the article (about Quake 3): "I'd play it, then walk out into the office corridor and realize I was looking at my co-workers as potential targets," said Taylor. "I was so used to killing anything that moved."
This guy's experience is beyond the pale. I've played hours upon hours of FPS games from Doom to CS. After a several hours session, besides a little disorientation and a tendency to strafe around corners, I have no lingering effects of confusing reality and the game. I definitely do not view other people as targets.
And how about the lady who shook the tree? What is up with that? As I mentioned, I play games and often for hours at a time. I have never tried to interact with the real world as if it was the game world.
The closest I come to this kind of residual effect is when I see a screenshot of World of Warcraft, I tend to move my mouse over different characters and objects in an attempt to identify them. But this gaffe is brought on by actually seeing a screenie of the game which prompts me to treat the screenie as if it is a real game session. That's a lot different than trying to skin a dead animal that I happen to see on the way home from work (for example).
Mario Kart: Double Dash
I went through a Tetris addiction awhile back--even that game isn't immune to the strange effects of the mind... I had one of those half awake/half asleep dream thingys one night after having spent way too long with the game. In the dream I was playing Tetris the entire night. It was like I could move the blocks with my mind. I saw the entire board there, the blocks would build up as they should, and it would get just as hard as it did in real life. I woke up totally exhausted the next morning.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
If i go outside after playing "follow freeman" level in half-life 2, i still hear bombs and machine guns. I also look around for combine soldiers, snipers or something worse.
When i see police officers on the streets or the huge screens showing adverting in our subway stations, it reminds me the beginning of the game (the "pick up that can" scene and the screen outside the train station)
i once was playing the first avp game for a long weekend with some friends. quite naturally, i played as an alien, because most others didn't want to. i was good, not in that i always won, but in that i scared the others (mostly the marines) out of their wits.
after about two days of crawling along walls and ceilings, i got up once again to go to the toilet. i was so tired that i had difficulty walking straight, and stumbled slightly in the direction of the wall. in that moment i almost followed through with the movement, to climb up the wall until i was just above the door to climb through the door along the top wall/ceiling. it seemed the best way to get through the door. i only just managed not to run into the wall...
We use to play so much Goldeneye when it first came out that whenever I would be walking around the buildings on my college campus I would automatically start looking around for the best spots to stick prox mines. Everyonce and a while I would catch myself and be like 'what the hell am I doing?'
-my other sig is your mom
I was at Xerox in the late 70's (think personal computers, mouse, ethernet) and there were two games that were amazing. One was based on a Star Trek theme and it used so much net bandwidth it was banned during working hours because it interrupted print jobs being sent to the laser printers.
... stopping and peeking around the corners to make sure someone wasn't about to shoot me. This happened more than once and I used to think it was probably how a cockroach felt just before it skittered across the kitchen floor.
The other one (the name escapes me) placed you in a maze of corridors and gave you a first person view (complete with perspective!) of wandering around the place. If you saw another player (they looked like giant floating eyeballs) you could shoot them.
The most dangerous places were the intersections. It would take you a moment to step out into the new corridor and look around. If someone was lurking there, you were dead before you even knew what hit you. If you stopped just short of the intersection, you could use the right & left mouse buttons to 'peek around the corner' without exposing yourself.
After playing this for an hour or more, I remember heading for the door of my office and
I get this weird thing where if a song comes on that I was listening to while playing the game it brings up memories of the game.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Especially when tired, I had occasionally thought of doing a save game before doing something pleasing, like eating a good meal.
Now I wonder why there are no records of people who'd save before trying something risky/stupid/dangerous...
There's just something so pathetic about people who complain about how they spend so much time doing something that is, basically, a privilege of comfortable and well-off people, that they can't separate it from their normal lives.
I don't know, just doesn't seem like news to me, or something worthy of a headline. Get a grip.
Someone took Half Life too seriously.
I played so much Everquest that I started to think things like "What if I harm touched this chick taking too much time in line at the grocery store"
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
i find that after a long gaming session, whenever make a mistake irl i automatically think.. load quicksave.
yes apparently, i have no gaming skillz
this sig has been discontinued.
I can't believe nobody's mentioned Crimsonland yet. A terrific game, the entire purpose is to kill bugs creeping in from the edges of the screen with various weapons. Since they come from all around you, you need to watch out for the bugs with your peripherial vision. For *weeks* after going through a couple Crimsonland marathons, I couldn't even use a computer because it looked like various bugs were "creeping" in on me, even when I was browsing the net or whatnot. I sat there once, watching a "bug" crawl around in my peripherial vision, and *knew* that I needed to stop playing it. Most disturbing game ever made (psychologically, not in terms of actual game mechanics).
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
One time I had been playing too much SMB3. I got up, walked around the corner and almost ran into my kid sister. My first instinct was to jump up and stomp her. I got embarrassed when I realized how ridiculous this thought was so I ran out the front door and used my raccoon tail to fly up through the pipe in the cloud.
...isn't anything new. Some of the experiences I've had are almost certainly shared by others:
Marathon - An urge to run-punch random passersby.
Quake - The old two-step sideways shuffle before turning a corner.
Tetris - I'm sure everybody's had a falling block dream once or twice.
Gran Turismo - You really have to watch yourself when getting in the car after a session with this...
After enough Counterstrike, I come out of it looking at hallways and thinking how I might bounce a grenade off the wall to get around corners.
Since I never actually have grenades, this isn't so bad.
Half-life 2 was worse. It makes you lazy. I'd come out of the game feeling like I didn't have to walk over towards anything I wanted to pick up. I could simply pull it towards me with my, ummm, non-existent gravity gun.
It's amazing how persistent that feeling is-- it makes one yearn for telekinesis.
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
I suppose that depending on the game, it could have a beneficial influence in real-life needed abilities. One just need to find the right game or even take that in account when designing one.
Semi-on topic, but I'd like to see a study done regarding type-R ricer kids who believe because they can drift in Gran Turismo, they're gods gift to the road..
All too often I see car forum posts which claim (insert non realistic driving game here) time saved them from skidding out @ 80mph in a residential neighborhood.
Makes me wish we did IQ testing for licenses here in my state.
Heck, there's a whole sub-industry with trading the cards and purchasing them using Tix, the so-called currency in the MTGO universe. You see, you don't pay to gain access, you buy the cards. There's never been a monthly fee associated with the access, or membership fees. Once you have your "decks" built, your pretty much done, however they keep releasing more and more! Its insane!
They call the physical cards paper crack, so I supposed the digital ones are digital crack ;) I need help.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
My dad and I observed this a long time ago after playing Pac-Man for too long - he was driving down the road and kept trying to drive down the middle of the road, on the dotted lines. Fortunately he avoided the brightly colored cars, but kept wanting to run into the blue ones.
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
Humm. Now I know why the word lumber camp came to mind every time I used to pass bye the woods behind my apartment..
this tends to happen to me after lan parties. Or after playing KOTOR for hours.
I LOVE VIDEO GAMES
Oh yeah, everytime I see a brick wall with a questionmark on it I want to know what's in it.
Whenever I see Cows or beef, I cannot stop thinking about The Cow King. Moo...
I've definitely blurred the lines between games and reality a few times.
:)
I played so much tetris in college, that I started to look at *EVERYTHING* around me as a tetris object falling downward and analyzing how I could rotate them and stack them to make them go away.
but the craziest thing for me has to be when I played nearly a week straight of multiplayer Doom 2 (back in the day, of course). I finally was overcome with hunger pains and had to go out for food. As I went outside, I wanted to hold my hands up to support my gun, and every time I approached the corner of a building, I wanted to sneak a peek around before I went around corner. These feelings persisted for a number of hours and all I wanted to do was get back "in the game"
Then of course, there is the wacky ending of the movie "The Beach". I know a lot of people who thought that was stupid and didn't add anything to the movie, but I could relate just a little bit...
My "Too much gaming" came from Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed. The first day I got it I played it all day and spent much of my time trying desperately not to hit anything and everything.
:] )
That night I had to go out to get some groceries and was terrified to back out of my own driveway. (Luckily I was a bit more successful with "Need for SpeedLimit: Honda Unleashed"
The examples given in the article seem extreme and contrived (although I've never played K.D.) and is reminiscent of the whole FPS games cause violence uproar--games banned in certain countries, rating systems in others.
But there is one class of game which is intended to be completely immersive, and to influence the player's behavior in the real world: Simulators.
Military and commercial flight simulators for weather and failure scenarios, the shoot/don't shoot situational simulators I've used in the military and that are used by police, even student driver driving simulators.
Is it so strange that in subtle ways or for extreme personalities, mass market video games would influence perception or behavior in the real world?
More music, fewer hits
I played Doom II...alot.
I got to the point where I could play name that tune with the levels and their music. Then I started hearing similar sequences of sounds in other music. When that occurred, I would get very disoriented due to what I was seeing at the time not matching what I was hearing.
This has never completely disappeared. 1:17 into Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride", I have an irresistable urge to whip around and unload two barrels into a Cacodemon.
When I was younger I would rent a N64 Console and a few games (I was too poor to own one). One day I rented Goldeneye. I played that game for 8 hour straight. Afterwards I was trying to surf the web, but I couldn't shake the feeling I was looking at something 3d! I was like "whoa the webpage is far away". Scary
This is silly. Very silly. If you have problems distinguishing between fantasy and reality, then it really isn't the game at fault; you're just genuinely disturbed.
Seriously. I play a lot of games, and I never once had the urge to go out and frag my friends, roll up automobiles and trees into a Katamari, or otherwise "camp" a grassy knoll in case some rare spawn "pops". I've certainly never had the urge to kill myself by wrecking my car into the side of the nearest building just to see how pretty the glass shards might be. When a normal person puts down the imaginarium, they are perfectly able to discern that they are not, in fact, still in a game.
It's very frightening if what people say is in fact waht they experience; but it isn't the games, because some of us are not deluded into thinking that fantasy is reality or vice versa.
Daily appointments
9:00 William Meyers, 39, has been trying to "pull off" combos at work.
10:00 Nathan Greer, 31, intimacy problems. Constantly chooses options from a "radial menu" during social interactions. Refers to sex as "WooHoo" and believes it involves flailing about under the covers while fully clothed. Tries to tickle me at the start of every session.
11:00 Rebekah Lane, frequently drives between oncoming traffic to achieve "Boost"
12:00 Quake IV Lan Party with colleagues
1:00 Resist urge to kill all humans around me...
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
I remember seeing the world in Tetris shapes ages ago, and also wanting to rewind everything after I got a Tivo. My wife as well. If somebody drove past the house and you wanted to see the car again, we would both have the impulse to use the Tivo remote to rewind it. I still want that on my car stereo...
Or at least that is what all the posts are when the article is about violence in games. Now we have ~50 posts from people admitting that after playing too much they daydream/dream/fantisize about Tetris blocks and gibbing and jacking cars!
Hmmm.
Maybe we should rethink violence in video games.
Those who open their minds too far often let their brains fall out.
I am scared to death to drive on the freeways as a result of online games.
I mean, if a real life person can, in BF1942 Desert Combat, ram me with a hummer when I am in the middle of the desert in plain sight imagine how much easier it is when you are in the tight quarters of freeway driving!
And after all, playing with real people has shown me exactly how fallible we all are - especially how fallible I can be ¦ (
the Freeway is my most despised mutliplayer environment.
When I was a kid playing a lot of c64 games I felt other cars would ram my dad's because of spy hunter, or worse, after too much boulder dash, when reading, I felt like the characters on the line above would fall over me all the time, so I couldn't read for a few hours.
I'm not sure that the submitter's example is really a case of "too much" as in "so much that it's hurting you."
:>)
It is very interesting perspective shift on the world around you, but my guess is that the same thing happens for anyone who is intensely involved in certain acitivity/career. I've known people involved in politics and academia, who tend to interpret a lot of daily-life events through the lense of their profession (e.g. getting a traffic ticket as an example of police oppression).
As for the original topic, I once jumped at a beeping sound I heard on the street that sounded remarkably like the auto-sentry gun in Team Fortress Classic. And currently whenever I see a building under construction I examine it from the perspective of the house building program in Sims 2.
The latter example I actually see as being useful since it's increased my understanding of how houses are built. The former sentry-gun one is just silly, but I got a good laugh out of it.
Drifting in Need For Speed Underground 2 completely ruins you for defensive driving hahaha.
I feel the urge to pull the E-brake more and more. And playing with the flywheel at stops so I can burn out at takeoff.
My roommate's even worse. He drifts into the driveway about once a week now.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Sometimes I look at the (actual) sky and start to critique the over-done cloud layering effect (ala Unreal), and a swear I actually see the cracks between texture maps. "These graphics look so fake." Then I know I need to take a break.
I've been playing MMORPG games for 6+ years heavily (for the unitiated, heavy MMO is crazy elsewhere) and I can honestly say I've never had an instance where I confused reality with in-game.
I think it may be because with a MMO its not the exact same thing repeatedly, where with games mentioned in the article are reptitive. I guess the other option is that there is no issue with games, some people are just crazy, if it wasn't this it'd be something else.
I had been playing Spyro the dragon all day (Great game for the PS1), and I sat down in the living room and found myself looking around for my coins underneath objects before I realized what I was doing...
... too much of something is bad for you?
Well I'll be DAMNED!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I remember this one time I was playing the paper and pen game Hangman too long and...
I keep trying to zoom in on things from far away (boobies?) or thinking "wow, what a waste of prims, that must've took loads of his allocation to build" when looking at things - that's what you get from being in Second Life for too long.
Ah yes, I fondly remember the first GTA. It's now available for free download.
I played Doom II...alot
I got to the point where I could play name that tune with the levels and their music. Then I started hearing similar sequences of sounds in other music. When that occurred, I would get very disoriented due to what I was seeing at the time not matching what I was hearing.
This has never completely disappeared. 1:17 into Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride", I have an irresistable urge to whip around and unload two barrels into a Cacodemon.
I've had this discussion with friends...
Although we love life and enjoy it, sometimes it's just boring. I don't want to kill anyone, I just think it would be interesting if zombies were a part of everyday life. They'd make life a whole lot more interesting and dynamic. I'd feel more alive if I had to grab a shottie and blast my way through crowds of zombies sometimes.
"Hey Nate... I need to make a run to the supermarket for some OJ. It's your turn to man the 0.50."
