|
I remember this happening a lot when I was a child and teenager, mainly during and shortly after LAN parties, where we'd spend one or two entire days almost exclusively inside one or two virtual environments (like Action Quake or later, Day of Defeat), I remember how my brain "quantized" many of the sounds from physical environment into their closest equivalent of in-game sounds, such as footsteps, character sounds or gun sounds, for example, laying my very tired and head, spinning from a lack of sleep and overstimulation, down to rest on a pillow, it would be disorienting at first, and then as my breath rose and sunk the covers, I'd hear the sounds of the fabric as small cracks, like the footsteps constantly in my earphones during gameplay.. I'd walk around outside and see surfaces as more or less ideal for performing strafe-jumps (something we did a lot in the glorious Action Quake days), and think about good corners to round for a one on one shootout. But honestly, it didn't feel so different from any other after-effect of intensive out-of-the-ordinary stimuli.. Think about the evening after a day of snowboarding, as you drift asleep, your brain starts to work its way down imaginary slopes, everything becomes transformed through the lens of snowboarding, rooftops becomes candidates for drops, piles of snow becomes ramps.. or when you've intensely learnt a new concept, your brain tries around it, to see if it somehow fits into what you've learnt.. Like how people learning about neural networks, can't help but go through at least a phase, where the idea of brains being computers are very appealing. I don't think this "Game Transfer Phenomenon" is that novel or interesting, and most importantly, not related to games in particular. It's just what the brain does when it engages in something.. it attempts to map and transfer concepts and relations, it's how we learn and grow.. |
The realisation of what I was doing snapped me back to proper conscious reality like smelling salts. Thankfully / Luckily.