When I played Superhot. It's a slow motion shooter where enemies and bullets only move in real time when the player is moving.

I only played it a few minutes at a time, but each time I looked up from my desktop I was surprised that stuff was in motion even though I wasn't.

Very weird effect and it set in each time I played.

Fallout 4 had me noticing a lot of scrap for a bit. Seeing a roll of duct tape was like looking at a bar of gold.

I got hit really hard by 2048. I didn’t even play it that much but my brain started looking for groups of identical things and imagined how they slide into each other to create something new. Plates on the kitchen table, seats on the train to work, identical cars…

At periods when playing a lot of geoguessr I often catch myself looking at license plates and street signs when walking on the street, as if trying to figure out where I am.

Also years after I stopped playing assassin's creed, I still get a mental image of a red outline when I walk too close to a cop.

Thanks to Morrowind and Skyrim i still find myself absent-mindedly noticing “alchemy ingredients” when walking through the woods on hiking/camping trips, despite the fact that I haven’t played either game in a couple years at this point.

I got access to a really nice VR system through work and binged through Half Life Alyx. I was in a room that was large enough to walk around in, but for larger moves you use the controller to teleport a short distance. Also you can gravity attract items within a few yards with your gloves.

After playing the first time I went to cook dinner and got embarrassingly frustrated when I tried to summon a spoon with a hand gesture.

When I caught myself planning exactly how I'd scale that building wall, AC style.

Played so much Assassin's Creed, I too wanted to jump off the top of a building.

Back during the WoW days (the flying mount expansion), every time I would walk home from Uni I'd think: "This would be a lot faster if I turned into a crow and flew over these houses".

I played a Druid.

When I was reaaaaally playing too much Hitman I began to notice large containers that could fit human bodies inside.

I knew I'd been playing too much GTA (would have been around the VC/SA days probably) when I was out driving one day, heard sirens, and looked up in the corner of my windshield to see if I had any stars.

When writing on paper, I will sometimes think, "Ctrl + Z" to undo an errant pen stroke lol.

I've attempted to quicksave a couple of times before parallel parking my truck.

GTA. I was driving down the road and had the urge/intrusive thought to side swipe a motorcycle because hitting them is just what you do in the game.

I noted how it was weird the first time, then it occured again a week later. That was the last day I played GTA even though I enjoyed the game.

I get this all the time because I tend to binge games over weekends when I got nothing else going on. I'll give two examples that I remember the most.

One of the most prolific is Factorio. Seeing conveyor belts everywhere I go. Whether I'm awake or about to fall asleep I just constantly see conveyor belts as I solve non existent problems with the efficiency of said conveyor belts.

The weirdest was after Outer Wilds. I binged it for about 12 hours straight one day. You spend a lot of time orbiting around planets and landing on them. After I was done I was walking around my apartment and felt like I was "orbiting" a spaceship around my apartment. It felt super weird to walk. Felt like the floor was the surface of a planet and my head was a spaceship flying miles above it trying to land.

Factorio. I began seeing conveyor belts in my sleep.

I always feel like I should throw a turtle shell at the idiot driving in front of me

Half life alyx had me flicking my wrist to try and gravity glove small items I needed. I remember having a late night sesh of HL Alyx and in a sleep deprived state trying it multiple times and not understanding why it wasn't working.

Not exactly the same thing, but when I got my first VR HMD, for about two weeks afterwards I had to fight the urge that my real hands were the fake ones rather than the ones I would see in VR. Supposedly it's something like 25% of first time VR users who get a similar feeling, but it didn't make me feel any better about it. Never happened again, even with how rare I play VR games, but it was rather off-putting.

Oh just thought of another one: when I was playing WoW back in 2005, I got so into it that it was effecting everything. My social life died and it was effecting work enough that my boss had to have a long convo with me to get my shit together. But what really made me realize how bad it had gotten was having dreams where dialog with people I knew IRL was all in text and I would have to type responses to people when face to face with them.

Not a video game - after using OneNote on an iPad with a stylus for a lot of time, going back to using paper I tried to undo pencil strokes very often at first.

Frogger, played a lot of that and had to stop myself before crossing roads for awhile after.

In my mind I was trying to optimize moving the same direction as the car and sneak in before the meeting car got there. I'm lucky to be alive.

Skyrim, keep seeing things to harvest. Neighbour grew leeks at one point.

I used to play multiplayer Agar.io a few years ago and got this badly, the game is about circles of various sizes attacking each other and there are circles everywhere irl.

