When I first played Skyrim, I spent so long just wandering around, harvest every mountain flower I found, that every time I saw a bush with flowers, I felt the urge to harvest them because obviously that’s just what you do when you see something that can be harvested. The dopamine hit from resource gathering is very real.

When I first started modding Skyrim back in 2012, I spent a solid week solely on water mods looking for something I liked. One day near the end of the week I was walking to work, and I had to cross a bridge. I looked out over the water and had a momentary thought about checking what water mod “they” were using.

Not exactly a double take, but sometimes when I play a lot of Assassin’s Creed I start subconsciously looking for good handholds on buildings in real life.

You guys all make me feel old.

I can remember seeing everything like tetris blocks or back when after playing guitar hero long enough, the table looked like it was growing.

Back when I was playing a bunch of Oblivion, I was doing the quest to find Nirnroot (Seeking Your Roots). I was spending so much time looking for them I started seeing them in real life out of the corner of my eye everywhere (it was usually actually thistle). I’d have to stop and look because I knew it was important, before my brain would kick in and I’d realize that it was from Oblivion.

I’m playing totk and now when I see an overhang something clicks in my brain.

After playing too much Ghost Recon, I once caught myself looking for a ditch I could jump into before “the guards” would come out of a farmhouse I was going to. Took me a full minute or two to shake off the feeling.

Right when I was playing Horizon Forbidden West, I saw a wrapped up chair that had tape in a blue cross on it, so it looked exactly like the things you can use your pullcaster on in the game. My first thought upon glancing at it was “Oh, I can use my pullcaster on that!”

…No. No, I can not. It’s real life; I do not have a pullcaster and there are no robot dinosaurs.

I used to imagine using a portal gun on various buildings to get to school.

After playing Valheim, I started pointing out birch trees to one of my friends who also played.

“Ooh, look, a fine wood tree. And another. And another. Oh wow, is this the plains?”

When I play a lot of Rainbow 6 Siege I have the urge to shoot out security cameras IRL

Sitting at a bus stop near a stop light. Police car stops at the light. My brain’s first reaction is to think we should hijack it. Cause GTA of course.

I didn’t even play that much. It was just a good game to fail at. Spectacularly. Its police cars were especially useful in that regard.

I had some really weird VRish dreams when I first got VR and started using it. Especially if you use it before bed for VR Wikipedia or whatever.

I played Uplink: Hacker Elite awhile back. One part of the game was that the in-game hacking software you could download had to be managed. One piece of software could take up 4 continuous slots of your computer “memory,” and I don’t think you could move it after installation without buying a piece of software that allowed movement, but you could delete it. Another could take up 2 continuous slots, another 6. I thought this was just a cool inventory system. Manage the space we gave you carefully and all that.

A decade later, in a computer science class, I learn that this is really part of how computers store stuff, including software, in memory. Aside from the fact that our modern computers do move stuff in memory without you having to buy something special to do it.

Was really not expecting the cool inventory system to come back into my life or be anything but a cool made-up inventory system.

Waaaaay back, almost two decades ago, I was super into the Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in. Played it almost every day. The only game I’ve actually fully 100% completed, which was a bit more difficult back then because walkthroughs weren’t as easily available. There were a lot of great cheat/guide sites that popped up around that time, and also physical cheat/guide books from before, but those were a bit harder to find where I lived.

(Speaking of physical cheat books, I used them a lot for for GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas. The cheats these days don’t even remotely compare to the variety and fun of the ones back then.)

Anyway, Spider-Man 2 had legitimately the best swinging mechanics in a Spider-Man game (IMO). Not that the Insomniac games are bad at all, but I consider them to be the best since Spider-Man 2, which is still pretty high praise, honestly. Ultimate Spider-Man which was released around the same time was also pretty good, actually. The others were just less fun or completely dumbed down to the point where you didn’t even need to connect your webs to buildings.

I don’t live in a city with skyscrapers. So every time I’d either see second unit camera pans on TV or movies with a lot of skyscrapers in frame, or find myself in an area with a lot of high rise buildings, all I could imagine was swinging around through the area.

It was kind of like the Tetris effect (not the game, the phenomenon), but more of like… I guess I’d call it the “Spider-Man swinging effect”.