When I got hooked on Morrowind in middle school it occurred to me to quicksave before a test at school.
What’s yours?
GTA. I was driving down the road and had the urge/intrusive thought to side swipe a motorcycle because hitting them is just what you do in the game.
I noted how it was weird the first time, then it occured again a week later. That was the last day I played GTA even though I enjoyed the game.
I’ve never had that thought, but I often think about driving over a curb. I play a lot of racing games too
Fallout 4 had me noticing a lot of scrap for a bit. Seeing a roll of duct tape was like looking at a bar of gold.
Deep Rock Galactic. I kept wanting to toss a flare anytime I walked into a dark room.
“A flare”?! So you don’t throw 3 flares in rapid succession and then complain that flares take too long to recharge? Just me? …okay.
I haven’t but my kid playing Osu! Lives and breathes the game. Used birthday gift money to buy a special three-button keyboard. Walks around all the time, tapping fingers on every surface.
I was that kid. Get them a copy of Rhythm Heaven if you can find one, or one of its spiritual successors like Rhythm Doctor.
Factorio. I began seeing conveyor belts in my sleep.
Not exactly the same thing, but when I got my first VR HMD, for about two weeks afterwards I had to fight the urge that my real hands were the fake ones rather than the ones I would see in VR. Supposedly it’s something like 25% of first time VR users who get a similar feeling, but it didn’t make me feel any better about it. Never happened again, even with how rare I play VR games, but it was rather off-putting.
Oh just thought of another one: when I was playing WoW back in 2005, I got so into it that it was effecting everything. My social life died and it was effecting work enough that my boss had to have a long convo with me to get my shit together. But what really made me realize how bad it had gotten was having dreams where dialog with people I knew IRL was all in text and I would have to type responses to people when face to face with them.
This is a really common experience for a ton of VR gamers. The thing I remember the most is how white text on a black background (usually my phone) made it seem like the text was really 3D and coming out at me. It fades away but I’m sure we’re going to find out some interesting things about the brain from this phenomenon.
Skyrim. I’m a Skyrim hoarder, grabbing every flower I run by. While driving to work I remember thinking, I need to get those. Thank goodness I remembered not to do that in real life.
I once messed up something I was writing by hand and instinctually wanted to press ctrl+z
Scraped my car tire rim on a curb the other day and mashing Ctrl + Z in my brain for minutes afterwards :(
Portal 2. Finished it in a few days and for a day or two afterwards my brain found blank white/beige wall surfaces very attention-grabbing.
Especially slightly angled walls!
I had been playing Minecraft back in the Technic modding era, lots of item tubes and machine blocks, and I remember looking at my actual real life washing machine and thinking “I bet I could use a wooden pipe to extract that into the dryer”
I’ve attempted to quicksave a couple of times before parallel parking my truck.
I just considered that like an hour ago. Car’s parked next to building, trash truck blocking me in. So I thought “I could go this way instead” where “this way” is a little slope, then turn onto the sidewalk for 50 feet then get to the road.
When I played Superhot. It’s a slow motion shooter where enemies and bullets only move in real time when the player is moving.
I only played it a few minutes at a time, but each time I looked up from my desktop I was surprised that stuff was in motion even though I wasn’t.
Very weird effect and it set in each time I played.
I remember they made a VR version of the game, which I was very keen on. And I imagine the VR aspect would’ve made that effect even stronger.
I knew I’d been playing too much GTA (would have been around the VC/SA days probably) when I was out driving one day, heard sirens, and looked up in the corner of my windshield to see if I had any stars.
Everyone gangsta till you do this and actually see 4 stars on the windshield
When writing on paper, I will sometimes think, “Ctrl + Z” to undo an errant pen stroke lol.
Not a video game - after using OneNote on an iPad with a stylus for a lot of time, going back to using paper I tried to undo pencil strokes very often at first.
