Is it real or is it virtual? Excessive gaming might make it hard to tell the difference.
(Credit: Nottingham Trent University)
If you're a casual gamer or even -- gasp! -- a non-gamer, that security camera in the mall is nothing more than a surveillance device designed to keep people from stealing sugar packets from the food court. If you're an "excessive" gamer, however, that very same camera is the eye of the evil overlord and it must be avoided at all costs.
That, at least, is what's implied by the findings of a study conducted by Professor Mark Griffiths, director of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University in England.
As part of ongoing research into the impact of gaming on real-life perception, Griffiths, working with psychologist Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, interviewed 42 hard-core gamers between the ages of 15 and 21 years old.
They found that something they termed Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP) occurs after excessive hours at the console. (We've reached out to the researchers to find out how many gaming hours is considered excessive and will update when we hear.) In short, this means that gamers did and saw things in real life that usually only happen on the screen.
What kind of things?
Well, one participant reported reaching for a game controller that wasn't there to pick up a sandwich that had dropped on the very real floor. Another saw "health bars" appear over the heads of rival team members during a soccer match. Still another considered using a hook that didn't exist to retrieve something in the distance, while a fourth expressed the desire to zoom in to something off in the distance (a skill I myself would like to have). According to The Telegraph, other interviewees ducked out of the way of surveillance cameras and "approached game-associated objects 'with the intention to shoot them with a non-existing gun.'"
The study found that the behaviors, which usually only lasted a few seconds, were sometimes triggered by real-life situations that resembled those in video games (like shooting the phantom gun), but that they also occurred when gamers reacted to non-gaming-related scenarios as if they were in a game.
About the admittedly small study of 42 gamers, which will be released in the next issue of the International Journal of Cyber Behaviour, Psychology and Learning, Griffiths said: "We believe this is the first study to attempt to explore game transfer phenomena, and these initial findings have proved extremely interesting. Almost all the players reported some type of GTP, but in different ways and with varying degrees of intensity. We are now following this up with a further study of a much larger number of gamers."
So if you find yourself thinking it's OK to try to leap from one rooftop to another because you have two more lives, or trying to activate a forcefield instead of ducking when someone throws a right hook your way, you just might want to get in touch with Griffiths and offer yourself up for his next research project.
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