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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.
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,
Is it just me, or has GTA clouded the minds of others as well?
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
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 */
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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
The Real World Doesn't have Respawn.
http://hughgordon.com/
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.
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.
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.
I'd say it's pretty bad when you hear a techno tune, close your eyes and you can just see the arrows...
I've hardly ever played Quake yet I remember being in theatres watching the crappy remake of The Planet of the Apes. They were inside a building and one of the windows was shaped like the Quake I symbol. So I blurt out "look Quake I!" Thankfully I wasn't the only person in my group to have noticed...
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.."
++ This is something I've talked about with many of my friends. After playing a lot of GTA, almost all of my friends feel the same way -- they start sizing up cars and getting tempted to hop in a running car. We're all level headed people and we would never actually do it, but I can't imagine what those who are more easily influenced would do.
This is one of the reason 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.
Yes sadly I no longer use that exclamation. My wife tells this story way too much.
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
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!
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!!
You forgot one more vital thing...
:).
;)
Background music so you know when to do the quick save
Imagine a "superhero" with such a super power- no other powers except having predictive background music...
This Tetris thought process is especially useful when moving. I realize it every time I help a friend pack stuff or load their boxes into a car/van.
What's really frustrating is playing Tetris for a few hours before bed then dreaming about playing Tetris all night... And even in my dreams, I can't get that one stupid block I need...
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.
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
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.
If you want really scary I got bored one day and decided to get some good scores in Minesweeper.
It took a couple of days and when I was done I saw the various number sequences in my sleep. I could play minesweeper in my head.
Then I realised the truth. MSFT had control of my brain and was using it to upgrade minesweeper. A bit of tinfoil and a linux install and I am feeling much better now.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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..."
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?
When you're dreaming about a video game, you're seeing your mind self-optimising to play that game more effectively.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I was at the mall with my girlfriend
/. Don't bother with the conseling.
You're already one up on almost everyone else on
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Not nearly as sad as my mindsweeper days when I would sit around trying to memorize and mathematically figure out common patterns you see in the game. Obvious example is if you see 121 along a straight wall there is a bomb behind the 1's
Poor fluffy, his hair stood straight up for a week.
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
I start losing weight.
But see, that's *exactly* how I pack a car.
When I was a teenager, it was my job to pack the family van for the long gift-laden trip to the in-laws. I would pack like a fiend, because I obsessed about not leaving any holes.
"No, don't put that in yet. There's a space. Give me the small piece. No, that one. There."
They would wonder how I got everything in with room to spare.
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
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
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).
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).
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).
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.
s/wife/mom/
This is one of the reason 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.
But it is easy to tell, as evidenced by you not stealing any cars. You might feel a GTA-inspired urge to size up the car and take the nice fast one so you can evade the cops(I do too), but you know that you are in reality and that the real-world consequences (not just legal for you, but the consequences for the one you steal the car from) stop you.
The problem is not that reading/seeing/playing a game involving some concept may cause you to think about doing it in reality. The problem is the "more easily influenced" people who actually would forget about the barrier between reality and fantasy and act on the urges.
If playing GTA can make you commit real-life crimes, then watching the History Channel can make you commit genocide, and either way you are a nutjob who should be locked away. That's just my opinion, anyway.
The enemies of Democracy are
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
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.
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.
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.
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.