*sigh* I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. My head says this is a really bad thing to wish for, but in my heart I want to be some hero that kills evil zombies every day.
Some years ago when learning to play Go, I speant a couple of weeks playing intensively, most waking hours. By the end of that time I was visualising all kinds of real life situations, problems and decisions as configurations of Go stones. That was wierd.
I was on a flight from Australia to England a few years ago. It was one of those planes with the SNES built into the chair in front. I spent the entire flight playing Tetris attack. I was seeing coloured blocks for a week.
Anyone else have shell shock or post traumatic stress syndrome from playing to many FPS's?
I would have to venture and say I do, for some simple reasons I shall lay out:
1. During a smoke break at my office, I was outside talking to some co-workers - not getting much done - when all of a sudden BAM! a car in the parking lot backfires. Every single person in my line of sight sincerly jumps out of their skin. I just methodically turn my head and think to myself "area secure". (thanks Battlefield 1942)
2. Whenever I hear a helicopter I instinctively look up and gauge its heading and range. Trying to figure where I should shoot my Stinger MANPADS at it from. (thanks Desert Combat)
3. Whenever I go into a office or goverment building I gaze up at ledges, walk gingerly around corners and check my 6 frequently... all the while thinking "this would make an awesome CS map". (thanks Counter-Strike)
I have more tales of post traumatic stress from FPS's, but in the end it would take up more of my time at work than I am willing to part with. FPS PTS is not a bad thing, it has just made me more callous to real world "surprises"... freakin campers.
"It's too bad she won't live, but then again who does?" - Gaff
Good thing my friends were there to talk some sense into me (read: drag me away from the car). I told them we could take it to the docks in San Francisco and load it onto the boat. It's gotta be worth $100,000 -- easy -- and if we split that three ways... but they said no.
I think they're probably walking through Bakersfield now. It's not too much further to Sacramento! Honk if you see them!
Played Jetset Radio 2000 for 5 hours solid (just one more try..) on my daughter's new Xbox last Christmas. Started in daylight and finished in the dark. Those mauve flashing lights for the rest of the day were just something else..
at least in the computer gaming sense. I know when I was in high school on the chess team (no laughing), we used to study and play chess constantly. it definitely got to the point where we would be walking down the hallway looking at the tiles on the floor and thinking, "if i were a knight i could capture them right now..."
In the car with my mate after many hours of wipeout (the original PS1 one I forget it's real full name). Driving through Birmingham (UK) in the middle of the night when the chemical brothers track from the game came on the stereo. My mate was doing 90mph through narrow tunnels like it was the most natural thing in the world...
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
When I'm tidying/rearranging my desk/home, I imagine it all as moving stuff from slots in my WoW backpack. Last year it was the same but for the Diablo stash.
You've got mail. Pattern baldness. - Crow
When Doom was the in thing, I saw a level with the same layout, colors and textures as a building I was often in every day. I only got to try the demo for 5 minutes, the effect was really strong for an hour or so after and slowly faded out over a week or two. It really made me interpret the building very differently for some weeks, especially the stair cases and other ambuse points.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Turn off the machine, put on some shoes and clean clothes, and go outside for a while. Get away from the wiz-bang graphics and fantastic worlds and 3D high-intensity white-knuckle action, find a nice park bench or bookstore, and relax. Look around. Get in touch with reality, instead of projecting the fantasies you've immersed yourself in on reality.
Based on Taco's post up there, I think he has reason to be concerned. Lay off the stimulants. Get away from Slashdot and ad revenues and shit for a while. Beg Kathleen to take him away from all the digital shit for a few days. Hell, maybe stick the game consoles in a closet for a month or two, delete the games from the hard drive(s), and only deal with the computer for the necessary work. I think he'll come back a healthier person. Hell, it would be good for any Slashdotter to find a greenspace or quiet spot, away from the flashing lights and flickering screens, to reconnect with the outside world and get away from the immersive fantasy.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
And you finally realize:
/hides from police.
a) I do NOT have a solid granite car.
b) There is no Artistic Bonus on real pedestrains.
c) The object of the game is not to, oh shit, this isn't a game.
While I, of course, have the habit of spotting good sniper spots, as most FPSers do, I also have another problem when I return to the Outside World... THE GRAPHICS! Sometimes I'll look up at a tree or the reflection of something and think "WOW! That's an awesome effect, I'm surprised my video card can, oh wait that's right, this is reality."
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
UT2K4 - I frequently wonder which would work better for eliminating my enemies in traffic: the link gun, the flak cannon, Avril rockets, or the Redeemer... Coming off a marathon ONS session is depressing. So many things that would be fun if somebody would invent real life respawning. Maybe the Leviathan?
I watched a former roomate, after 20+ hrs of video editing and Photoshopping, get frustrated by his failure to click his desk light off using the mouse. It took him a few moments before he realized his MacOS desktop didn't go that far. "Oh right. Real life."
No, reelly I don't!
When I first was introduced to Doom I played it every chance I got. Unfortunately, the only computer I could use was at work. So I'd play it the 8 hours I was there and then stay after closing until it opened again around 5am. I'd even come in and play on my days off. So in addition to playing too much I was also sleep deprived.
Here's what happened to me: I was walking down a hallway when an elevator opened. In fear, I jumped over to the side of the elevator door with my back up against wall waiting for the monsters to come piling out. That episode lasted a few seconds before I realized what was going on.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I'm not Tony Robbins, but I would like to offer up my personal experience as an encouragement for anyone inclined to listen. I played computer games (1st person, strategy, etc) all through college and into my 20's. I guess I was lucky enough to have a natural gift for learning because I managed to keep my grades up in college, but I think I had a real problem.
I would stay up 'till 3 in the morning and be tired at work. I didn't have as much of a social life as I could, and I'm certain I missed many enriching opportunities. I never exercised and weighed upwards of 285 lbs. at 6'2".
Eventually I realized that I didn't like the direction my life was taking and I just quit playing about 4-5 years ago. I have a serious girlfriend, friends that I see regularly, I weigh 215 lbs. and I think I'm finally on the right track.
At the time I was playing I seriously considered and decided that I did not have an addition. I didn't get particularly jumpy or anxious if I didn't play for a few days and I don't think I had many of the classical signs of addiction.
Nevertheless, gaming is so enthralling that I don't think one needs to be addicted to be negatively affected. Modern games are compelling, surrounding universes that can serve as substitutes for real life. I had an immense sense of pride when I created a winning society in one of the turn-based strategy games or when I racked up the most frag's in Counterstrike. But it isn't real and it doesn't last.
I hope anyone who is currently going through what I did, depressed and isolated, can take some encouragement from my words that there are plenty of good choices and positive paths a person can take. If you think it's a problem, it probably is, even if it isn't classical addiction.
Sinerely,
Dave
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
I fully know what thats like. I size up curbs and handrails all the time, but it's from real life skating as opposed to a video game.
It's been about 7 years since I quit too. I skated from 13-23 years old. It becomes part of you as skateboarding back then wasn't something you did, it was some thing you were.
ft
...last July on my 25th birthday. I slipped and told someone I dinged 25. I laughed for like 10 minutes about it, then felt overwhelmingly depressed. I live in a third floor apartment with a balcony, and I'm reasonably convinced I could not only survive but walk away from a jump off of it with only a few hit points damage, which would no doubt regenerate in mere moments. Jedi Academy really screwed me up with Force Jump...so did City of Heroes.
Like this is any different from people who spend three hours having inane conversations about what their child ate yesterday.
When you spend a lot of time with something, it's easy to become quasi-obsessed with it. I had an old roomie that declared all kitten talk banned after we got a cat once.
But thanks to the fervent puritanicaly paranioa which is American culture, they'll point to this as proof that when I get done playing Doom, I'm thinking about killing my neighbor. Or when I finish GTA, I won't be happy until I jack a car. Or any other "people are to weak to discern reality" theories that seem so oddly hard to dispel.
Apparently in all of my years of psych classes, they forgot to mention that we're all psychotic. Would have made a good excuse for failing that quiz...
I hadn't played any video games for about a year. Then, my cousin got MarioKart Double Dash and let me borrow it. Over 2 days, I played it constantly to unlock all the secrets. Late on the second day and juiced from playing, I was driving too fast IRL and hopped a curb, possibly triggering the failure of the car's water pump.
Not to mention the time I turned into a ninja from playing too much Shinobi.
After a long session playing any game where I drive around, from Grand Theft Auto to Need For Speed, I have to stop myself from driving faster and more recklessly than normal.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I've always said that video games don't affect people in real life, but now I'm not so sure. People sizing up cars and thinking, no matter how briefly, of jacking on? Picking "human shaped targets" out when you are at the park? Actually reaching for the parking brake before entering a high speed corner with your wife and kids in tow before you "catch" yourself?
I have never, not once, in my 25 year gaming career ever confused a gameworld with reality. I mean, I've said jokey stuff with my friends about "failing a save" when I do something embarassing, but I don't actually think that.
I remember this Old Man Murray article making fun of a guy who wrote an alarmist article about how playing FPS games made him see the games "morbid reality" descend upon him "like a grid of hyper-real euphoria." It was funny because the conceit was that surely only someone off his psycho-meds would experience such a thing. Maybe you guys "blurring the line" a bit should lay off and stop playing, before you don't "catch yourself" and slide through an intersection and kill some other poor slobs family.
Next time slashdot runs a "parent sues video game developer" over their kid blasting someone, maybe there should be a link to this story.
Like my comments? Try my podcast: http://www.baldmove.com
My uncle quite often tells a story of a friend at work that had Nightmares, where he was chased by demons. My Uncle introduced him to DOOM, next time he had a nightmare, he stopped running and started shooting.
I know Snood is a relatively recent game based on older games, but it was still a big hit in college...I realized I had been playing too much when I started falling asleep in one of my classes and the inside of my eyelids had Snoods on them. Then I got worried when I started seeing Snood formations in my peripheral vision that would turn out to be furniture or unrelated posters or such...
Poor fluffy, his hair stood straight up for a week.
It's bad when you start putting up walls in a small square so the little theme park fans can't walk anywhere and stick one in.
Then you sit there with their profile up to watch them get more pissed off, and more pissed off
and imagine it's your boss...
Then you put in a taco stand and tell them to shut up.
No bathroom damn it! Only tacos! Be good or I'll drop you in the lake!
---- How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. -Shakespeare
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who knew he had played too much Tetris when he strated seeing falling shapes with his eyes closed and tried to slot them into lines - AND STILL LOST!!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Not so much a gaming artifact, but back when I was in High School, I had a phase where Edit->Undo was the first thing to come to mind when I made a mistake. A bad grade on a paper, a embarassing mmoment (I had plenty), losing at one of my races, anything really. And everytime I did it I would think to myself "I am such a freaking nerd" right after.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
The sight picture is different and can make it hard to judge when to flare for landing.
Also, it is hard to spot landmarks in the computer landscape and the flight model is off.
Amen!
After playing so much Pong, I began to try and bounce large, bright squares off of my body and back to other people!
I contemplated buying green-tinted glasses to really simulate it, but that would be weird.
Married with two young kids...still haven't quite finished KOTOR I....
I have a TiVo moment, I'm in this meeting and I drift away a bit, then I hear something interesing and find myself trying to reach for non-existing remote to rewind.
Did you know that playing Need for Speed Underground 2 for 5 hours a day will actually increase your driving skills? It's true! I can drift my Volvo all mad crazy, yo, and my shifts are faster than ever to get all 88 HP to the rubber as quick as possible.
Iron Soldier for the Atari Jaguar. I was living on the 7th floor of an apt. building in Cambridge at the time and would look from the balcony visualizing missles streaming from my shoulders.
1. Years ago, after playing Thexder, I began getting brief moments of seeing things in EGA. Just a little disturbing.
2. When I'm at work and someone comes up to ask me some annoying question, my immediate reflex is to move my mouse to the right and click furiously. This is a result of playing far too many FPS games.
One being Tetris. This game is pretty darn addictive - I started playing it a few years ago when one of my roomates found her old Gameboy. We would have contests for high score etc. I had to stop after a few weeks because when I would go to bed I would be in between the sleeping and waking state and see Tetris shapes floating through the air. I would wake up in the morning and realize that I had Tetris music playing in my head and constant Tetris games being played as well. It was totally insane.
The newest, and only other game to have this effect on me is RTCW:ET (Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (Free and runs on Linux!)). If I play this for a couple of hours before going to bed, I have similar results to Tetris. I wake up and realize that I am playing a wargame in my head and yelling in German. Aha Sehr Gut!
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Many times if I make what I realize is an irreversibe mistake in real life, like missing the bus or breaking something, I'm very tempted to hit Ctrl-Z, or reload the last saved version...
For some odd reason, I got hooked on Bejeweled 2 for about three days. I haven't played since I was driving home and saw three red lights spaced like this:
X X X
Where the left one was a turn lane. I actually lifted my hand to drag the left one beside the two on the right.
I also did the flinch for the 'Z' key to zoom my suit so I could see something far away the other day. Creepy.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Am I the only one who thinks "Wow that's just sad"?
Mine was always after a marathon session of Tempest in the bowling alley, I'd blink and see fuseballs in my peripheral vision.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
Chris Taylor, a staff writer at Time magazine and a regular game reviewer, said he thinks driving games and first-person shooters are particularly likely to make players lose track of reality.
The only problem I had after playing UT2K4 for 7 or 8 hours straight was that my eyes hurt from not blinking much during the game. I also had a minor phobia of that huming sound the Mantas make just before you get run over by them. Other than that, I'm fine.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
When playing the first GTA on PS2, I remember seeing a passing trash truck on the way to work, and thinking "trash truck, trash truck... o, I found one of those already."; all that before minding that I wasn't in-game at that moment.
I like roleplaying environments and imersive characters where players add to the depth of the environment around them. A big part of creating such a character is their speech (since most games lack control over body language). So I tend to alter my normal speech patterns when playing my favorite character.
One of my favorite speech alternations is inspired by the Wheel of Time novels. It makes quite an impact, but it requires a bit of thought to alter the sentence structure properly. But with practice, it gets easy. Then I found myself "speaking" in that mode during my dreams. I realized something interesting was going on.
This isn't without precedent. When I got my PilotPro years ago, I learned grafitti with gusto. I even found myself scribbling out sticky notes using occasional grafitti glyphs.