During the pandemic I did essentially nothing but play Arma 3 like it was my job. 4k hours in like 2 years.

I went out for a walk towards the end and went to grab for binoculars I didn't have...

Best/worst game I've ever played for so many reasons.

I had been playing Minecraft back in the Technic modding era, lots of item tubes and machine blocks, and I remember looking at my actual real life washing machine and thinking "I bet I could use a wooden pipe to extract that into the dryer"

Skyrim. I’m a Skyrim hoarder, grabbing every flower I run by. While driving to work I remember thinking, I need to get those. Thank goodness I remembered not to do that in real life.

I once messed up something I was writing by hand and instinctually wanted to press ctrl+z

Long, long ago, when HL2DM was a thing, I was jogging hone from work, past the edge of a park.

A kid kicked a football towards the fence just ahead of me, and I started sprinting... and then realised that no, this isn't the perfect gravgun kill, stop it.

Played so much Minecraft, the trees outside looked all blocky when I was tired one time.

Also, after the first time I did VR, I was outside and my brain told me to stop walking every couple of steps because I thought I was going to walk into a wall.

I haven't but my kid playing Osu! Lives and breathes the game. Used birthday gift money to buy a special three-button keyboard. Walks around all the time, tapping fingers on every surface.

This is really embarrassing, but I played so much battlefield 3 once that I felt the urge to reflexively "spot" some people walking in the distance (IRL 💀) to see whether they were friend or foe.

I didn't have a keyboard, so there's nothing I could even do about it, but the fact that I felt the urge really made me pause.

Happened with Lone Echo for me. It's a VR game where you're in a space station, and you move around in zero g by just grabbing your surroundings and pulling yourself along or pushing yourself off of them. I started reflexively attempting to do that in real life for a bit after longer sessions

Deep Rock Galactic. I kept wanting to toss a flare anytime I walked into a dark room.

I will go on Football Manager binges, overhauling my favorite squads and seeing them to long-term success. Then I watch actual football matches and think, "Why isn't Dick Johnson starting at left back?" and have to remind myself that Dick Johnson doesn't really exist.

Beatsaber - it'll change your life

I got so used to quickly leaving in minecraft from a server when falling or in lava to get the immunity frames, when climbing a mountain, i imagined leaving life if i fell

Guitar Hero was a bastard for this back in the day, every time I shut my eyes I'd see the notes coming for me.

I'm so happy to learn that other people also change lanes at a stop light to try to complete a row.

My dad found a OG gameboy in a train when I was a kid so when I actually played tetris lol. Close my eyes and see the bricks fall. (which is what the tetris effect is.)

Then I had it with Mario Kart, close my eyes and see the track move.

And the weirdest thing is when I finally got properly used to vr and played 3 hours of half-life: Alyx straight. I had to physically touch a wall to convince a part of my mind that this was real life, and not vr.

VRChat of all things. I have caught myself a few times doing the various finger gestures used to control expressions.

When I was a kid I used to watch out from car window thinking it's a side scroller lime Mario, and how the character would jump on and over obstacles

But also as a result of doing bmx and mountain biking for like 2 decades, I always see my surroundings as potential spots to do some trickery and imagine the lines in my head

Back in the day after a while of playing The Sims I started organizing my free time like in the game e.g. "I'm going to take a shit now and then I'll study a bit" etc... I stopped playing soon after, not sure if it was because of that, it was funny though.

Absolutely assassins creed. Especially 2, and i know plenty of you MFS know what I'm talking about, you can see the path up every single building around you

Someone commented on my post about Devil World that what I experienced was Tetris effect. When I was scrolling vertically on my phone I would occasionally experience sideways scrolling similar to the game mechanic even though there certainly wasn't any sideways scrolling happening.

Another one was when I was playing Portal. Traveling via portals became my usual method to move around in every dream I had those days.

Played a lot of rainbow six siege, where you have to shoot those 360° security cameras when you are attacking. So, now I'm trained to spot those on instinct.

Played DiRT Rally when it came out for so many hours, I'd get intrusive thoughts coming up to a corner telling me "Do a Scandinavian flick man"

When I played a cool new game called Tetris.

Maybe not exactly the same thing, but I have had pretty heavy Minecraft building binges that leave me looking at IRL buildings thinking, "huh, I wonder how I'd build that in Minecraft. Obviously I could put a full block there, but that detail would be sub-block, so maybe I could imply that with a chiseled variant...and that's brick, but it's a dark and weathered red brick, so I guess I'd have to use...maybe terracotta? And dang, that curved archway would be murder to recreate accurately, this building might need to be at 1:1.5 scale to even do it justice..."

