A recent BBC article by Josh Sim highlights the significant impact of my research on Game Transfer Phenomena. I’m grateful for the contributions from gamers Christian Dines and Max Dzmitryiev, senior game producer Ali Farha, Scott Jennings from Gaming Addicts Anonymous, and researcher Nick Ballou.
I have included some excerpts from the article below.
Follow the link for the full article.
Christian Dines’ hands were twitching. As though he were still gripping his video game controller, about to make a killer move… when he glanced at objects in his room, he felt an urge to absorb or “collect” them, like weapons or power-ups in his game. He swallowed hard. “I thought, ‘what the hell is this?’ It was something I’d never experienced before as a gamer,” he says. After a week of playing the same game maybe two or three hours a day, Dines’ virtual experience was spilling over, disturbingly, into reality. “It all only lasted a couple of days, but the effect was disorientating,” he recalls. “It’s unnerving to be distracted in some way by a screen when you’re no longer in front of it.”
Ali Farha, a gaming industry commentator and senior game producer at Stockholm-based Star Stable Entertainment, has experienced GTP himself. He describes his case as “a pretty harmless sense of gameplay repeating offline”. He suggests that regular breaks during extended stretches of play and a period of conscious decompression after a long gaming session – reading a book or watching some light TV – could help counteract the likelihood of GTP raising its head.
Jennings also recounts a GTP-like experience. After playing an aggressive racing game he later felt “a disconcerting urge” when out driving, to smash into a vehicle that pulled up alongside him. He argues that GTP could be compared to alcoholism. It’s not necessarily about how many drinks you’ve had but rather it’s about your personal relationship to alcohol. Similarly, he says, while most people may have a functional relationship to gaming, some players are less able to contain its effect to playing time.
Max Dzmitryiev, a US-based counsellor and gamer, says he grew up experiencing symptoms of anxiety. Video games, he says, offered an escape from reality. “But I’d easily get immersed in them,” he recalls. “And as the level of immersion grew, so the stimulation was higher and so I had more GTP experiences,” he says. To him, GTP is “freaky and unpleasant” and something that can overwhelm his thoughts and decisions for as long as 20 minutes. After such a bout, GTP can keep popping up for days, intermittently, he explains.
Ortiz de Gortari argues that developers should take more responsibility in addressing the potential impact of GTP on susceptible gamers, possibly through their own research, or at least by acknowledging its effects.
Dines says that he would endorse some kind of warning on games. It may only have relevance for a few gamers but that’s no different to the warnings about strobe lighting effects, which could induce epileptic seizures in a small subset of players, for example.
Game developers intentionally craft their products to give certain experiences – they know their game’s power,” says Farha. “Players need to appreciate that games have to be used correctly. I know I’ve played too much at times and it didn’t make me feel good.”
“We have enough evidence that GTP is happening,” she says. “Now we need to know more about how and why.”
“The more realistic the video game world is, the more likely players are to confuse the game world and the real world” – Angelica Ortiz de Gortari