Insightful articles about GTP
2014 LiveScience Pew! Pew! Some Video Gamers Hear Imaginary Sounds After Play
2014 Boston Globe When the game shuts off and the brain doesn’t
2014 Polygon The merits of studying video games and the effects they have on our brains
2014 Psychology Today Video Games Invade the Real World
2014 Ventura Beat Seeing things: When gaming messes with reality — and your brain
2014 The Punk Effect Game Transfer Phenomena: When your brain just won’t stop playing
2014 Gamer.NL Hoe games onze hersenen beïnvloeden
2013 Udem ExaUDEM estudia el Game Transfer Phenomena
2011 New Scientist Level-up life: how gaming can enhance your reality
2011 Kotaku Study of Game transfer phenomena’ Examines Why Some Get Tetris-on-the-Brain
2011 El fenomeno de transferencia del juego
Poetic thoughts about GTP
“We play. We play a lot. And for it we see things differently than all of the people who ever came before us. Literally, we see things differently.
We of the silicon generation live in a pseudo, near constant hypnagogic state. A lucid threshold consciousness in which the vibrancies of the gamerverse shift into reality, pulling us in and out of the slipstream. The walls they come tumbling down and for a time it’s hard to distinguish between the layers.
When I put my controller down and step outside into the bright cloudless sky I can see screen-tearing, pixelation, rendering. Are these my sea legs or are these augmented realities not my realities? Am I still playing a game?
The Ancients believed that to glimpse the mystical the illusions of our world first had to be splintered. The afterworld was built on top of this world. To get at God you had to mistrust your senses. So drunkenness was next to godliness. To unhinge the mind was to set it free and to peek behind the astral curtain.
Psychology refers to it as the Game Transfer Phenomena. Visual and auditory conditioned responses. Echoes of extended gameplay. We are Pavlov’s dogs, programmed by developers to react instinctually to specific stimuli.
In other words there is no Matrix, there is no God, just a few thousand programmers elbow deep into our cerebral cortex. Our basic neurological impulses tweaked in a postproduction edit. Our brains a scramble from too many video games.
Too bad.
I prefer the mystical. A glimmer into something that we’ve lost in our rush toward the future. Something ancient. Something greater than ourselves that the stimulation of video games allows us to perceive. The relativity of reality? God as programmer, arranging and rearranging the configuration of the atoms that is us.”