Back in 2001, I was walking along the street and passed a new BMW and all I could think was △ △ △.

Took me a beat to realise GTA III was fucking with my mind.

After extended sessions of any of the Telltale adventures (Walking Dead, etc), I would spend about 10 minutes post-game with the sense that real-life conversations were like, scripted, and I was navigating by selecting the best option.

Arguably, not a wrong assessment of life, but it feels really gamified when affected

That is a pretty bad description of the Tetris effect. Also incredibly misleading. The very short description from Wikipedia reads:

The Tetris effect occurs when someone dedicates vast amounts of time, effort and concentration on an activity which thereby alters their thoughts, experiences, dreams, and so on.

The Long Dark. Hearing crows in the distance gives me the urge to go check to see if there’s any useful loot.

How do you do Tetris moves in real life? Genuinely stumped.

I was a localization playtester at Koei for their release of Gundam Musou and played the game 40 hours a week as a job looking for errors in the Subtitles. We started with the subtitle with Japanese version and so about two weeks in I get a massive anime style fever and end up living stuck in the video game's stupid hackneyed story mode. Everybody in the dream was speaking Japanese way beyond my extraordinarily basic level so I was frustrated that I couldn't understand anything, It was a dull and repetitive hack and slash which I would occasionally revive and wake up from briefly to sigh with relief that it was over at last before passing out and going right back in. I was rescued 16 hours later by my housemates who were worried when I didn't check in.

It was bizarrely hellish.

Not in a game, but I've sometimes tried to Ctrl+F some text on a pile of papers.

For me it was Monster Hunter World. I'd be lying in bed and on my head I was just going through the motions of fighting a monster, complete with the button combinations and all.

Bonus: when I started learning programming I was at an after Party at a friend's place after a night out and was on a few things and when I closed my eyes I would see lines of code and functions etc.

I then went to the toilet after partaking in some ketamin, and I tried to solve/debug the function in my head to release urine from my bladder. Fun times!

DDR. Would see scrolling arrows when I'd shut my eyes b

I one time played TF2 so much, and I went outside to buy groceries, saw someone wearing a red shirt in a store, tried to spycheck him

Persona. I've had conversations with friends after playing P4 or P5 for awhile where I wondered what response would max out my confidant points with them.

GTA when I saw a school bus

I tried to Minecraft F5 in real life once

Factorio. I saw transport belts in my dreams.

Not games, but I was Naruto running back in that show's heyday.

Descent had me reacting to the cashier door at fast food places

I think it was Tomb Raider 2, one of the first games I played. The character movements were so etched in me, I began viewing the world subdivided in blocks, small steps and large steps

Played a lot of minecraft and then took a walk. There was something behind some trees I wanted to check out but it was fairly large so I thought "I should just switch into creative mode and fly over there to get a better view"

I once played EU4 too much as I've continued to "play" it in sleep, and later wondered why didn't it save.

Lethal Company. I was sick in January so I had nothing to do but play LC. One night I took my dogs out for a walk and I kept scanning my surroundings for monsters and scrap.

TF2 . Holding a bottle of booze or a frying pan. Also looking at my surroundings and estimating if I could rocket/sticky jump.

Kids used to spam hadouken and kamehameha to each other back then. Not sure what kids these days do though.

Assassin's Creed II. Walking around the neighborhood, I'd look at churches and think, yeah I could climb that.

WR:SR made me appreciate industrial areas and utility vehicles (road or rail).

Civ V: USA has cultural domination in my country. Sometimes I see a building and think that this could be a wonder.

Witcher 3: "It looks like rain.", when it's very obviously raining very much already. Not everyone gets this.

CDDA: I sometimes value clothing by the volume of its pockets (I haven't put spaghetti in any bag yet though...). After binging, I sometimes get unconsciously afraid of people, like drunkards in the night shouting and being loud.

Assassin's Creed: Suspicious haystacks...

In college I was playing a lot of Crackdown. At a certain point I remember instinctively knowing which level of a dorm tower I could jump to, grab onto a window, and then how many more jumps it would take to reach the top.

Similarly, more recently, I was playing Resident Evil 4 on the Oculus. After a good two hour session when I took the headset off I found myself trying to move around my house by using my thumb to jump to a new spot.