It seems that a combination of focus, interest, and repetition leads to a rewiring our wetware, as it were. Which shouldn't be surprising. It's a common learning principle. But I suppose what is surprising is when we find what we learned within a limited context, jumping boundaries in to the mundane.
After playing Zelda, Ocarina of Time, I still have this desire to hit the large stones on the lawns in our campus with a large sledgehammer, just to see if there are any secret tunnels leading to quest characters.
When my little cousins played Super Mario 64 first came out, they later visited an art museum, and wer tempted to try taking running jumps at large paintings to see if there were any secret entrances.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Anyone who has played Tetris for hours before going to bed knows EXACTLY what affect games have on the mind!
all my Jedi Academy and Knights of the Old Republic time wasting would be worth it...
Seriously though, I was feeling this kind of blur with good ol' Doom. I played it so much that I'd strafe at night when I saw an orange street light in the distance. Damn those Imps and their fireballs
Cheezit! We're boned! - famous 31st Century bending unit
Boy did the lines ever get blurred with me. My last run down highway 17 was a real laugh in the real world. Turns out I was really shooting Norwegians on holiday. Did I have egg on my face (or Norwegian on my face in this case). Should have used the gravity gun. The sentence would have been shorter for sure.
Seriously, this isn't only with games. Often when I've been programming for quite some time trying to solve a problemen it still wanders around in my head for a while.
Same for movies, books, whatever. It's nothing new. So don't try to blame it on games just because there's actual interaction with your entertainment.
I have imaged what it would be like to shoot someone (or a little doggie a saw walking to school) with an instagib rifle (UT) and what the gibbage would be like.
I start losing weight.
One day, I was too much caught up in the game, having to go to the loo, I was pushing cotton and changing its color to a lighter brown.
After my multi-year stint of Counter-Strike, I found myself, upon entering new rooms, looking for the ideal wall to lob a grenade off of into the next room and automatically assuming a good defensive position, such as a corner, while at the same time having an escape route. After playing for another year on a CS server that defaulted on low gravity....
I call bullshit on anyone who says that videogames can't actually spawn violence, or that it's easy to entirely differentiate between videogames and real life. I'd like to hear more opinions on this.
True, but only in those weak minded retards who would pick fights, abuse alcohol and drugs etc.
It seems in the last 5years (guess) the expansion of the computer gaming community has changed the demographics from geeks to 'scallies' (new word for the day) shouting in the shops...
"ar aye gimme dat footie game it's ace, no way man GTA lets you hammer people, der la"
(Of course it could just be i'm from Liverpool)
There have always been "violent" games, they are just more mainstream, so more violent people are getting hold of them. Plus it's cool to blame the games not the kid.
Millions of Buddhists would disagree...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
After playing Hitman for a while, you start looking around for places to hide bodies, stash weapons, or snipe from on your way to class or work. That's when you know it's time to go back to The Sims.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
First, they start off talking about "Los Angeles artist Kozy Kitchens" and you just assume it's a made up name. Then they mention her husband, Dan Kitchens.
This woman either has the world's most supportive husband or parents without much forsight.
I gave them up cold turkey a couple of years ago. I was spending WAY too much time playing. I'd work all day in front of one computer, and then come home and sit in front of my computer at home playing MMOGs 'til I went to bed. I was living on frozen dinners for the most part - things that I could say "AFK" and take care of in a minute or two (popping it in, taking it out) and then play the game while eating dinner at my desk. Bleh.
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
For me it was walking into a room and thinking that I needed to shoot out all the lights.
Back in the day we used to have latenight doom fests at my office. A friend of mine got into so much that when we went home he would try to sneak around the door ways on the way out. He latter had Doom nightmares.
He now has Doom 3 but doesn't lay much deathmatch anymore/
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I appreciate the problems of playing too many hours, but they should be so lucky to have all of that time to play games! Back in the day, I'd play so much tetris or pacman that I'd see them in my sleep. But now I'm lucky if I get 6 hours to play in a given week. Yeah, I know, whine whine whine! Hats off to the game designers, because one of the marks of a good game is addictive gameplay. I'm not sure I can recall any bad games that had this quality.
Seriously, perhaps it's not so bad to have a little fantasy in your reality. Real life can often use some brightening up. This is what I think Nintendo is selling in their current crop of GBA ads in which the player becomes immersed in various game worlds.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Yeah, people get whacked out on video games, but it's the same thing as reading a good spy novel and then feeling obliged to tiptoe stealthily through your house for the rest of the day, or to come out of a good action movie and worrying about cars exploding on your way home. It's a product of the human mind, not a fault of any of these types of media.
----- "All right. It was a miracle. Can we go now?"
For kicks, I'd start to look at my surroundings while imaging how it would be modeled in-game.
Talk about games changing one's perspective. Yikes.
Sometimes I cannot even sleep because some tune is stuck in my head. The sad thing is that I'm totally serious :( Shit - music has stronger influence than many people realise I think. Gaming, anyway - I feel _so_ silly when I strafe around the house with my arms strung after a good dose of IL2. And I'm 30. :-|
As most of you know Counter Strike got a major graphical upgrade with the release of Half-life 2. Last night after playing for 3 hours and then having to get called into work i realized i was looking at my office building as if Terrorists were inside!
:)
I would subconsiously think of where the enemy could be sniping from. Where would a good place to throw a grenade would be. Should i rush and straif the corner, or try and find a round-about-way of enterting that area. I even got to the point where I was thinking... "Man that would be an easy headshot!"
What did i learn from this? Never bring a gun to work... you might relapse into Couter-strike mode
I still play far too much RTCW: Enemy Territory (which is a free game BTW), and it's only gonna get worse now the True Combat Elite mod is out (http://www.truecombat.com/)
You know it's bad when you start to dream about repairing a tank with a pair of pliers, and you hear your mate on TeamSpeak shout a warning about some Axis soldier creeping up on you with a primed nade.
Then there is Doom. Whenever I see a barrel, I want to shoot it and make it blow up.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'm this way naturally. I don't use any chemicals.
--- Ban humanity.
I've commented on this situation before, but here goes again...
I played X-Com back in the good ol' days way too much, and stopped when I was watching a movie and getting temporarily very confused when I noticed that people should have ran out of action points a LONG time ago based on how much they were moving around.
Addiction's a funny thing.
Video games don't affect kids. If Pacman had affected us when we were kids, everyone would be running around in darkened rooms, munching on magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
who fell in love with the Dr. from her favorite soap opera and began stalking the actor?
Besides a reality check, I'd recommend making a full psychological and neurological study on the people who have blurred the line between fiction and reality. Traumatic experiences at very short age, perhaps? A head injury?
I've caught myself many times thinking while i drive how much the semi\bus next to me is worth for me in points. Also how many cars would i crash if took it out.
It seems i have thoughts like that with games that have a real world feel, not fantasy worlds like EQ.
ender_pete
"Once, my girlfriend happened upon a tree ... kind of like the round, thin trees in the game, and began to shake it -- one in-game way of receiving money, goods and bees," Weisberg-Roberts said. "When nothing fell from its branches, I think she quickly realized how this must have looked to the other hundred or so people in the park."
Must have looked about as funny as iPod zombies walking into traffic or people walking around with hands-free mobile phones talking loudly at the air in front of them.
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
Too much solitare and when I close my eyes, I can still see the cards and I'm continuing to map which cards are flipped. Sadly, I can never beat my friend's hit score, even in my dreams...
I played a bit too much BF 1942. One day I was at a farm picking apples with the wife and kid. We had stopped to eat lunch, and we were headed for a picnic table. There were people milling all over, and as I made a beeline for the table, I momentarily pictured BF1942's overhead map where you see all the symbols indicating your teammates as you all swarm on a tank. Very disconcerting.
// This is not a sig.
When I played UO I kept having this dream where my house was being looted. The problem was I kept my computer next to my bed and was in the habit of checking my character every couple hours of the night anyway so my sleep was mixed with the game. Because of this it got to the point where I couldn't tell if my dreams about the game were real or not and the only way I could tell was to check. Very scary, fortunately i sold my account on ebay for 600 bucks about 6 years ago.
Who needed a Gameboy? Enough time with Tetris on the ZX Spectrum and you could still play anywhere, plus the batteries never ran out!
I was making stir fry for me and a friend and accidentally dropped my spatula on the floor. Her dog came over, sniffed it, and walked away. I told her not to pick it up with bare hands because it was cursed. I swear I'll find that damn amulet one of these days... (For those of you who haven't figured it out, www.nethack.org)
The other night I knew I'd played too much D2 because I went to bed, closed my eyes, and could still see the maps. The screen still even had my little necromancer and his bonespears flying, and a monster whose status bar was slowly dropping at the top edge.
I haven't played a game that much since the days of Tetris and Solitaire. I'd see those when I closed my eyes too.
None of them seem to translate into the real world, though. Once I was really tired and a bit drunk while playing pool at the pub. Afterwards walking back to my dorm, I would see a person standing just around a corner, or a group of people in the square, and imagine lining up a shot. So it isn't just video games. ^^;
Also, my sister and I have picked up vocabulary from The Sims.
I used to play Rogue a lot (SuperRogue, UltraRogue, Hack, Nethack, etc ...) and I used to salivate whenever I saw a % sign... It's pretty unpleasant to have your dreams get stuck in a game, though - it's like if you have a fever and keep dreaming you're a lightbulb and have to screw yourself into a socket but keep falling out, all night...
I must be mad because I can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Being serious for a moment I have had the effect they describe in the article after reading a good book but never after a computer game as they don't involve your own imagination as much were as in a book you have to imagine what the author is thinking of getting you more immersed in the fantasy.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
I remember my freshman year at university, cramming for a linear algebra exam, being surprised at a sign in a shop saying "Matrix 3.99" (in Swedish 'Matris'). Why on earth would they sell matrices? And wasn't that on the expensive side? It took me a long while to realise that what the sign actually said was "Rice" ('Mat ris' in Swedish).
Several friends reported the same experience, aparently a rite of passage for the budding student. So it's not just games. Maths can also do it to you. :-)
Stefan Axelsson
When I finally used my car (after a 3 day weekend of playing Midnight Club 2, 24/7) I realised how slugish my Jetta's performance was.
Still, the 65mph speed limit seemed extremely restrictive.
Being stopped at a red light, meant that I was about to get a green signal and the foot HAD to hit the floor.
Those were dangerous times.
Marques Johansson
After *long* sessions (sometimes 20+ hours) with Nethack (http://nethack.org/), I've actually dreamed in terms of @, G, d, h... but then I've had even longer sessions with other games (40+ hours in a weekend) without the same effect, so I'd imagine that's a test of how good the game is at making you feel a part of it.
Needless to say, my near-flawless GPA from high school changed to something like 'barely passing' in college after I discovered games...
Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
I think I get the same problem after spending a lot of time coding
I find myself activily writing code in my head to handle the current situation. For instance standing in line at the grocery store, or opening a car door. It is really strange when you notice yourself doing this.
Has anyone else experienced this?
what about IRC? I told a joke to some kid in my university class once and he said "LOLL." To which I replied "gay" and his friend looked at him and goes "owned." I IRC a lot, but I've never shamed myself by LOLing, either online or offline.
I didn't find out until later that both those kids IRCed too. UnderNet at that, so 'nuff said...
2)Halo. I knew I had played too much Halo when I saw a woman walking on a sidewalk next to a building across the street from me. For a split second I had an internal debate if it would be better to kill her with the sniper riffle or the rocket launcher. With the building as a backboard, I chose the rocket launcher.
If you really want to start addicting people... someone will make a MMORPG where the intent is to get drunk and whore as much as you can. Then let everyone watch. Say goodbye to EQ and WoW then...
I want the red cherry flavored lubricated ribbed rubber please.
Oh yeah, I want royalities.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
I recently got Prince of Persia: Warrior Within... I usually play for 3 hours
daily (more or less). When I start getting dizzy I turn the thing off and relax.
Problem is... whenever I close my eyes I start seeing (in my mind) images of the
prince jumping or running on the walls... Sensory overload maybe?
It's a weird effect on the human brain - 3D games feel much more real than
2D games, as if you disconnected from the physical world and began living the virtual world.
Please reply this with your experiences regarding 3D games.
Too many video games will cloud your mind--is it me or is this not really news?
It's been a looooong time, but when I was a kid, those stupid levels with the speeder bikes....ugh! Anytime I get into traffic and start weaving through, I hear the music in my head.
:P
Duh duh duh. Dun dun, dut, dut da da. Dut da da ut. (doo do do do do do do)....
Worse. If I hit a jam shortly after, I hear sad midi drums.
Boom chick, boom chick, boom chick chick chick...
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Geek.com has an article (probabky not an original reference) that indicates excessive game play changes brainwave patterns. http://geek.com/news/geeknews/2002Jul/gam200207090 15292.htm
Long story short, the games stimulate your visual memory and create a sense of heightened anxiety to help amplify the intensity of the memory, so it's not surprising that visual cues in the real world which "seem familiar" will cause disassociative thinking.
It's funny how these games are creating a generation of Pavlov's dogs, and tragic that people don't realize how much the mass media and so called entertainment is actually conditioning them.
The trick, of course, is whether you still have a strong enough grasp on reality not to act on these impulses. If the answer is no, you really should consider another hobby, or possibly getting some mental help.
yep.
the other day, after an 8 hour GTA4 session, i was stopped behind a car at a stop light and for a second, thought about passing him, running the red light, running over the pedestrian at the next intersection and stealing his money.
seriously.
After playing that for a full two days, I wandered around Manhattan with my head back, just looking at all the great places to sling from. It'd be surprisingly possible to get around (assuming Spidey powers.) On the flipside, while I was playing the game, I had a very palpable sense of vertigo when climbing the Empire State Building. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with me seeing it all the time, or suffering from acrophobia, or just being a wuss. It was tempered with an annoyance that the virtual city ends waaaay too far south (don't disrespect Harlem!)
Waaay back in 1994 or so when I was in highschool... I was parallel parking into a tight space when I thought to myself "IDSPISPOPD" -- or "turn off clipping".
Realized I was playing too much Doom.
Another: A couple years later in college, right after Quake 1 was released, I spent one monster 5 or 6 hour deathmatch session with a pal when he wrote "Let's get dinner". So, we leave our rooms and meet in the hall, both of us holding our hands out in front of us locked in keyboard stance. He looked at me with this sad expression and said "I have to piss, but I don't remember how".
