Game Transfer Phenomenon

A recent controversy has caught my attentions and more importantly caused me to rage a little inside. The subject is something called 'Game Transfer Phenomenon' and it is a small scale study that looks at peoples reactions to real world situations and how in rare cases they want to perform game-like actions they are accustomed to.

The media, namely The Metro and The Mail have taken this in an incredibly negative format and chosen to run titles along the lines of 'Gamers unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality'. What utter bull. Taking something like this study out of context is nothing new for sensationalist media but its all too common a pattern to demonise games.

So the effects from my point of view? Well I am affected by this study as it simply puts a name to something that has been happening to me for years anyway. I am clearly not alone in this situation, anyone who has played Mirrors Edge or Assassins Creed for long enough will start to see urban areas in a different context. I think the most prominent example that I have experienced is not actually game related but just technology as it is.

Growing up with technology surrounding me I have been subjected to a world where information is always present anywhere any-time. My reaction to thinking something funny? Hah, I should post that to twitter/facebook. A somewhat normal reaction for those of my generation and below. But this ease of access is not always present. When I was writing my dissertation on educational games there was a great amount of written literature in the library that covered the subject. I found myself reading a book a week on the subject and kept coming across the same issue: Keywords. Taking in this vast amount of information was not an easy task but my mind is constructed in a way that it takes in the context and the conclusion of something and not any finer details. When it came to a point where I needed a reference for something I remembered reading I became stuck in not remembering which section of the book I needed to look at. My reaction to this? I should use Ctrl + F.

What? As soon as the thought past my mind I realised that was stupid, Ctrl + F works fine when looking for information in a digital context but is absolutely irrelevant when dealing with physical books. It was by no means an isolated incident. The amount of times my brain wanted to use Ctrl + F when finding information in books became frustrating to the point where I was wishing there really was such as function.

So am I out of touch with reality? The answer is obvious, of course not. But I am a 'Victim' of conditioning. My thought patterns operate in a digital way, it is native for me to perform actions I would digitally. So the same goes for any other person that partakes in activities for long periods of time continually. It is called behaviourist learning, learning by associating actions with situations. Want to find someone in World of Warcraft you run a search for their avatar name. if you perform this action enough times it becomes normal to your brain and so when confronted with similar real world scenarios your brain reacts as it believes to be normal.

So is this behaviourism all bad? Not in the slightest. In many ways games can teach good reactions to scenarios. Most beneficial is probably efficiency. This is a subject for another blog post however.

In conclusion. If I ever see an Ork in real life, I will know exactly what to do.