It's not quite emulating the game's moves and such

But some years back I played so much SMT IV on the 3DS (which is a quite striking-looking game with the stereoscopic effects on. Characters are anime art but everything has depth and it looks real neat) that whenever I'd look at a plan wall, I'd see patterns moving back and forth as though they were objects in the game's stereoscopic effect.

Some chalk me being a bad driver down to having played games like Mario Kart leading up to the test.

It's been a good while since I was actively gaming but when I was a very active player in a certain game called "unturned" I achieved a point where I could VERY vividly imagine different scenarios and simulate them for pretty long. It was a pretty interesting experience because I don't have that strong of a visual imagery. I'm pretty sure that I have experienced the tetris effect to be it either with this or other games but I can't recall any examples.

(Damn just noticed that I say "pretty" a lot.)

Tomb Raider on OG PlayStation.

I remember walking around after pretty much a solid day of playing and just seeing buildings in terms of which ones Lara / I could climb.

Frets on Fire. An early pc Guitar Hero clone. Saw the colored streams when I closed my eyes.

I've recently had it with Vampire Survivors, so much visual stimulation and patterns going on at once.

Can't play it before bed. Otherwise, my brain keeps projecting projectiles and enemies 😵‍💫

When I was 100%-ing Watch Dogs, I would see and hear the icon for hacking gates and doors whenever I went past them.

When I originally played Fallout 4, I would feel a compulsion to take any duct tape I saw.

Assassin's Creed II. Walking around the neighborhood, I'd look at churches and think, yeah I could climb that.

Having grown up on Sierra adventure games, I still have a part of my brain thinking about saving and loading in bad situations from time to time.

Not exactly IRL, but I'll type g st in basically any bare terminal if I'm trying to remember what I'm doing (it's my alias for git status -bs. Even when it's not actually versioned lol.

And of course the classic :wq in any text field

The Witness. Started seeing puzzles in real life and having the urge to drag my finger across them

I've been playing the videogame, watched the entirety of the anime, and read some of the manga of Made in Abyss, and the other day I got nervous about walking upstairs 😂

I really liked action racing games like NFS and Burnout right around the time I turned 16 and got my driver's license. I didn't do anything too crazy. But, since I had been grinding those games, my confidence on the streets of my suburban town in my dinky 2000 Nissan Altima significantly increased.

The ascend power from Tears of the Kingdom. Not so much in my literal real life, but any time someone in a show/movie is being chased or is trapped somewhere or even just stuck in an awkward situation I expect them to just fly through the ceiling and leave all their pursuers with question marks over their heads.

Guitar hero

When I was in high school I was up way too late playing D&D and dreamt I was the general of an army.

In the shower I was questioning how we'd all get clean in time for school.

Not a computer game but Tetris-like, Lonpos Cosmic Creatures had me thinking which of the irregular pieces fit allong any jagged edge for a while.

Playing Tetris

Sims for me too. When I'm not playing the game I'm trying to put myself in x4 speed. I got shit to do.

When I first got into speedrunning Portal I found myself twitching my thumb as if to hit my quick save key before doing something I felt might go wrong

I've always been quite deadline driven. So the week before going to the breakpoint demo party I wrapped up a Commodore 64 demo in a long series of all-nighters.

When I finally crashed I was dreaming 6502 assembly.

the witness shifts reality in a way that is difficult to describe, but bleeds into the real world. If you've never played it and enjoy learning, this is a serious gem.

Found my original review:

"This game will bend your perception of the world. It is one of those rare games that define the genre. Everything you need to know to get through this game is always right in front of you, but nothing is ever explained. Every puzzle has rules, rules that you slowly have to figure out. And as you play more, you'll look at things differently. It is amazing how much is hidden on this fantasticly crafted island. True art. Also a timeless game, pick this up at any point in your gaming career. It took me 100 hours to be able to say that I've seen everything."

On my way home from Zombieland i had to keep reminding myself, "pedestrians are not zombies. Don't hit them."

Most survival builders that use natural resources. I'd see flowers I think I should gather, or trees I could chop down for wood, etc

When I'm looking at a huge building or scene, I instinctively think "press F4 to enable freecam" from Minecraft so that I can look from above and noclip. But alas, it's not possible :'(

Not exactly what we're talking about, but remember how your legs would feel after roller skating for a couple hours?

You'd have sea legs for a while afterwards where walking feels a bit like skating.

After Oblivion, I really wished I had the option to quick load my last save.