Good times.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Geez, all the amunition Senator Lieberman needs to regulate the gaming industry is in the Slashdot comments to this article!
Perhaps the games are slowly desensitizing/changing us; we just don't want to admit it.
I'll be driving home from work, or driving just about anywhere, and will see the best line to take a corner with. Too much Gran Turismo, I'm afraid...
"What I cary in this box is your utter subjugation."
I had the constant desire to do backflips off walls and couldn't walk in a straight lines for weeks.
He was walking down a staircase, and before reaching the bottom, he jumped, landed in a low stance, looked behind him, looked forward, got back up and started walking again.
I figured he played console games a little too much.
This may all sound funny (I'm guilty of thinking that as I read some of this too) but when I think about it and realize how real it is, it starts to scare me. Cars in particular are one situation where people go on auto-pilot and might react before thinking. We have a lot of stories about people who "almost" did things... I wonder if there have been real accidents that people don't dare share. And I wonder if the dangers increase as games become more realistic (a more realistic emergency brake controller for those who have mentioned using that, for example).
A few years back, every time I saw a mushroom, I'd run and jump on it. I remember playing Super Mario Brothers too much.
I can't believe that I never linked the two.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Of too much gaming. But my pet chocobo is way too addicted to Final Fantasy games. He thinks he can actually fly!
Is it worse when you end up dreaming not of being in the game, but just playing it??? ( http://www.naturalselection.com ) Quote from #naturalselection on GameSurge: you can never play enough NS yeah you can what's the longest you've played? if your eyes start bleeding... then maybe what's the longest stretch you've played? from 5pm to 6 am i think eh? I've pulled 18 hours before ^^ got up to piss twice, and that was it yeah those damn bathroom breaks.. it seem that I do better as fade when I'm sleep-deprived more instinct drivin i geuss :\
reality just sort of blends in to what I see on the screen
I reach nirvana
I am one with the fade
LordStorm clap's
I think "swipe" and I swipe
I blink
and shottehs clatter uselessly behind me :P
I feel the warm blood as my focus swipe tears through HA
great... now i want to go play ns
and then I start hallucinating :\
and then I get up and try to machete my roomate
When I was in high school, I would work sadly long hours at Taco Hell. 16 hour long days during summer break at times. I'd work night shift, get off at say, 4 am, and go to bed.
Then dream about making Tacos.
No!!!!!!
It gets worse. Later on, right after the dot-com bust, I was working a call center at Compaq. During certain times of the day, when things were slow with nothing to do, I'd decided I wanted to get better at Perl coding. I'd sit there for hours making strides in a program I was writing, learning new modules, working on problems, etc.
Then I'd go home, and not only dream of coding in Perl, but occassionally fix my code IN MY SLEEP.
God help me. I recently figured out what was wrong with our DNS server while under the effects of anesthesia for an upper endoscopy. Yikes.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Every few years I go into a descent frenzy with the most recent version. Once I had a serious Descent 2 streak that took several hours a day. After a few days of Descent 2 (it was Summer) I played something like 5 hours and then went scating in the dark. I nearly broke my neck approaching a lit subway staircase at full speed and actually atempting to dive into it. I got back into the real word 3 meters in front of the stairs.
I also recall darkness phobia after long hours of Quake.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've been playing a lot of burnout 3 lately, and whenever someone tries to pass me, I have a strange urge to slam them into the guardrails.
Racing games like NFSUG, Burnout, etc are definitely bad for when you're half asleep and driving to work.
...but when I play a game for a long time, I don't get like the people described in the article. Sure, I start to think about things in terms of a game maybe, like when I've played an RPG for a long period of time, I think of myself and others in terms of hitpoints, stats, etc. However, I would never actually physically shake a tree after playing animal crossing (and I played that quite a bit), nor would it ever even remotely enter my mind to actually grab the wheel of a moving car and steer it into something after Katamari Damacy. More likely, I'd make a joking comment about it.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
I used to play Baldurs Gate like a junkie in college. The game had little amussing/informative messages that would pop up when you were loading between screens, I remeber one one that said something along the lines of "We know you love the game, but DON'T FORGET TO EAT! We don't want to lose any dedicated players." Cracked me up everytime I saw it, usually at the end of another 6pm to 3am bing.
Games that are highly realistic, like high end flight simulators, can actually train reflexes and unconsious strategies that are effective in real life. The problem with GTA seems to be that it resembles real life visually and aurally, but not in terms of morality, risk assessment, or practical physics.
I won't go into detail about wanting to cast spells or just lop off the heads of Luser's asking very, very stupid questions. "Last week it said my password would expire in three days. Now I can't log in. Should I have changed my password? It is telling me to pick a new password. Should I change my password now? ". Please?? Just one fireball?
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
needs to be balanced with a dose of Real Life.
Come on folks, seriously. Too many video games cause you to blur the line between reality and fantasy? Why are these types of statements always made towards the gaming industry? Watching too much of one movie could do the same thing. For that matter, making a serious commitment to ANYTHING will cause you to subconsciously think of it repeatedly throughout the day. If you've made a serious, daily commitment to a video game, I think you have more problems than you are afraid to admit. Not trying to troll, I just get tired of hearing the game industry bashed because society has grown accustomed to bad habits. Anytime you consume yourself in ANYTHING pleasurable you need to step back and learn to control yourself. A little concept called moderation. Bah.
Yeah, I know the feeling. A roommate of mine in the late nineties had a playstation and I used to play Wipeout for hours. It was a very (very!) fast paced racing game, and you have to do some tricky stunts to win some levels; sliding up walls while in a turn or while overtaking opponents is basically standard procedure.
l
Boy was I worried when driving to work after playing for hours; I realized that traffic around me was so slow that I started losing my patience (faster! faster! clock's ticking!) and I'm basically trying not to slide up the railings while doing a turn, just out of habit and because it's such a f'ing elegant thing to do.
For screenshots see http://www.vidgames.com/ps/software/wipeoutxl.htm
Back when I played Civilization 8 hours a day, there were a number of times when I strategically parked my car to avoid being "1 square away" and take advantage of the terrain bonus.
I almost got into a car accident sizing up a park near where I worked for good combo lines when I was playing Tony Hawk a lot.
And I woke up from a dream once where I was desperately trying to 'tap' the pillows on my bed to cast 'Plow Under'. I distinctly remember not having enough forests (all my pillows are red) to cast the spell. Yikes, I still play Magic, too!
That says "...if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching on magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." actually has some validity? ;)
:P
I've occassionally thought that if I concentrated hard enough, I could summon enough ki to blow away my television after a particularly stupid commercial, but it's never actually happened, no matter how loud I scream "hadouken!".
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
This first happened to me as a kid, when I discovered the Dragonlance books. For a while, I'd spend nearly every spare waking moment reading and re-reading them. It got to the point where I was having lucid dreams about the land of Krynn...and then lucid daydreams.
I lay this obsession aside when I got my first computer (a Trash 80 Model III) and a floppy disk containing BASIC. I began to obsess with programming, and began to code my own games. This time, when I began having lucid dreams, I actually started working out bits of code in my sleep, which I'd implement when I woke up. I also started to put everyday activities in the context of BASIC programming. (10 input "What do you want for breakfast?", x$; 20 if x$="cereal" goto 40 else goto 30; 30 print "We don't have that. Choose something else."; 35 goto 10...)
Years and several obsessions later, the same thing happened when I bought the game Civilization. My first session went 72 hours straight, and ended when my friend kicked me out of his house. After a couple of days of plotting game strategy in my sleep, I couldn't look at the landscape around me without evaluating its merits as a place to found a city ("Yes! Open land for farms, proximity to a water source, forests and mountains for resources, and existing roads for a good economy bonus!")
The thing that frustrates me about this whole obsession thing is that I can't choose to obsess over something (although I can choose to avoid things I know I'd obsess over--which is why I don't yet own Half-Life 2, or even Unreal Tournament 2004.) I only wish that I could find an obsession that would have some practical application in real life--my wife will only permit me to obsess if it results in a paycheck.
Back when I was badly hooked on several MUDs, I often had dreams about making exp and stuff, in ASCII.
And more recently, after long sessions in the dark worlds of Metroid Prime 2, I often found myself staying near roof lamps and other light sources, reluctant of moving anywhere.
I don't know about anybody else, but when I see a suspended tile ceiling, I start thinking about running around underneath it, hitting a bouncing ball. I knew I shouldn't have played Atari as much when I was little.
This is why I play games like Counter-Strike. Even if I get the urge to fire of a few rounds into a nearby terrorist, I don't have the gun to do it anyway.
Of course, if anybody ever drops an M4 Carbine assault rifle in front of me, we're all in trouble.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
s/wife/mom/
strafing around corners in my house after 8 hour CounterStrike fest...
A few years back I was doing a Rubik's jigsaw puzzle (each piece had a 'jewel', all of which together formed a chain, and you had to follow a sequence to solve it. (I can't seem to find it online, feh)). I worked on it for a week or so, and I saw it when I closed my eyes, and I dreamed that I was working on it. No computer involved, but the same level of mental obsession.
I realized that I played to much counter-strike when i started gossiping about professional counter-strike players. "Shaguar must be doing crystal meth! between this tournmanent and this other tournament he lost like 200 pounds!" "Well Ksharp and Aphrodite were dating, but Ksharp took her to the CPL, where Aimetti put his moves on her, and took her back up to his room"
leprkan...
It got so bad with this game that I would be driving down the street and would start to see groups of buildings as commercial, industrial, or residential blocks. At it's peak I could have sworn that the buildings had yellow/blue/red colors underneath them. :)
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
After beating Prince of Persia: Warroir Within before Christmas I started noticing how the ledges around downtown could be scaled, along with the phrase "Monkey see, Monkey do" running through my head. Try playing PoP:WW with Dragonball on in the background; the Prince really will remind you of a monkey when hanging and crossing ledges.
I also still occasionally strafe through doorways (Doom, Quake) and get upset when watching an action movie where the character is silhouetted in the window (Counter Strike).
I'm still not sure if the andrenaline rush I felt then was from the thought that a missile was locked on to my car, or if it was from me realizing that I had just about done something incredibly stupid. Can't imagine trying to explain that to my insurance company - "Yeah, I thought there was a radar-guided missile locked on to my car, and I wrapped it around the telephone pole trying to evade..."
And don't get me started on Tetris dreams...
Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
When the Carmageddon was a new game, I actually wrecked my parents' car by driving it to the wall.
I was reversing from a tight spot and there wasn't enough space to turn the vehicle. Unfortunately, I was just been playing Carmageddon quite heavily earlier that day and I instinctively thought that I can "slide" the car along the wall. I hit the gas and, well... the damage was repairable, but it did cost quite a lot and I wasn't allowed to use the car again for quite a while.
"I'd play it, then walk out into the office corridor and realize I was looking at my co-workers as potential targets," said Taylor. "I was so used to killing anything that moved."
and
"So later, after you put down that controller, you're walking around your apartment, or going to the store in your car ... and suddenly you do something similar, something that trips an 'opportunism' wire in your brain."
I don't buy it. I do not have any problem distinguishing between reality and fantasy. My behavior in games, and I play a lot of them, does not leak into my real world.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Too Much Gaming Anyone?
No fucking way, man!
When I saw Star Wars for the first time, and thought I could use the force to pick up things
I am the maverick of Slashdot
You know it's bad when you percieve your "social" skill as having improved after talking on the phone or hanging out with your friends.
There is simply too much glass..
I played one of the Jedi Knight PC games for a bunch of days in a row, hours and hours each day.
Shortly after a gaming session I was sitting on the couch and the remote was out of reach I actually tried to do a Force pull to get it closer.
I guess if there was anytime when such a thing would have worked it would be when I fully believed in what I was doing.
In world of warcraft, you often group with other people and then head to a quest zone. In these occasion, you can just click on another member of your party and choose to "follow". Since I always get lost, I just tag on other people a lot.
The other day, while on the freeway, I was following a car, and mentally tried to tag that car so that I could just "Follow" it... Needless to say, I don't intend to play Carmaggedon anytime soon now...
Most of my urge to roll stuff up while driving is gone, but every time I see a row of nice round manicured shrubberies, I still want to roll them all up. Thumppity, thumpitty, thump.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
It's the people. Some people become immersed in particular tasks more than others. Perhaps the multitasking 'ADD' generation has an advantage here: if they can rapidly shift perceptual contexts, they are less likely to have this problem.
I knew it was too much when I was out driving one day and when I wanted to change lanes I found myself searching for my strafe key... felt kinda weird for a bit... then there were the half-life dreams where I was gordon freeman for a few scary nights.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
For me it was Theif and Theif 2 - After a long session in a dark room lit by nothing other than the computer monitor, sneaking my way past guards and trying not to be seen, I'd go to work the next morning and I couldn't help but notice where every shadow on the ground was, and I'd start mentally planning my path for how to walk to the next room witout leaving any of the shadowed spots on the ground. - that and feeling an odd irritation that all the lights are electrical.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I played way too much NFS:Underground 2 during the winter break. I'm still fighting the urge to try and spin out any car that I see coming up next to me.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
I don't know if this has happened to anyone, but sometimes while reading lots of text on a real piece of paper, I sit there and think about how I could grep through it to find what I'm looking for.
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges and Degrees
I found myself daydreaming about shooting...oh never mind. That wasn't me.
Too much America's army operation made me believe the USA army wasn't that bad. Once realized I immediately stopped. Man, I am sure this game is full of subliminal messages.
Many many hours of playing both these induced the feeling of comming up on acid with a side order of PCP.
Ever noticed how the windshield of a car is perfect for visualizing Robotron, even when you don't want to.
Would imagine pusing bombs down the corridor so they would intercept my co-workers as they rounded corners.
Thankfully, two things happened that saved us.
PHB's decided that we shouldn't play Bomberman in the conference room anymore.
The Robotron joysticks broke, we thought it would be best to not replace them for a while.
"Never trust a computer you can't throw." -- The Mac
I have been playing Quake 3 for 4 years, the last 18 months competitively. I am occaisionally having dreams about using rocket launchers and railguns to pick off bots (Tank Jr. model, which I use for enemy) across a busy cityscape.
