Too Much Gaming Can Make You See Things

Ever got a little carried away after an extended gaming session and started to see the world in Minecraft pixels? Or imagined World of Warcraft health bars for IRL people? Or the road transform into a Guitar Hero fretboard while you’re driving along? Apparently, you’re not alone.

Research published in a 2014 issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction has looked at the phenomenon of gaming-induced pseudo-hallucinations, or what’s more scientifically known as game transfer phenomena (GTP).

The authors, psychologists Angelica Ortiz de Gortari and Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University in the UK, explained the range of effects as follows:

GTP manifest as altered sensorial perceptions, automatic mental process, automatic actions, and behaviours. GTP occur spontaneously and usually without gamers’ control. They can occur while gaming, immediately after stopping play, or after some delay. GTP are explained by physiological, perceptual, and cognitive mechanism that results from the exposure to a virtual environment for certain periods.

While the concept of GTP has been around a while—it’s also sometimes referred to as the “Tetris effect”—they believe their study is the first to look at altered perception across a large group of gamers. They also point out that, as video games get more and more immersive, it's more important than ever to understand how they might influence our perceptions.

To gather data on gamers’ experiences of GTP, the researchers searched for related posts on 54 gaming forums, and came up with 656 instances in which members described the hallucination-like effects. They covered 181 different video games, from tile-matching games of the Tetris ilk to massive RPGs like World of Warcraft. A database then coded and quantified these logged experiences to analyse them more closely.

They found that most gamers mentioned they’d been playing for a long, or very long, time before experiencing the hallucinatory effects, and that the visual disturbances themselves usually only lasted a few seconds—though in some cases remained for days.

People also had different types of experience. Some saw aspects of the game in their mind, or burned on their eyelids when they closed their eyes: “The first time I got “Meteos,” I played it constantly for days. It was not possible to sleep for a while after that because every time my eyes were closed, I would see the Meteos pieces falling,” wrote one fan of the Nintendo DS puzzle game.

Others saw game elements projected into their real life, which is perhaps a little more worrying. “After a long “Black Ops [Call of Duty]” session I saw a red player tag above a woman riding a bicycle,” explained a CoD player. “Fortunately, I didn't have my gun on hand.”

Additional senses, like movement or music, also sometimes played a role, and a distorted sense of reality—like time passing at a different pace—was occasionally reported.

The researchers concluded that, yes, gaming can “induce altered visual perception,” especially afterb prolonged button-mashing sessions. But while the effects may seem similar to symptoms of, say, schizophrenia, or drug use (and it must be noted that people affected by both could have been included in the study sample, as it couldn’t control for this), they shouldn’t be lumped into the same category. “One of the major contributions of this study is to demystify VGTP, because the experiences can in many cases be misunderstood and pathologized,” explained the researchers.

After all, some of the gamers in the survey enjoyed their trippy post-gaming visions, and the authors wrote that not only did their experiences gave an insight into the human mind, but they could perhaps help inform a way of using video gaming to enhance learning. Of course, they could also lead to less positive outcomes, like distracted drivers. “It can be dangerous in certain circumstances," Ortiz de Gortari told the Telegraph.  "This is why it’s important to take breaks after playing and this is why we need to investigate.”

And there’s no word in the study on whether this is limited specifically to gaming. Am I the only one who sees red-flag Facebook notifications popping up on the peripheries of real life?