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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.
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....
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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
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.
I'd say it's pretty bad when you hear a techno tune, close your eyes and you can just see the arrows...
I found Half-Life 1 to be infinitely creepy. After a long gaming session, I got up to get something from the fridge. Along the way, I happened to run into a single strand of spider-web hanging down from the ceiling. My barnacle-avoidance instincts kicked in and I twisted my body out of the way - it took me a second to figure out what the hell I was doing.
Of course, I have all of the usual stories of seeing stuff when trying to fall asleep after late-night gaming - falling Tetris pieces, Super Puzzle Fighter blocks, Puzzle Bobble bubbles, even minesweeper scenarios. I think it's especially prevalent with games featuring lots of visual elements that your brain can abstract into functional pieces...?
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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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
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).
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).
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
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.