The Last Word On Nothing

People who compulsively play video games sometimes get strange little twitches and glitches in their reality. Out of the game, back in real life, they are seized by brief snatches of hallucinatory game crosstalk. For example, people who spend hours playing Tetris might see bathroom tiles trembling, or bookshelves lurching rhythmically downward in steady chunks. Others may be haunted by echoes of in-game music. Possibly the most relatable is the guy who mentally reached for the ‘retrieve’ button on his game controller after he dropped his real-world sandwich on his real-world floor. This one stings a little, probably because I too have felt the brief, irrational pull to Control-Z my way out of an IRL fail.

Though these little reality hiccups have undoubtedly existed for as long as there have been video games, they only got a name in 2011, when Nottingham Trent University researchers Angelica Ortiz de Gortari and Mark Griffiths christened them Game Transfer Phenomena. It was controversial at the time, but they have spent the past 10 years verifying their findings in ever-larger populations of gamers.

When I reported on their work in 2011, I made a point of saying “many of us are gamers now”, so this could affect more than just a stereotypical guy in a gamer chair. But in the past ten years I’d argue we have all become gamers, some of us more wittingly than others. It’s been endlessly litigated how social media, smart phone apps and well, just smart phones in general have adopted the tips and tricks of casinos to get us addicted to their devices.

Indeed, in a couple of weeks Gortari will present more of her findings at the 7th International Conference on Behavioral Addictions. She’ll be discussing the relevance of GTP in gaming addiction, but I have been wondering if it goes beyond gaming.

A lot of the people who criticised the initial findings did so on the grounds that they weren’t new – it was understood that anything you do repeatedly, day in day out, will bleed through into other elements of your reality. They gave driving as an example – a long day of driving will give you a weird time late that night as you’re trying to go to sleep and still see the road flashing in front of your eyes and feel the sensation of forward momentum. Similarly, people who have been on a boat or a surfboard all day will feel the waves again as they’re getting to sleep. The reason is clear – anything you do over and over again, constantly, throughout the day, will entrain itself in your mind. What seems to make GTP different from this is that it can manifest at any time, not just in the relaxed stimulus-free haze before sleep. And it’s closer to synaesthesia.

During the pandemic, when we all languished on zoom calls getting our dismal previews of web3 and the metaverse, I started thinking about Game Transfer Phenomena again. If endless repetition of environment-specific actions transfers inadvertently from one environment to another, would we start seeing weird glitches from zoom life? Would GTP effects start to plague those of us shoved into a digitised (and increasingly gamified) existence? And if so, what weird hiccups could we expect when people start to re-emerge into reality? 

I got my answer in the early aftermath, as everyone cautiously began to creep back into physical reality again. I was having coffee with a friend and as she left I found myself waggling my hand in a close, palsied wave, my face frozen in a strange, grinning rictus. I recognised it immediately as the “zoom wave.” That terrible wave you do to people as they leave your digital proximity and you freeze your pleasant grin while hunting with your mouse for the red “leave meeting” button. A regular wave, but shrunk to the size of a zoom square.

I’ve also once tried to mute myself in a live meeting. (Not actually tried – I want to emphasize that these glitches aren’t full-blooming experiences. They’re hiccups, incredibly brief glitches that feel more like a microsleep, after which you snap, embarrassed, back to consciousness.) 

Neither of these experiences especially affected my life – but they feel pretty weird!

So I’m wondering if this is just a me problem, or if this is an everyone problem. Please will you share with me, in the comments, any experience you have had with Zoom Transfer Phenomena? (or Microsoft Teams, or any of the other godforsaken digital landscapes we have all endured since the before times).

Thank you! I’m gonna mute myself now.

Image credit

* This is actually a still from The Alchemist and the Demon, one of the “trick films” made by Georges Méliès in 1906. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. It does look a lot like my zoom face though.