Video Games Can Alter Reality

Something interesting about VR gaming is the very heightened sense of spatial involvement. If I play a game on the screen I remember it as if I played it on a screen. But if I play in VR my instinct when reflecting on it is that I was there, in the game world. It can feel silly to talk about with people who don't play VR, but all the ways in which you remember experiences in the real world are the same. When you talk about it you can't disconnect them without just adding "in VR" to the end of everything. It's never that your character did the thing, it was you, you were there.

I've had the opportunity to drive on race tracks that exist both in VR and in real life and the spatial relationship is 1:1. So your brain is blending the two experiences seamlessly as you drive around, and you apply all the same spatial cues from VR onto the real world.

On a lighter note, I played far too much GTA: Vice City on PS2 in college, to the point that when driving in real life I forgot to check my side and back mirrors at stop signs, and instead realized I was squeezing my middle fingers on the steering wheel instead of turning my head to look.

On the game side of things, the strongest I've ever got this was during/after playing The Witness. It's an incredible (and incredibly addictive) puzzle game that will have you seeing puzzles everywhere in the real world if you play it enough. The game even alludes to this effect in one of the endings!

This seems to have crept into the game, Glider (a game where you control a paper airplane through a long house), that I wrote over three decades ago. In playing some of the longer houses I start to get a little claustrophobic.

It could of course be a coincidence: the dreams, game design. It's also possible I am misremembering the period when I first had the dreams—perhaps they actually began after the first shareware version of the game.

I think excessive concentration on a new skill can just create that pattern in your mind, no matter what the source.

Also quit playing PUBG because after a few hours I find myself processing my real environment as if I'm in the game, feeling like my instincts trigger to things that remind me something from the game.

Maybe it's like the way how people get adjusted to modified bicycles that turn to the other direction instead of the expected one or like those vision modifiers that turn the world upside down or looking back and after some surprisingly short time people start seeing normal again despite the modified optics.

IMHO its not that different from how our reality is skewed when spending too much time online, so neural networks are neural network no matter what the process I guess.

I've been part of the crowd that said loud and proud that "no, video games aren't making you more violent, and aren't destroying your soul". But here we are with a whole list of people who report that it has had a negative influence on their driving etc.

I personally am a little afraid because I now look at nature as if it was a screenshot to be looked from afar and then uploaded. It's a weird sensation that I'm not fully immersed in reality anymore and everything is just to be seen, shared and commented whereas before the web, reality was all you had to exist in, you had to touch, feel, play there was nothing else.

I wonder if anybody else ever had that state of mind.

ps:I often consider spending a month without any screen at all to try reset my brain.

“He started seeing health bars above the heads of the opposition players,” she says.

“Another player heard voiceovers while dodging tackles or chasing opponents.”

Okay but I wanna know if these health bars bore any relationship to reality, and were they conveying information otherwise unavailable? Like if a player was dealing with a hangover but looked okay, did their health bar show it? Was that voiceover telling the player what to do before it happened?

Started seeing a chessboard overlayed everywhere, and thinking what the next move for me and other "game objects" would be.

This was after just getting into chess and playing it many times a day, almost every day.

It was a very weird feeling. Luckily, it passed after a while. I stopped playing chess after a while too, and kinda been avoiding it since.

Whenever I go skiing, the first few days I'll feel myself sliding while in my bed, the exact same feeling as on snow.

On the rare occasions I traveled by boat, I could still feel myself rocking in my bed later, while no longer at sea.

And just a few days ago, I picked up Elden Ring (a video game). That same evening after "only" 2 hours of play I could still see swords slashing, giant monsters leaping at me, and me instinctively rolling around to dodge that.

I just think this is normal, and part of the brain rewiring itself to be better at that task. Indeed, my second days of skiing/gaming are way better than the first. Obviously it could be problematic if this process happened to me in the street.

The game doesn't affect reality, it affects the user's _perception_ of reality.

Understanding the difference means a major change for some people: accepting that what's inside your head is not "reality".

The failure to understand and accept this difference between reality and make believe (make believe is only in your mind) is the root of many millennial problems...

A long, long time ago when Grand Theft Auto 3 was new, I played a 9 hour session without distractions. Immediately after this over indulgence was completed, my mind was completely optimized for real-world fastest path object retrievals. I had to do grocery shopping. No steps in my path were wasted. Nothing but the items I wanted to buy were even seen to me. In what usually takes 30-40 minutes, I completed in 17, with nothing forgotten.

It was a big help for me growing up in a place where actual reality wasn't that exciting or even nice at all.

Perhaps the new elements is that studies confirm its existence, and that it could be leveraged to prevent or mitigate PTSD.

On a side note, this works even with chess. At some point I played Chess a lot, and I noticed I started to interpreting people's movements, behavior, intentions even, as chess piece moves and tactics. Must be weird for actual chess GMs.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2011/09/19/gamers-succeed-wh...