I think that this normal daydreaming associated with creative minds.
That article is absolutely the most meaningless piece-of-crap-fluff reporting on technology I have read in a long time.
Thanks a lot for elevating it to the status of meta-piece-of-crap-fluff by linking it on slashdot.
(Bleh. Is it just me or is the content being reported here a little weak in the last month or so?)
I've overcome my addiction to video games by becoming addicting to online poker.
I spend about the same amount of time playing poker that I spent playing Medal of Honor or Call of Duty online.
Atleast with poker, I've been turning a respectable profit.
Yeah... I find that after a long time playing computer programmer, I have this urge to try to reprogram the dragons to be easier to kill when I see them.
It's now three years since playing Deus Ex but I still have the urge to stop and examine every air/heat vent I see.
Discussion:
info
Jessica
hobby
date
sex
arrgh.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
These people must have a lower level of intelligence. I can't see any other explanation. I've had some massively long gaming sessions in the past (Myst, Doom, Doom2, Quake I/II/III) and NEVER have I confused reality for the game or started looking at reality with game eyes. I'm not saying I'm a genius, I most certainly am not. But, I'll bet the people who experience this must have some sort of cognitive issues and likely it manifests in a large percentage of the population.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Some years ago I noticed how I became more and more uneasy about walking around corners, cross vast open spaces or even worse: cross a road. I had to check all directions multiple times. The feeling was getting stronger over time, and it actually took me some time to even notice that I had a problem. (Some year or so).
:)
Finally one day it all came to me. I connected it to deathmatch multiplaying games. I decided to lay it off for a while, and it worked! Now I'm ok and rarely play fps:s, I kinda miss it sometimes but on the hand I got a lot more time to do other stuff instead.
(Such as playing nethack, usurper etc..
I found an article at http://www.loonygames.com/content/1.2/feat/.
It talks about something called simulator sickness, a condition similar to motion sickness that is caused by exposure to virtual environments.
This article seems interesting.
They never let my dog in the store. Not fair!
Also, the other day I got kicked out from a church after trying to drop things I found on the street onto the altar...
Anyway, as other posters said, this is not limited to games. Back at the days when I still climbed, I often ended up staring on walls of buildings trying the figure out the way up. And the other day I caught myself standing on the street in a heavy rain, looking at the rushing water trying to find the best way through the "rapids".
AccountKiller
Anybody else try to 'hop' their sedan around an interstate corner?
When I first was playing Doom deathmatch in college I would finish up, and go to walk around, and my eyes would flick around like I was scanning the screen for movement. It would take some time for me to be able to calm down and see straight. After a month or two I was able to leave the game without any residue. Anymore all I get is an occational "Hehe. Naw, that's not a good idea." left over from a gaming session. I don't know if it's related to time spent as a gamer, or maybe learning to differentiate on a graphically simpler game.
But after a long session of multiplayer Burnout3, I always advise my departing guests "Remember: Drive AWAY from the other cars!"
That I was afraid to crawl up to my attic, sure I was going to get shot in the head when I poked up.
yeah GTA got to me. i would come out of walmart and all of a sudden get this urge to go over to someone putting groceries in their car, kick them, punch them then throw them to the ground then steal their car.. yeah GTA is defintely clouding my mind...
I'm too busy gaming to post an intelligent comment.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
I live in Maryland, where this actually happened not too long ago.
what is this "reality" you speak of?
Remember Super Mario Bros? Running along, scanning left to right for obstacles, so you could time your jumps? I remember after one 18 hour marathon, I decided to relax and read the latest Robotech book. After a few minutes of reading, my mind trailed off on a tangent, but my eyes kept scanning the text. (This actually happens alot when I read a book which excites my imagination.) Soon I realized I wasn't simply scanning the text, but my eyes were darting from capital letters, over half-height letters, and arcing between words, as if it were a level in super mario. At first I was amused, then alarmed. The problem disappated over a few days. According to my neurologist (I had an aneurysm near a ganglia in my back, so I had to have regular checkups to make sure the bleeding didn't cause any nerve damage), long hours of repetitive motion will reprogram nerve clusters. Scanning text, like walking or breathing, is an automatic function which is controlled by a feedback loop so that, unconciously, it adapts to changing conditions. This is whey repetitive motion injuries can be so severe - you can literally undo years of programming in a few short days.
As games get more realistic, the blur between reality and gaming will be increased. Today I watched how one of the roads outside our company's building was illuminated by the sun, and since it was so similar to HL2, images of Striders came up in my mind.
Ten years from now, graphics will be so realistic that games will come with warnings about their effects and advices of how to counteract those effects.
From a philosophical point of view, this situation simply gives credit to the simulation argument (www.simulation-argument.com). We might be living in the Matrix, but there is no way to tell. Not only computers may be so powerful one day that the likes of Holodeck is an everyday reality, but some how machines may 'rise' and form the reality for us.
Hmm. I don't know what these people are talking about. hehe The background: Despite the Red Alert reference, my fondest memories of this type were when I was in high school. My brother and I decide to "spend the weekend on Arrakis." From Friday afternoon until almost-school-time Monday morning, non-stop, we took turns completing levels in Dune II. He napped (on the floor by the PC) while I played. When I finished a level, I woke him. "Tag, it's your turn." The cool part (or disturbing, depending on view): Literally, for the next 3 days, EVERYTHING I looked at had a Dune map superimposed over it. Trikes and Quads were crawling over everything. I heard the spice credits ticking constantly: slow rate, fast, increasing value, decreasing. The credits ticking was the most memorable. It may be many more years before I forget that beautiful sound! *wistful sigh* Speaking of *emotes*, playing on MUDs, such as NannyMUD (telnet://mud.lysator.liu.se:2000 *ahem*), can cause a LOT of this verb-translated-to-RL effect. Role-playing games have been noted for this effect for many years. I have been known to shamelessly use "Argh," and "Boggle," verbally to express myself. --Kenneth
.no
Ugh, we've let the cat out of the bag. Now all the anti-video game pundits can point to our comments here......
YES, I played GTA 3 daily for a while and when driving on the freeway I'd see building and I could imagine myself jumping off the highway onto the roof, etc.....
Ok, let me start by admitting that I've been there too. I played quite a bit of GTA3 and Vice City and remember scanning traffic while real world driving, seeing a sportbike and thinking, "ooh, I could get through traffic much faster if I grabbed that."
But on the other hand, I'm convinced that playing lots and lots of Grand Tourismo 1 and 2 pushed me AWAY from bad driving behavior in real life. First, it conviced me that nothing that you can drive on the street is actually fast. You just can't beat a purpose-built race car. Why bother souping-up your real car a little bit and then act like you are racing on the streets when it is just pathetic pretending. I saw right through crap like "The Fast and the Furious" as a bunch of posers because I knew that $100,000+ Supra still wasn't a "ten second car" it ran in the 13s at best. Any old Mustang set up properly for drag racing could beat it cold. Pretentious.
Secondly, hours of racing, even without car damage on, taught me that driving on the edge of control inevitabley leads to collisions, which make you lose. It also taught me that the margin between "in control" and "crashed" is very slip, and once to pass that tipping point you can't get back, so the only way to succeed is to drive well under the your and the car's capabilities so that you still have room to make adjustments.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I used to work at a video game company on a PC Gamer Game Of The Year title. At this company (and no, it wasn't Electronic Arts...), Engineers worked an average of about 70 hours/week with peak times exceeding 100 hours/week. Needless to say, fatigue was a real issue, so in order to wake ourselves up between coding sessions and before the drive home on a boring stretch of highway, we'd play Quake deathmatch spontaneously throughout the day/night and for approx. half an hour before leaving for home, whatever time that was.
Well, I don't know whether it was physical and mental exhaustion or too much Quake, or a combination, but on one pre-dawn drive home a driver ran a red light on a cross-street and cut me off, nearly clipping my front bumper. Rather than hit the brakes or swerve or hit the horn, I reflexively reached for the "6 - Enter" combo (select rocket launcher, fire). I actually removed my hands from the steering wheel and reached for a keyboard that didn't exist!
The visual hallucinations, blackouts and memory loss that had been occuring in the prior months I could ignore, but when I chose to rocket-strafe a car rather than swerve to save my life, at that very moment I *knew* beyond a doubt that I was gaming too much and things needed to change while I was still alive so I quit soon after.
Oh, and if any of you remember being fragged by a LPB camper named BaldHeadedBaby, that was me.
I'd notice, after playing Carmageddon for, oh, six hours straight, my driving skills would either suffer tragically or, depending on your point of view, suddenly improve. I never hit anyone, but I would go faster, turn aggressively, and generally shave several minutes off my travel time to wherever I was going. Of course, my girlfriend, who refuses to learn how to drive because cars scare her, would verbally beat the shit out of me after driving like that, so I responded by saying "Fine, I'll just go play Carmageddon." And, of course, a few hours later, she'd want a ride somewhere :) MWahahahahhaa.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
I was also very unamused to discover my Ford Contour somewhat underperforms relative to the Infernus.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
After playing counter strike and battlefield 1942 religiously and moving to a new city about 18 months ago, I found myself evaluating every new building and room for breech and exit strategy.
:)
Scarily, I also found myself sitting in the cafeteria or on the patio on breaks staring across the way at a vacant high-rise building thinking, "hmmm, now THERE would be an incredible sniper spot."
I'm glad I don't own a rifle.
It does if you're a Buddhist, you insensitive clod.
My friends finally convinced me to pick up World of Warcraft. I hadn't done it because I knew I'd be addicted. I finally broke down when we were all at a party and one of them shook his head and said "Dude, why aren't you playing?"
Another reason why I wasn't playing: another mutual friend had been playing since open beta, and told me he feared for his marriage when they released the production version. (He bought instantly and has been playing constantly).
Occasionally my three-year-old sees me playing and says, "Daddy, you're playing your character game a LONG time."
My wife usually lets me know when it's time to stop by saying "I just don't understand why this game is more important than I am." Last night she said maybe I should work on accumulating some marital XP.
So what's my point? I think there is definitely a case for "too much gaming." Can you imagine sitting in the same chair for 4-5 hours at a time looking at a computer monitor that was turned off? Maybe I should at least set up an exercise bike in front of the computer, then I'd have legs of steel.
Doesn't this article and many peoples postings here lend credence to the "Violent Games Generate Violent People" so called theory. It seems very strange to me that someone could become so disconnected from reality. It seems to me if you are really that susceptible to becoming disconnected from reality then you should probably not play the games. Like the guy's girlfriend who tried shaking the tree in the park.
/. crowd are the first to say that their is no connection between violent games and violent behavior yet many of the posters here are saying that their behavior IS influenced by their gameplay experience.
I swear the the
Which is it?
What's most interesting is that when a story is posted about somebody blaming a game company for some sort of crime, everyone here says "I've played GTA for 72 hours straight and never carjacked anyone!". Yet here we are and everyone's agreeing that the lines can get blurred, even momentarily.
Is carrying out video game violence just the next logical step to what you all have experienced? You'll probably never reach that point, but what social or mental deficiency would you have to have before acting out a game becomes reality? Do we maybe start looking at Columbine and other tradegies and saying that maybe games to have some role in some violent acts.
Most difficult of all, is if we can find a link, what do we do about it? Go back to NES-style graphics?
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
The worst I remember is going into a movie theatre and wanting to turn around and shoot the projector window (too much Duke Nukem 3d.)
But that was just a momentary whim, even if I was carrying a gun I wouldn't have even come close to pulling it out and shooting.
People must really walk around in a daze and/or take things too seriously.
Overheard at the theatrical release of "The Two Towers": "Oh, come on, Rangers can't tank!"
Something similar happened to me after a Bolo marathon. Those of you who know the game will remember the angles you could use with the grid buildings to shoot at pillboxes safely. I was walking home that night and the world seemed like a grid. I kept positioning myself to take pillbox angles using trees as shields when nearing doors to buildings. Every pedestrian seemed to be wearing green...
Well GTA's the obvious one....but I remember two other times.
One was this one time after a very long Max Payne session - I needed to go do laundry, so instead of *walking* into the laundry room, I bullet-timed into it. I realized the stupidity of this about halfway down to the ground.
Another time was after a very long D&D session. I was riding my bike home and I was like "Wow, I could really go for a sprinkler on the ride home" (it was a long ride, in addition to being hot, and I was freaking tired). Instinctively (or not-instictively, in this case, really) I expected my DM, Pete, to "roll for sprinkler". This was one of those moments that makes you stop your bike in the middle of an intersection and wonder how you could be that stupid.
AccountKiller
I picked up a PS1 long after it was fashionable to have one. One of the few games I had was Tekken 3. After about an eight-hour ass-kicking session, I went to bed and had nightmares about a giant panda chasing me around and trying to kill me. Pandas now give me the heebie-geebies.
There was a time when my brother and I spent 36hrs straight (that's right, no breaks whatsoever) playing "Continuum" on a Mac SE (with a b/w display).
All 512 levels were played, and in the end it didn't really matter where I looked (or closed my eyes), I would see the exact same thing.
Man, not being able to close your eyes to something, being mentally 'trapped', is a powerful and sobering experience.
"Good news, everyone!"
I was stuck in the security line queue at the airport and started thinking how easy to would be to just run up the wall, swing from light to light to light, jump then run along the wall to the escalator.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
The worst part was falling asleep at night and having dreams where you actually broke down your movements into quanta that would fit in one T.U.
I would dream that I couldn't possibly walk that far in one turn, so I should stop behind a tree for cover.
After buying Crazy Taxi for christmas, I played far too much. After Christmas vacation was over, I went back to work. Upon driving home, I realized I had left my paycheck at work. Obviously, making a 3 point turnaround would take WAY too much time, so I simply gunned it, and then slammed on the breaks while making a hard left. Well, the maneuver actually worked, but I quickly realized "What in the HELL am I doing??!" Yeah, good ol' Crazy Taxi.
I played the hell out of "The Sims" when it first came out. I would imagine +, - signs over people's heads when they interacted with each other. Creepy, really.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
For me, it's Splinter Cell. I was waiting to be picked up once, outside the physical plant for a university, and I spent the time analyzing how best to infiltrate the building. Take out that light. Scale the fence. Hide behind those pipes. Etc.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Real life will do that, too. I got back into rock climbing about a year ago...and now everything I see with a vertical surface, I start visualizing the line I'd take climbing it.
