Transfer Phenomena

[sus]

“Spotted: a dirty brown bag crushed under a tennis shoe. Looks like someone won't be eating dinner tonight. XOXO... Gossip Girl.” The thing about voices is they are contagious. I can't do accents, but spend a week watching TV re-runs and I can GPT-3 an essay in the narrator’s delivery.

Most people who play Tetris have experienced the Tetris Effect: the blocks coming down before sleep sets in, a little micro-simulation of gamespace in closed-eye visuals

And those who seriously game may have experienced other, similar “game transfer phenomena”—mild closed- or open-eye hallucinations, the framing and transformation of real-life perception by the paradigms of the game. What exactly constitutes game transfer phenomena, in the academic literature, can be hazy—full-blown hallucinations, on the one end, to the mere projection of game metaphors (leveling up, scoring points) onto normal tasks. But what they have in common is continuation of sensory inputs, in one task, becoming top-down psychological projections onto another task.

My experience is that the same bleed from media to reality happens when living inside books and movies: the narrator’s tone and sentence cadence, in a Jane Austen novel, takes over the reader’s self-narration of everyday life; the anxious headspace of a protagonist leaks into the reader’s everyday headspace.

Research has turned up a handful of personal accounts on Reddit and Twitter threads, excerpted here:

Just a few days from twitter feed to Jane Eyre, my thoughts, even on day to day tasks, bear resemblance to the writing I’m reading. Like I’m still confused.. I would never think to say “bear resemblance”.

If I read something with an Irish or Scottish narrator, I find myself thinking with an accent, haha.

[this is] why i exclusivley read noir detective novels. life is more inarresting [sic] that way, see.

I want to get a better handle on these effects—this "afterglow" from living inside a media object.

 

[luka]

i always think and speak in the voice from whatever book im reading. we've talked about this a bit before with the lads

 

[version]

There's a weird effect that comes with games like Guitar Hero where the motion of the fretboard seems to leave a temporary impression on your vision. I thought I was having an acid flashback the first time it happened.

Urban Dictionary: Guitar Hero Hallucination

1)The Feeling of the world "Zooming In" after playing any of the Guitar Hero Series Games for an extended amount of time. 2) Proof that Guitar Hero isw a Legal Drug

www.urbandictionary.com

 

[Clinamenic]

Very good stuff here. All of us mimetically veering through mindspace.

Could it have something to do with the content of the media being more idealized than our realities would be, and thus it impacts us more potently? After all, some of these works of art have been thoroughly honed.

And we would be drawn into them because of their extraordinariness, which may be enchanting at times, leaving deeper impressions on our imagination than what most of our waking lives can offer.

 

[Clinamenic]

Your presence dematerializes as you are immersed.

 

[version]

I've read a fair few people pinning a certain style and tone that appeared online on the influence of David Foster Wallace.

 

[sus]

i always think and speak in the voice from whatever book im reading. we've talked about this a bit before with the lads

Do you remember where? Keywords for the archive search?

 

[sus]

One thing I'm thinking of is how, when you talk to someone, you start syncing up each other's speech patterns. "Mirror neurons" etc

Perhaps it's the same thing?

 

[Clinamenic]

I think so, like you are in each other's orbit, affecting each other's reality.

 

[Clinamenic]

I also think that may be amplifying when the two arbitrary people are interacting within a larger social network, or perhaps know each other primarily in the context of that network, etc.

 

[Clinamenic]

I'm sure just being at a remote location with someone might entail picking up some of their behaviors.

And it can get more interesting when you consider that, at least most of the time, we aren't actually dealing with each other so much as we are dealing with our perceptions of each other, romanticizing, demonizing, strawmanning each other, etc.

 

[Clinamenic]

Also some more game recommendations, should you be looking for good games to analyze or just enjoy.

Machinarium (haven't finished it yet, as my playstation now membership expired)

Portal / Portal 2 (the antagonist in this one is a sort of omniscient AI game master, compelled to eternally administer tests, of which the player is the subject)

The Incredible Machine (an old rube goldberg cartoon engineering game that impacted my imagination at early ages)

 

[Clinamenic]

I can consciously attest to the influence these games have had on my cognition.

 

[version]

The Incredible Machine (an old rube goldberg cartoon engineering game that impacted my imagination at early ages)

Used to love this one. I had it on an old machine running MS-DOS with a bunch of other games like the original Prince of Persia and Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah games like that are polar opposite to the stereotype of video games being mind-rotting.

 

[IdleRich]

This rings very true for me... the Tetris thing, the hearing narration to your life in the style of the book you're reading.
I particularly liked this quote

Just a few days from twitter feed to Jane Eyre, my thoughts, even on day to day tasks, bear resemblance to the writing I’m reading. Like I’m still confused.. I would never think to say “bear resemblance”.

As the phrase he mentioned was instantly recognisable as one that had been projected into his vocabulary. The difference between that phrase and "like I'm still confused" later could not be more pronounced.
I'm not sure I have anything to add at this point but it's nice to put a name to a phenomenon.

 

[IdleRich]

The Incredible Machine (an old rube goldberg cartoon engineering game that impacted my imagination at early ages)

A Rube Goldberg machine is like a US copy of a Heath Robinson contraption right?

 

[Clinamenic]

But in terms of games with social dynamics, Fallout 76 is an interesting one. Certain in-game dynamics to which the player can respond differently to, and this difference in the distribution of decisions across the player-base can ramify into controversy in the community that game has across social media.

Some players feel the game is broken and appeal to the developers to fix it or to change the rules somehow, other players take a more individualistic approach, etc.

One example in mind for individualism. Certain parts of the game - "public events" - involve many of the players on the server to come together to achieve some end. And across the game there are legendary enemies that spawn at lower rates than regular enemies, and they drop distinctly good items.

In one public event, there are three points in the countdown where a legendary enemy predictably spawns in one of a few areas, and the player needs to get a shot on the enemy, to damage it enough, in order to access its corpse as a loot container.

There are players who get a shot on it, and wait for the other players to run over and get a shot as well (some of us even signal distant players to "come here" via a public emoticon capability). And there are others who obliterate the enemy right away. One example of a contained social game, this one having been going on for three years.

 

[martin]

Oh yeah, this definitely happens. Trying to think of examples that don’t make me sound completely unhinged, but you can cycle through multiple writers in a short space of time and feel a shift in your mindset, mood and perception of your surroundings with each switch.

It’s also interesting when you’re reading books in quick succession and it seems the writers are communicating with each other through you – something raised in one book gets refuted in the next… coincidences crop up: why have three completely different writers all mentioned the same city in South America? Or referenced each other…or mentioned something that made the news in current week, despite all being dead for 40+ years?

I think you have to be invested in it though: have read Mein Kampf (or most of it) and didn’t enter Hitler’s headspace, or glean anything beyond being bored shitless.

 

[Clinamenic]

A Rube Goldberg machine is like a US copy of a Heath Robinson contraption right?

Having looked him up now, yeah they seem similar.