Maybe you see a plant you have to collect in game or a rock wall that looks different. What items have you caught out of the corner of your eye that you realized was just your brain so focused on looking for things in a game that you saw it IRL and made you double take?
When I first played Skyrim, I spent so long just wandering around, harvest every mountain flower I found, that every time I saw a bush with flowers, I felt the urge to harvest them because obviously that’s just what you do when you see something that can be harvested. The dopamine hit from resource gathering is very real.
Hahaha, yeah I remember going out in nature back then and the game invaded my reality. I felt the need to harvest plants, but managed to control myself.
Not exactly a double take, but sometimes when I play a lot of Assassin’s Creed I start subconsciously looking for good handholds on buildings in real life.
That 100% counts. I was thinking anytime the game perspective bleeds into real life.
Or it’s the animus bleeding effect.
You guys all make me feel old.
I can remember seeing everything like tetris blocks or back when after playing guitar hero long enough, the table looked like it was growing.
there’s a known psychological phenomenon that people who play lots of tetris sometimes see tetris when they close their eyes and dream about it in their sleep
Every time I’ve had to move into a new place, I catch myself humming at least one of the 3 Tetris songs without realizing it while packing boxes or a vehicle. Usually it’s Music-1 or Music-2.
When I first started modding Skyrim back in 2012, I spent a solid week solely on water mods looking for something I liked. One day near the end of the week I was walking to work, and I had to cross a bridge. I looked out over the water and had a momentary thought about checking what water mod “they” were using.
January 4, 2012 -had been playing skyrim like I needed the overtime for just about 2 weeks. Off on a ski trip, and someone was seated nearby, but facing away. My first thought was how I could pickpocket them…
Back when I was playing a bunch of Oblivion, I was doing the quest to find Nirnroot (Seeking Your Roots). I was spending so much time looking for them I started seeing them in real life out of the corner of my eye everywhere (it was usually actually thistle). I’d have to stop and look because I knew it was important, before my brain would kick in and I’d realize that it was from Oblivion.
I’m playing totk and now when I see an overhang something clicks in my brain.
I live at the top of a hill and keep thinking “oh it’ll take no time if I shield surf my way down”
Holy shit, I’m not the only one! So weird! None of the other powers have that affect on me, only the ascension ability.
totk?
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
I used to imagine using a portal gun on various buildings to get to school.
I was going to comment this. I remember after playing a bunch of Portal, I saw a plain white wall up high and thought “that’s a good place to put a portal!”
They got you thinking in portals
Right when I was playing Horizon Forbidden West, I saw a wrapped up chair that had tape in a blue cross on it, so it looked exactly like the things you can use your pullcaster on in the game. My first thought upon glancing at it was “Oh, I can use my pullcaster on that!”
…No. No, I can not. It’s real life; I do not have a pullcaster and there are no robot dinosaurs.
No. No, I can not. It’s real life; I do not have a pullcaster and there are no robot dinosaurs.
That’s unfortunate
After playing too much Ghost Recon, I once caught myself looking for a ditch I could jump into before “the guards” would come out of a farmhouse I was going to. Took me a full minute or two to shake off the feeling.
When I play a lot of Rainbow 6 Siege I have the urge to shoot out security cameras IRL
I did that when playing Splinter Cell. That, and looking for pipes to climb.
After playing Valheim, I started pointing out birch trees to one of my friends who also played.
“Ooh, look, a fine wood tree. And another. And another. Oh wow, is this the plains?”
I had some really weird VRish dreams when I first got VR and started using it. Especially if you use it before bed for VR Wikipedia or whatever.
Waaaaay back, almost two decades ago, I was super into the Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in. Played it almost every day. The only game I’ve actually fully 100% completed, which was a bit more difficult back then because walkthroughs weren’t as easily available. There were a lot of great cheat/guide sites that popped up around that time, and also physical cheat/guide books from before, but those were a bit harder to find where I lived.
(Speaking of physical cheat books, I used them a lot for for GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas. The cheats these days don’t even remotely compare to the variety and fun of the ones back then.)
Anyway, Spider-Man 2 had legitimately the best swinging mechanics in a Spider-Man game (IMO). Not that the Insomniac games are bad at all, but I consider them to be the best since Spider-Man 2, which is still pretty high praise, honestly. Ultimate Spider-Man which was released around the same time was also pretty good, actually. The others were just less fun or completely dumbed down to the point where you didn’t even need to connect your webs to buildings.
I don’t live in a city with skyscrapers. So every time I’d either see second unit camera pans on TV or movies with a lot of skyscrapers in frame, or find myself in an area with a lot of high rise buildings, all I could imagine was swinging around through the area.
It was kind of like the Tetris effect (not the game, the phenomenon), but more of like… I guess I’d call it the “Spider-Man swinging effect”.
I loved that game. It’s really nice to come across people who share my feelings about it so many years on.
Hah, nice.
Man, stuff takes me back to so long ago. A few regulars and I would hang around on the IMDb message board for that game.
As shitty and toxic as IMDb was, I kind of miss those message boards. Wearing very rose colored glasses here, but still.
I played Uplink: Hacker Elite awhile back. One part of the game was that the in-game hacking software you could download had to be managed. One piece of software could take up 4 continuous slots of your computer “memory,” and I don’t think you could move it after installation without buying a piece of software that allowed movement, but you could delete it. Another could take up 2 continuous slots, another 6. I thought this was just a cool inventory system. Manage the space we gave you carefully and all that.
A decade later, in a computer science class, I learn that this is really part of how computers store stuff, including software, in memory. Aside from the fact that our modern computers do move stuff in memory without you having to buy something special to do it.
Was really not expecting the cool inventory system to come back into my life or be anything but a cool made-up inventory system.
Sitting at a bus stop near a stop light. Police car stops at the light. My brain’s first reaction is to think we should hijack it. Cause GTA of course.
I didn’t even play that much. It was just a good game to fail at. Spectacularly. Its police cars were especially useful in that regard.