Christ, I was at the Macaroni Grill the other day, and they had this archway made of rough shale-looking bricks, and I was thinking, "Hey, that's got to be about a V2 or V3 bouldering problem. I could send that bitch."
The point is, it's not limited to just video games. Anything you can get obsessed with is fair game for this sort of behavior. Pun semi-intended.
blog |
First off, no I wasn't drunk. I rarely drink.
It's funny that this post appeared today.
I played FarCry yesterday for the first time in about a week, the first thing I noticed was how disorienting it was. After awhile you get used to the scrolling of the graphics as you sit there. I'm amazed that I can get used to it.
Today I woke up so incredibly dizzy I couldn't even sit up. It took me about twenty minutes to sit up. A slow walk to the shower, all the time not moving my head.
Some powdered ginger and sugar in water helped (read about it somewhere).
Was it the game? Hard to say.
I can no longer participate in heated debates while holding a crowbar.
I lived with a guy who played a lot of GTA. One night when he was stoned and drunk he decided to take it up a notch. He found a car with the keys in it outside of a bar. He took it for a joy ride for a while. Causing a bit of destructing.
He did the same thing to a bunch of kayakers that stayed at our place. Their boats weren't tied on to the car very well. I had to go chasing after him. Collecting kayaks down the road. One kayak dragged for a quite a while. It's a good thing kayaks are made tough.
There were many times when I became very infatuated with a video game, daydreaming in school of playing it, of how to beat some level, or what I would try next... but nothing comes close to when I was first introduced to a MUD.
For those that don't know, they're scrolling text based games played with others online, sometimes with a modicum (or more) of role-playing involved. Back when there were not many online games, this was the fo-shizzle.
Being someone who enjoyed table top gaming and loved console RPGs, when I started MUDding in college at the somewhat infamous Moosehead SLED, I was addicted.
It was worse than crack. Worse than heroin. Well, I imagine at least. I was in college, and for the first week I literally would go to computer lab at 8am after breakfast, get a good spot, and sit there until until dinner time playing. Then I'd go to dinner, come back, and play more until about 6am. I might get 2 hours of sleep... maybe. Sometimes less. This went on for a full week. I made it to one class, which I slept at during the whole lecture, then went back to playing. Since I had slept then, I didn't need to sleep as much that night, yay!
Insanity. When I did sleep, it was of scrolling text that I couldn't read, but I knew what it meant. When I closed my eyes, I saw scrolling text. I started relating everything to the game. I started talking with MUD socials (single commands that would do an action response on the game.) I started referring to my backpack as my inventory.
When we had spring break shortly after and I went home for a week, I went through withdrawals so much that I went out and bought a $1200 computer on two different credit cards just so I could get my fix.
I'd turn down going out with friends to play the MUD. I'd try to get out of work as soon as possible to play the MUD. I'd spend my days off, my lunch breaks when I could, and nearly every spare moment to play this game.
My friend was nearly as bad... when he died online against another player, I have seen him shred his hat and a few other items in disgust at dying.
As with most things, you burn yourself out and lose interest... thank goodness.
On a similar note, while in college a friend and I decided to speak with a bad italian accent -all- the time. After a month of this, I started thinking with an italian accent. I started reading (to myself and others) with an italian accent. I had to concentrate to speak without an italian accent. Ack.
Oh go fuck your self. Games CANNOT make people kill other people. People make decisions. I decide to say fuck you, you decide to shoot me, cause and effect. Some freak shoots up their school doesn't mean the video game made them do it. Either they have 'bad parents' or have been pushed to their limits. The limits will vary with age, sanity, and stress. And don't give me the you can't blame the parents bullshit. Rich well educated properly socialized kids tend to turn out with a much clearer reality line than poor kids who's parents don't have the time of day or night.
Todays lesson: It is more likely for poverty to cause someone to murder than it is for video games.
Now go pay your taxes bitch.
Before GTA3, there was Carmageddon... a race game where you bought more time, and money by plowing through pedestrians along the raceways. You couldn't really succeed without mowing them down by the bushel- long lines earned you multiplier combos.
Getting behind the wheel of a real car could make one blink and rub one's eyes when a group of real pedestrians six or seven big started looking really temping in a crosswalk...
If anyone ever got hallucinations from playing text adventures. And if so, what the hell were they?!
are bad. I'm an average tetris player, ussually get around 100 lines. One night though I was trying to complete the damn structures on Tetris for the N64 and I was playing with some friends for hours...I think my brain snapped, because the last game I played I got some 350 lines and I wasn't even focused on the screen most of the time. The really bad part was trying to go to sleep later, I couldn't stop seeing tetris pieces falling into place whenever I closed my eyes. So I got a terrible headache from watching these damn tetris pieces falling and not being able to sleep and eventually ended up puking all over the place. I don't think there's anything worse than puking due to tetris and at the same time seeing tetris pieces fall perfectly in order into the bowl.
After years and years of way too much gaming, I can only think of a few instances where for a split second my mind gimped out like that..
Too much mario kart made me think I should hop and drift through curves on the freeway to get a mini turbo.
Too much Planetside with too little sleep made me trip out and I thought I saw a cloaker moving out of the corner of my eye a few times.
I think burnout 3 was the most disturbing of all though, as it had me thinking for just a split second that a head on collision would be cool.
Too much tetris had the theme play as an auditory hallucination once when I opened the freezer, not in my head, but literally in my ears. I read some explanation somewhere that anytime you listen to a sound way too much, your brain might eventually reprogram to think of it as the 'null sound' and next time you hear a droning natural 'null sound' like the freezer compressor your brain inserts the new 'null sound'? Anybody know anything about that?
I never once had anything from grand theft auto and I've played them all a ton.. I consider that game to be a personality test basically, I don't get anything out of randomly killing people in that game, I think that as a run and gun shooter it has pretty terrible gameplay, it's the driving, exploration and storyline that make it a good game for me, the random crime aspect is more of a novelty then anything.
On the flipside of alterated reality....
Anytime I play a game for more then 4 hours in one day, I'm almost guaranteed to have dreams all night about it, in all kinds of indirect mixed-reality ways, and sometimes will even wake up somewhat mentally exhausted from having dealt with all those game type challenges all night long.
I think that if I play a very difficult game and put it down after having my ass handed to me then go to sleep soon after, I don't remember having any dreams about it, but I'll often wake up the next day and utterly obliterate whatever it was that was giving me trouble.
I get the same effect when programming, which has kind of led me to never just sit there toiling away on something difficult, but to take lots of little breaks and not even think about the thing giving me trouble until something from my subconcious surfaces with a clue.
(attn average /. reader: no, this is not a porn related post, most of you can skip the next paragraph)
There was a game by Atari called Hard Drivin' in the arcades (mid-late eighties?) and it's claim to fame at the time was one of the first "simulation" type racing games (had actual gravity, had "realistic" geometrically based visuals much like early flight sims, etc.).
Back then, it was as close to a simulator as the average person could get, and the car (a Ferarri?) behaved (proportionately) remarkably well. I played that thing over, and over, and over - trying to shave milliseconds off my time for the course. To the point where bystanders would gather 'round and gawk at my driving (yeah!).
However, because the game always started with the same positioning of everything (there was litt/eno randomness, other cars on the track always started at the same spot and drove the exact same routes).
The whole game got to be more mechanical than anything, shifting at exact points, balancing the clutch/accelerator exactly in specific situations, etc. It got to be so repetitive that it ingrained certain situations and responses into my head.
In the end, I played it so much at various sittings, that when I went out and got in my car, when presented with real-life traffic, my mind immediately starting proposing Hard Drivin' based solutins - realisticaly calculating cutting across sidewalks, parking lots, etc. just like in the game. One distinct point I remember was just after I pulled out of a parking lot, a slower car was immediately in front of me, and I reflexively almost down-shifted and cut across the inside of a turn - through oncoming traffic. I literally started the maneuver for a split second before my rational mind pulled the plug.
I doubt I'm the only one... or am I?
I can remember back in the day when I was a fiend for Tetris on the original Gameboy.
:)
After weeks of playing linked games against my friends at school and spending all my free time training up for said matches, I slid the milk back into the fridge after pouring a glass.
Suddenly, the eggs were a 4x1, condiments were un-Tetris-like 1x1s, and the milk was a 2x2 block.
Before I knew what I was doing, I said, "Wow, a double!" and was planning my next move based on what was left after that.
Sometimes I wish for reality bleed-over from games, because it would make it much easier to clean out the fridge, deal with annoying bosses, score with chicks, etc.
I've always been one of those that argues against the corrolation between violent videogames and real-world violence, and always will be.
However, this topic is the one strange loophole. I've noticed myself thinking in game-mode several times after extended play sessions, but only once did I ever really act like I was in a game. Two years ago, on Memorial day weekend when the girl-friend was out of town, my roommates and I spent all weekend playing Driver (and drinking), without any real-world driving (thank you, delivery men).
Tuesday comes, and I get in my car and head to work. About half-way there, while I'm in my normal driving-to-work mental fog, I notice a cop car coming down the other side of the road. When it was about a hundred feet away, the cop car turned on it's flashers.My brain screamed DODGE, and reflexively, I whipped my car over a lane and hit the gas. Thankfully, my common sense kicked in right away and I slowed down only a moment after gunning it, but I felt like a total ass. I'm just glad that the cop had pressing business, or that little Driver-inpired manuever might have forced me to come up with a good excuse real quick to avoid a ticket.
Of course, I blame the all the alcohol I drank that weekend for creating the conditioned response, not the game.
My wife came out the door one day and I threw a rock at her. She ran back in. She came back out, and I threw another rock. She ran back in. She did this three more times before finally asking me waht I was doing. I told her I was spawn camping, and she just got pwnt.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
I got arrested after playing this game. I raced a cop. Woops.
If something bad happens, i always want to load a previous save state, and i am always suprised that this does not work in the real world. It is so practical.
Y'all are sick. Not because you dream video games, but because all of the stories here are about dreaming about video games. Have none of you ever played a game without a pc/console?
I can remember chess club back in high school. After the tournaments, we would be driving home on the van, and I would still be seeing how I could attack the person two benches ahead and one person over from me. I was not the only teammate who had this happen either.
Go play a "real" game.
I have the same urge when I'm at a walmart, but what's GTA?
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Anyone remember that Simpsons episode, where homer fits the family into the car by wedging them in Tetris style? I used to walk around town after marathon sessions and EVERYTHING looked like it was made of simple interlocking blocks.
I can honestly state that hours of work on trying to unlock a new car in Gran Turismo 3 made me a better driver.
For example, when I skidded on snow the other day, I let off the brake, tapped the accelerator, and started steering the car exactly as if I was on a rally/dirt track in GT.
It was only afterward that I realized that I was thinking about the whole thing in terms of a video game rather than reality. On the whole, it was probably a good thing that I thought this way as it kept me from panicking and possibly losing control of the car.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
After a while, bicyclists become very adept at hopping small imperfections in the road like railroad tracks, potholes, etc. The first year I cracked 3,000 km or so of riding, I found myself trying to hop a bridge expansion joint in my car. Luckily, the car's suspension is better than my bicycle's.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
After playing this game for 4 hours straight and then jumping in my real car to go home on the freeway... let's just say that I had to be VERY counscious of my driving because my auto-pilot instincts were urging me to do very bad bad things.
00101010
I, for one, have adopted Gran Turismo techniques into my real-life driving. No joke. When I am confident there is no one else coming down my home street, I use all lanes of the road (my lane, the oncoming lane, and the shoulders) to go into the bend wide and cut the apex of the turn just perfectly. I can't help it, after playing Gran Turismo for 100+ hours I've convinced myself that this is the only way to avoid a spinout!
I wonder if the same thing applies when someone watches too much Pron..... I was at the laundromat the other day, and there was this girl there, and the DIDN'T take off all of her clothes, and F**k me..... What is the world coming to? :P
I LIKE TOAST!!!
Which reminds me of This guy
I empathize with the part about seeing the world in layers. I do that to, as well as finding myself wondering how to fix colours of a coloured pencil picture I'm working on and I'm always thinking (and if I'm near my keyboard hitting)ctrl+z to undo something 'real'. I'll also twitch the fingers for certain keys if I react to something, thumbs for spacebar jumping ect, and feel silly about it. At least I haven't gotten so bad as to shake trees yet. I didn't really game much recently until getting into World fo Warcraft, I'm afraid where that is going to lead me..
MUDs... I've logged well over 5000 hours on MUDs in the 7 or so years I've been MUDding, since I was 12... sometimes I'd be on for over 24 hours a session.
Oh yeah... once I stayed up for FIVE DAYS STRAIGHT playing Heroes of Might and Magic III - mainly just to see if I could. That was an... experience...
Beat that.
You have forgotten the face of your father.
..you approach your fridge in the morning thinking: ;eat ;emote dishes"
"Create
I know programmers who talk java. I mean to ME.
...The game that is still to this very day responsible for my uncanny ability to spot security cameras and feel the abject need to avoid them... or work out a quick firing angle. I bet I'm not the only one either.
Maybe I'm becoming an old fogey (at 28?) but it seems to me that kids in the age range where they were playing realistic driving games before driving are nuts. Following too close, diving in an out of traffic, etc.
Not that my generation didn't have games (pole position and rad racer are less than realistic, tho). Not that we are all good drivers... but I seem to see a LOT more 20 year olds driving like it's the daytona 500 than I used to.
Or maybe I'm just a fogey...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
So, I think to myself, what game could I get for my wife so she gets more enjoyment from our PS2? I heard about Karamari Damacy online (Penny Arcade, I think) so went out and found a copy.
Now the wife sings the danged music walking around the hosue... well, she sings it the few times I see her anymore. I've seen her rolling up laundry into large balls, and she has been eyeing our dogs for size.
And then there is the wacked out funk coming out of this King of All Cosmos' mouth! I'd like a little of whatever this guy is smoking.
I'm really starting to think that this game is some sort of cult programming device, creating a legion of garbage-rolling zombies ready to serve some unsavory purpose...
The moral of the story? Either Be Careful What You Wish For, or Don't Let Your Wife Game. Take your pick.
Years ago I was working a job that I had been laid off from, but had a month to go. They were cool about letting me just hang out in the back room and work on the computer. This was before there was much to read on the internet, so I was stuck playing Solitaire on Windows 3.1. I played so much that when I went outside to get lunch or go home, I kept envisioning stacking women in front of men, then men in front of women, to get the whole Jack-Queen-King thing going. Frightening.
Is this article supposed to be a joke? I play a lot of games, and I think about games a lot. Occasionally, I fantasize about "playing" games in real life (it would be nice if I could steal any car in sight and drive off like in GTA3), but I generally don't act on those thoughts. However, I have NEVER had any trouble distinguishing games from real life.
I dont care. I'm hooked into Second life. Ive met some sexy gals (or at least their good a role playing one). I wanna give up my job and just become one with secondlife....as long as the street cornor has a wifi connection, there will be no problems. lol
this isnt as abnormal as you might think. every person i know who's ever done any serious skating in real life does this constantly (even after they've stopped skating). i think its interesting that this is happening to you just by playing a video game though.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
We were all gung-ho, having each logged many a late night in CS, and felt we've have an edge on the competition with our intricate knowledge of coordinated attack squad tactics.
Now picture all of us nursing our burning legs after less than a half-hour, having discovered that it's actually incredibly painful to run around in a squat position for periods of time longer than about 4 minutes.
I noted that there was a noticeable lack of suicide charges into enemy territory as well.
I live in LA, full of gang tags... shortly after picking up GTA:SA, I noticed a purple tag on an overpass... first thought? "Fucking ballas... where's my paint?"
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Many moons ago, when I spent far too much time MUDing, I found myself dreaming in text:
I would dream consistently for hours in scrolling colored text, in the general correct colors and shapes of chatting, MOB killing, PKilling, etc.
What was odd however, is that I couldn't read any of the wording (which I'm told is very standard for dreams), but I knew what each line meant
Did anyone else share this odd experience?
-matt
Any time an article regarding kids who do some fool thing and blame it on GTA or Random-Violent-Game-of-the-Day, and Slashdot turns into a great big billboard reading "You're a rotten parent."
A humorous article gets posted regarding blurred lines between games and reality, and we see hundreds of horror stories involving people thinking about how to optimise their drive to work with regards to the rules of GTA3, Burnout 3 (crash mode), Doom, Quake, or other Random-Violent-Game-of-the-Day.
Consider that the intellectuals are generally given to better self-control and introspection than your average human. Consider how close some of these stories got to becoming true horror stories. Consider that teenagers generally find the concepts of self-control and introspection more alien than most people do.
This is starting to sound like the people who say alcohol is harmless, then proceed to tell the stories of the last time they rode home naked in the bed of a weaving pickup truck because they forgot how to put their pants on.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
A few years ago my wife went away for the weekend. I had bought a new PC with hardware 3D but I didn't have any games. I had never played a FPS game before but had heard that Quake 2 was "really cool", so I picked it up at the local CompUSA.
I pretty much killed the rest of the weekend learning to play the game, and I slept maybe three hours between Friday and Monday. By the time my wife got back, I realized that I could see the crosshairs in real life whenever I looked at anything. That experience was enough to convince me to uninstall the game and get rid of it.
Ian McKay (of Minor Threat and Fugazi) once stated that the reason why the "punk" mentality and skateboarding culture combined so well together is that perceived things differently than the traditional point of view. A railing was an opportunity for tricks, a parking lot was a place to pick up speed, a stage was a pulpit.
All the games mentioned tend to do that. They all make you to look at things differently.. whether its hunting for gaps in Tony Hawk, looking for hookers in GTA, or looking for objects to pick up in Katamari Damacy.
The games have altered your reality; you just have to know how, and how to turn it off.
Hot girl walks by: "OMFG cum let me sex0rr"
Bump into co-worker in the hallway: "WTF TK-er? Kickban!!1"
Sitting behind a car that's waiting for someone to pull out of a parking space: "F U camper!"
Slow down car to get the lane-changing/tailgating jackass stuck in the slow lane: "w00t"
This has happened to many times (dreaming about video games/not being able to get them out of your head when you close your eyes) The worst or best such occasion for me was I was playing Robotron for a few hours with the lights out while drinking and when I stopped all that I saw when I closed my eyes was the Brain/Woman level... crazy stuff! :D
~Necromutant
There are only three games that I've had weird out-of-gaming thoughts regarding.
looking at floor tiles, brick buildings, or really just about any jagged blocky shape and immediately start thinking of the best way to fill it with tetris pieces
sometimes random techno music makes me think of arrows, or (god help me) when I've heard Busy Child somewhere and couldn't help but tap the steps. I've also noticed that many tiled floors are very similar in 3x3 tiles to a DDR pad
sitting in a large theatre, I realized I was plotting how to grind/jump/kick-off my way around the inside of the building with the various rails and balconies, and it was fun
Luckily, I don't play FPS games
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
In addition to the occasional dream I have developed a definite habit of using everquest chat syntax when icq'ing people and every now and then I find myself trying to start an email with
/g here is the docs you requested
"tell the ones that come after me that 5 is to much"
Now, excuse me. I'm having a plumber come and I want to make sure that I have a few barrels to huck around.
I have been playing World of Warcraft every night after work. Last week I was at the airport and I saw this attractive girl from afar. In my mind I tried to right click on her to see what her name and stats were.
If only it were that easy...
For me, it was Carmageddon 2, which after days and days of play left me considering swerving sideways into other things on the road or trying to get the piledriver bonus. (I had out outside-of-usa-"not-zombies"-edition) Whee! Suicidal peds!
Steering by scraping the guard rails is easier than trying to hold the line, especially in the Metreon parking garage. And yes, after playing GTA, I found myself in traffic behind one of those carrier trucks they use for jump ramps.
I was playing Manhunt thinking those same thoughts. Gosh, I hope they're wrong about the link between video games and violence.
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
I hate to break it to you, but when you do repetitive things IRL, the same sort of stuff happens. I'll be driving home from 10 hours of snowboarding and start judging different hills and drifts alongside the road for the right approach or whatever... I've never tried to hit one (I'm still here, aren't I?) but I suppose if I was tired enough or if my brain wasn't functioning correctly, the urge is there, it could happen.
It's not just gaming, it's whatever you do.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
The desire to score 10 takedowns on my way to work in the morning is kept under control by the fact that I drive a sentra. Trying a takedown on a silverado might hurt a bit.
Here's just the thing for you.
Happens to me all the time.
[javac] 100 errors
I once put a camera on my car's bumper to simulate the bumper cam in Gran Turismo.
True story about Carmageddon:
This was after finals, my junior year of college. My roommate had just upgraded his PC to the latest and greatest, and had purchased one of those steering wheel/pedal controllers.
I'd been playing a couple of hours of Carmageddon (1), which was a first-person demolition race featuring pedestrain zombies you can run over to get extra time. Perhaps you see where this story is going.
Well, we ran out of beer or chips or something, and I was the only one who hadn't had anything to drink, so we all piled into my car to head to the grocery store, which was only a couple of blocks away if you went the back way.
About a minute into the drive, there was a lady sort-of shuffling toward us on the right-hand side of the road. My first thought was: "I can totally get to her!" And I very nearly swerved to do so, even.
Fortunately, since I'd only been playing a couple of hours (and not days and days), and since I hadn't been drinking, I caught myself before I killed anyone, but it did scare me to death, and I've been careful what games I allow myself to play since then.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
I have to say that after reading the article, and the comments that have thus far been posted, I am quite afraid. ,this element of real life would be interested if placed into the game world".
I play a lot of games, perhaps not as much as I used to, but I still spend the occasional weekend doing 16 hour gaming sessions.
The closes thing to this that's ever happened to me is to see things IRL that I think would make good elements to add into an area of a game (there is this one section of freeway that I drive on ever day that I later used as a central object in a THUG2 level I designed), but my thought process is always "this is real life, the game is a game,
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I used to play Quake. A lot. At some point, during a deer hunting session, I've nearly dropped the gun to finish him in humiliation - with a hammer. Well, I've spent sometime in rehab but my psy now consider that I made enough progress to release me in the wild ;)
A friend of mine is a great ice climber. While walking with him on a sidewalk downtown, I noticed he was no longuer around us. He was going sideway, on the side of the church, 12 feet over us.
I ride a lot of mountain bike. When I go for a walk, I imagine what line would be the best in bike. When a go down a stairway, I imagine it would be fun to simply stair-gap it on my bike. When I took my girlfriend to camping last summer, she almost turned crazy because when we went hiking, I was enjoying the trail more than the look around the mountains. I've bought her a mountain bike and she's now sharing my passion. She even sometime see lines on the trail where I wasn't even sure existed.
Dont even get me started on those damn Microsoft certification I have to do. Those are nightmares, not sweet dreams!
I mean, its not only about "abuse", but also about "passion".
I think that everyone, like me, has at one point or another played a tetris game on a public bathroom's tile floor. No magazine? No problem!
No-one's mentioned YKYBHTLW? We used to chat about it lots on Usenet. It stands for
"You know you've been hacking too long when"
and hacking could be changed to programming, gaming, etc.
For me, I knew I'd been playing Castle Wolfenstein too long when I found myself strafing around corners.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
...ah slashdot. A grammar or spelling lesson free with every thread!
Am I the only one that doesn't have these problems??
Carmageddon was just released, and I had a beefed up 486 that was up to the task. I installed the game and didn't leave my room for a day. The only real issue was my drive to work after, I kept on looking at people as I was driving trying to size up how many points they would be worth if I hit them (style + gore factor x speed). I figured I was in for a cool 10,000 pts. if I powerslided a group of preschoolers over the rail on the highway overpass. It didn't help that the game had an awesome soundtrack that you could play in the car. Man, what a great game...
Played so much Carmageddon I started sizing people up for points when I was driving around. style + gore x speed = points You could listen to the soundtrack in the car to, which is really a scary option.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
For me, it's movies.
I like to watch a certain set of films. It's a fantastical escape, just as games are, but with more of a story; for me, this makes them more "life-like" and enables me to pretend more easily.
I like films such as Braveheart, Die Hard, and The Boondock Saints. I suspect these films have drastically altered my outlook on existence, as I've watched them quite a bit. Identifying with them leads to subtle emotional and opinionistic changes in one's mind...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I work as an overnight stocker at Wal-Mart 1870, and part of the essential job functions involve reorganising frieght in the bins, and managing to fit in the night's overstock in. Tetris actually enhanced my ability to "fit a round peg into a square hole", by increasing my ability to mentally re-arrange the objects in the bin mentally faster than it is actually possible to do. It is sort of like chess, I know where I am going to place an object 3 moves ahead of actual time. If you like Tetris, you will LOVE being an overnight stocker at Wal-Mart.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
You are EXACTLY the kind of person one would expect to end up dead at a McDonalds after having gone postal there. You've got some anger issues.
I will agree with you, that parents -NEED- to be a functioning part of a childs development. However, your argument makes it sound more like we should throw parents in jail anytime a child does something wrong.
And I think your poverty premise is full of shit. I've known too many people FROM rich affluent families, that ended up in jail because they were never even exposed to poverty. You equate rich with something it is not.
You take the word "rich" out of your statement, AND the word "poor" out of your statement, and then you will have a "true" statement. A statement that is backed up by the earlier premise that good parents are crucial to proper development.
There are plenty of "poor, poverty stricken kids, who have made successes out of life.
And when was the last time you read an article about poor, poverty stricken kids shooting up a school? The last I reviewed it, it was always the well off, "had everything going for them" kids. Kids whose parents never even suspected their kids of anything wrong.
And why do you need me to pay taxes? You're probably some shit-for-brains asshole on welfare who uses the money to buy cigaretes and beer, sit on your ass all day playing games instead of getting an education and a real job. Why should I give you any money, you'll never amount to anything with your attitude. Guess you'll have to learn a few more moves from GTA so you can roll me some night on the freeway.
Take another drag on that weed, maybe you'll toke enough to relieve the tax burden.
The two biggest times I got this were trying to turn on my eye backlight once while walking around outside when I was into Deus Ex, and always running to my car after hours of GTA.
I also once ducked behind a pillar and went for my gun when someone walked into the door at the gym. Luckily I wasn't packing.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
When I'm in a mall, a cathedral, or any nice, roomy area with arches and upper structural areas near the ceilings, I soooooooo very much want to use my grappling gun (best Quake mod ever).
I think it was originally called "tetrisized" after the old game Tetris, where after playing for a long time you'd go outside and see blocks falling between the building... does it actually happen? You bet... first hand experience here!
Iknow I've been behind some @sshole at a green light sitting there talking on his cell and caught myself thinking "throw in a flashbang or teargas,cuff 'em and move that car myself".If you haven't tried Swat 3,You don't know what you're missing!Why can't all first person shooters randomize the placement and ratio of good/bad guys?The replay value is SO MUCH better that way.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
i've been playing too much FPS for a long time.
like many here i often find myself thinking in real world like i would in a game.
but my point here is a dream i have more an more:
in real life i'm in a situation where i would need to use a gun but i cant find the button to switch weapon!
I think my high school would make an aweseom CS map. ... What?
I'm always looking for good spots where I can see a large field of view, fire with in it, but that conceal me. My favorite I've found so far is at work peering down on to the warehouse floor through the small gap between the door from and the open door.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
I've been playing road racing sims since I can remember, back in the commodore 64 days. When I was sixteen I got my license and got the first of MANY speeding tickets. Now I've accumulated so many that I pay over $20,000/year for car insurance. I recently sent a letter to Accolade and Electronic Arts joking about how they've ruined my life...
My love for the FPS (especially Wolfenstein:ET) genre has not changed me at all... I mean sure I can now shoot a penny at 60 feet everytime with my pellet rifle and 100 feet in 3 shots......
Karma: Good, or bust!
After playing and watching a friend play Grand Turismo 3 for weeks on end, whenever I was driving I would take a corner and see those little lines that "Help" you during the license tests. "If I coast to here and accelerate... NOW."
And then I always want to swing to the outside of the road and coast in to the inside... but sometimes on coming cars don't appreciate that.
Xhentil Do'ana
Enjoy!
Play enough Starsiege: Tribes and you start trying to jetpack everywhere. Even worse, you try to "ski" down hills which involves running down the hill jumping whenever you touch the ground. It worked in the game! WHY DOES IT HURT ME SO?!
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
One day with three other friends we were making a webpage. Being 4th in a row of subcontractors for some large governmental contract, work going gradually down from huge "pro" companies to 4 amateurs like us, with enough time wasted by the others in the meantime that no pro would agree to do the project with deadline as we accepted. But that meant about 15 hours of work a day for 3 days (that was the deadline). On the second day we were nearing the end and we know we will do it and even have some spare time. So my 3 ingenious friends decided that since we're wired over a LAN we "built" for that purpose, we can play a few quick deathmatches of Q3A.
Next day I said "Sorry, friends. Coding, okay. Gaming, no. It was still acceptable when I was placing HTML tags in my dream. But when I was trying to shoot them and they wouldn't die, that was too much."
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
One of my best friends and I played Star wars Pod racer until our eys bled. We car pooled in the morning and one day he looks at me and goes "We can skim inbetween those cars, bank up off the building and get out of this traffic, just push the turbo" We stopped playing when I tried it...
I played the whole game while working from home for several weeks.
Then I went out to the petrol station, filled up, and pulled out onto the right hand side of the road, and drove about 500 metres on the main road. A car pulled out onto the road in front of me, and I realised that in New Zealand, we're meant to drive on the Left!
Cars aren't meant to come towards you in the same lane... Very very freaky feeling.
-- You can't give it, you can't even buy it, and you just don't get it!
Similarly, I found that when I had a crack at racing Pilot buggies, it felt like I was just playing a driving sim. Well, until I span out, forgot to let go of the steering wheel and dislocated my shoulder, anyway. That felt pretty real.
Anyone experienced this ?
dreaming about fitting tetris blocks ?
I've also experienced this with cnc generals ??
perhaps i'm playing too much.......
How about too much time at game development? While I was working on Nascar Racing 2 (testing the spotter reactions and playing after-hours), while driving home in the wee morning hours, I would:
- Feel like I should check out the current collision detection behavior by casually "rubbing" against the car in the lane next to me.
- Get suddenly angry when someone went in the right lane to slow down, when obviously the pit lane's over on the left. Geez, buddy!
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I think I erred in permitting my kids to play GTA *before* buying them hookers...
Or if the lane for oncoming traffic is empty just gun it and drive the wrong way. Or just hop up onto the sidewalk to detour a traffic stoppage. And don't for get the classic "maintain top speed around a 90 degree turn by cutting over the sidwalk, hitting three pedestrians and sideswiping a light pole".
Fortunately the feeling goes away pretty quickly, even if you've been playing all day.
Back in the day we didn't have the computing power to simulate real life well. Games like GTA or Tony Hawk are more engaging because they are more realistic. Driving around a city committing crimes is just real enough to be extra thrilling; so is pulling epic tricks on a skateboard at the mall.
Another game that added realism to its genre was Gran Turismo. You could buy real cars and perform realistic modifications to those cars to improve performance. The cars handled according to their real characteristics. For example, you could easily tell the different between FWD, RWD and AWD.
The ultimate add-on to this would be a module that would allow folks to add real driving locations. You could use GPS to map out the road and a digital camera or video recorder to capture the scenery. Then you could try driving familiar roads with or without traffic, in various types of weather, and most importantly without the repercussions of a real crash.
This game would be even more dangerous because it would give young drivers a terrible model for how to drive real roads. But I bet it would be quite popular if local roads were available.
I see GTA coming up a lot in this thread. I know I've had fleeting thoughts of jacking cars and stuff sometimes. but it mostly just comes up as jokes with my friends and such.
On the other hand, there were a couple of times on the freeway where some drunk and/or terrible driver drifted into my lane (once across four lanes, very quickly), and I instinctually got out of the way and back into the lane while avoid the center divider three feet away. If it weren't for all the practice I'd had dodging cops and swerving through traffic, I'm sure I'd have jerked the wheel too far and crashed. As it was, I didn't realize what happened until a few seconds later. I was pretty glad I'd wasted so much time gaming after that.
[insert witty quote here]
This discussion is giving me stacks of good games I can play! I'm in a gaming rut at the moment and am looking to dig up some old classics. Thanks guys for telling me about the ones that really f**k you over. Another game that hasn't been mentioned - Mechwarrior. Too much of that and you walk around with a reticle permanently burnt in the centre of your vision. The smoothing female voice of your mech computer telling you you've reached 'critical temperature'.
>
> Now all you have to do is convince your boss that you're just as effective asleep as you are awake. Then you can take those well-deserved naps at work after lunch.
We have reviewed the grandparent poster's performance and concur with your assessment.
Someone once complained that nobody with any guts gets anywhere in this company, and that management was full of shit.
As to the second problem - yes, we're full of shit. And in order to put the first problem to rest, effective immediately, all employees below my level of management shall receive at least one endoscopy per day while being quizzed on the minutae of DNS configuration.
I think the whole gaming-is-bad-for-you press is overblown. There hasn't been enough time for kids to grow up with gaming and learn how it fits into their lives for people to draw conclusions on how good/bad it is. What we are seeing is people who have half a foot in the door with computer literacy and another foot in the past, getting caught up in a whirlwind of an exploding addictive market.
I've played games for a long time, and yes, you get caught up in games. You get addicted to games, hype, communitys, and you learn to control your behavior. When kids grow up there are so many times when parents say, "It's a phase." These are phases that the whole gaming world is undergoing and people get panicy because they never got the chance to go through it during the saftey of childhood.
The more people you talk to who have experinced the let down of an overhyped game will tell you they just don't get that involved anymore. People who go hard core into a game and play 10 hours a day get burnt out, and just don't go back to that kind of playing. This isn't to say that gaming itself is a phase, I think it will be around for a long, long time. These new trends will move more twords younger ages, and as long as parents don't freak out due to media coverage of the evil video games, people won't be so ill-prepared for what happens when you get interested in gaming.
I spent a few years teaching myself photoshop in college. Then for a while I dated a girl whose primary hobby was acrylic painting; so the summer we were apart I entertained myself by trying to learn to paint. (how cute, I know.)
Everytime I screwed up with the damn brush, my brain reached for "undo" and my command-Z fingers twitched.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Lemmings was the worst for me. There's a point when you're trying to get inside your house from the car, and you think that if your girlfriend would just go stand right over there with her arms out you could bounce off her and you'd be vectored right in through the entryway. Oh, but it's locked, so maybe you need to give your little brother a pickaxe and bounce him at the door to see if he can dig through. If it goes "clink", you need another route of entry.
And that's the point when you know it's time to find another source of entertainment.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
This happened right when the Mohaa was goin around...... I was sitting in a tutorial at skule and the building adjacent was this like 100 year old building, and the person's head pops up in one of it's windows..... I swear I reached for my sniper gun. Laughed out loud after that.
Oh and I dreamt I could swim in air while going through competitive swimming in grade 12.
A few years ago, I was walking down the street near my apartment when I heard a man grunt. I turned around, and almost tried to whip out :)
a rocket launcher.
An old place I used to live in had a very squeaky sliding door at the back. It happened to be very similar in tone & timbre to the call made by the robots with the chainguns just before they would beat the living daylights out of you. ;) one housemate happened to be walking past the door when the other came in, and he crapped his pants to the point of physically moving extremely quickly, spinning around, looking for the robots, concerned for his personal safety.
;)
Suffice to say after a long Descent session (can't remember how many days
Another friend who used to practically live with us he was over that often to game or watch tv/movies actually fell off his chair while physically attempting to strafe to "see around the side of the monitor". He took his joystick, keyboard, and half the contents of the table with the PC with him. Very funny to watch, and funnier still after his explanation
After a long time DM'ing with Quakeworld I got caught by a group of close friends turning around, strafing, and attempting to pull a "rocket launcher" out to fire into the bottom of the stairwell on route between lunch venue and workplace. It seriously looked just like a common camping spot in one of the popular maps! Very embarrassing.
Recently I had a solid session (12 hrs+) of NFSU2 and had to fight the urge to actually drive like that immediately afterwards. I think the scariest thing about this one was the fact my car is not controlled with an xbox controller pad, but there was no discernable difference in my mind - the driving style just came naturally and transcended controls.
As many other people have said - all these are good signs you need to give it up for a while. Even a single day should help.
Matt
I then relised this is reality..
Another time I started work at a warehouse and noticed an overseeing box overlooking the whole warehouse. First thing I thought was
"Wow, that would be great with a sniper rifle. You could aim down every isle"
A blog I run for the wealth
This first happened to me after seeing an episode of MacGyver. I forget what the episode was about but he had to use a laser to get around ostacles that were in it's way with mirrors to activate something. Now I visualize places I've been and where I would need to place mirrors and what angles are needed.
Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.---Scott Adams
Yeah, I've had a few of these moments. Perhaps the best was the time when I was in my early teens and I'd been playing Laser Squad on the Spectrum (Timex) for hours and hours. I woke up in the middle of the night needing the bathroom, and for about a full minute I lay there trying to work out how many Movement Points it would take to get there and back - could I do it in one move? How about if I cut diagonal corners at the doorway? Then I snapped out of it, but for a brief period it was a very real concern.
And then plenty of times I'd notice a crack in a wall, or a blemish in the plaster, and immediately register it as a different 'texture', possibly a secret door or panel. Reflex action. I've admired the lighting model of streetlamps, too.
I think I'm better now, because I got nothing like that from Half Life 2 - no urge to play around with planks and bricks, for example. I can easily pass a barrel without wanting to hurl it at the nearest NPC, I mean bystander.
...better.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
After Fallout and Fallout 2 marathons, I started seeing the barter screen at the drive through booth at McDonalds. When I did finally make it to work, I had the urge to rifle through every bookshelf and cabinet I saw for ammo.
I also had trouble driving home after marathon sessions of GTA2. My first instinct was to drive like a maniac.
I have a hard time deciding what I think about this issue. I have anecdotal evidence from my own life that it isn't really a problem. After playing GTA3 for a while I would think about how cool it would be to see if I could make a handbrake turn in real life, but I haven't ever actually thought about doing it other than in a controlled situation. When driving around, my roommate and I would often try to categorize vehicles that we passed as cars from GTA3, but that was more to annoy our girlfriends than anything else. My experiences with FPS games such as Counter-Strike and Thief definitely cause me to think about the most defensible spots in a room, but I am not convinced that is a bad thing. To summarize, the experiences I have had with thinking about games while not playing them have been fun rather than disturbing.
On the other hand, One of my closest friends in college had a real problem with games. I haven't ever known someone closely who had a drug-related addiction, but this seemed as frightening as I imagine that being. My friend was, for three years, just one of the guys that would play games together. But last year he started playing City of Heroes, and everything changed. He stopped attending classes, lost interest in the things we used to do together, and lied consistently to his closest friends and his fiance about what he was doing. That friend failed all his classes that year, had his engagement broken, and has alienated himself from all his friends now. It makes me sick now to think of the times I urged him to skip a class to help represent our clan in a CS game, knowing now that I may have been contributing to destroying his life.
In conclusion, I really don't know what to think about this. I used to firmly believe that gaming addiction was a myth spread by hysterical mothers, but I have seen it with my own eyes. However, I sincerely believe that it was not games themselves that pulled my friend in, that if not for games he might have become an alcoholic or obsessed over something else. I certainly don't want to ban games, but I will definitely look at them with a bit more caution in the future.
Oh, and here's an appropriate quote to this discussion from a GTA3 radio segment:
Lazlow: "Okay, and speaking of impossible, Jane from Cedar Grove is on the line, and she wants to talk about how difficult it is being a parent today. Hello Jane..."
Jane: "Hi Lazlow, I love the show, I'm a first time caller. I wanted to say something about these videogames, they are warping our kids minds. My sons dog, Bugle, got hit by a truck, and he says 'Mummy, mummy, where's the reset button?.' Kids these days, they think life is a game. Well it's not a game Lazlow. It is very, very serious. I let my kid play video games, and now, he runs around the house looking for gold coins. This is teaching our children to go chase money. My eldest has been playing this new videogame, called Pogo the Monkey..."
Lazlow: "Yeah, I've heard of that one..."
Jane: "The shop teacher called me today, and Sam made a home-made banana cannon in shop class, and was lobbing them across the street at a fast-food restaurant. And it's all because of videogames. Lazlow...life does not have a reset button!"
Lazlow: "Right, but this show does..." *beeeeep* "I love that button."
I've been remenicing (sp?) with Half Life 2 and going through the lower-class neighborhoods in my area. And I've also wished I had a gravity gun to grab that soda I left on the counter when I sat down to watch some TV.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
I'm just more concerned that gaming does not blur my mind THE RIGHT WAY.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Hmmm.. I don't know what it is but after hours of Halo 2 I find myself sneaking around the house and as soon as my wife's back is turned I elbow her hard in the back and scream, "Assassinated".
I have no idea what these divorce papers are that I got in the mail today.
In college I played games at a really unhealthy rate, like 50+ hrs a week. Luckily I was smart enough to scrape by all my classes with this habit. Anyway, it turns out that the "addiction" was really caused by seasonal affective disorder. I've got this under control now and am gaming at a much healthier level. I remember reading some article, probably linked by /. that mentioned how gaming "addiction" is usually just a sign of some other mental problem. I'll agree with that and I think that not being able to separate fantasy from reality might be a similar sign.
Never mind gamers, how are we going to cope with 150,000 soldiers suffering from varying degrees of shell shock returning from years of war? Now are you glad we let the assault weapons ban lapse?
/. peeve #274: The word is neither "walla" nor "whala", it's voila. Phonics is a tool of the devil.
instead of laughing at something funny, you blurt out "lol"
Never bring a gun to work?
Why not?
According to some (old, suspect, perhaps unrelated) statistics, workplace murder is a leading cause of death for American males.
I'm an American male.
I'd rather not have some Ed Norton wannabe pwn my bitch ass.
I've got a license to carry a handgun.
I'm not a maniac.
But I am in a position to protect myself.
We live way out in the country so we're not used to much traffic or any kind of crowded anything for that matter. Whenever we go the nearest city 1.5+ hrs away and manage to accidentally hit rush hour, I find myself waiting for my framerate to start stuttering.
Well, you are anyway.
Point that uncharged M4 at me, squeeze the trigger, and die when it fails to fire and I don't.
These people must have very weak minds. This never happens to me even aftor not sleeping for a day or two. Does this happen to anyone else??? (Dident read the other replys, sorry if I offend anyone, peole are all different.)