04/16/2025
Health bars and power ups: The 'freaky and unpleasant' world when video games leak into the physical realm
Video games are the biggest form of entertainment in the world, but sometimes they bleed into people's lives offline in surprising and disturbing ways.
Christian Dines' hands were twitching. As though he were still gripping his video game controller, about to make a killer move. But the game was switched off and his hands were free. The US-based sustainability advisor had also noticed how, when he glanced at objects in his room, he felt an urge to absorb or "collect" them, like weapons or power-ups in his game.
He swallowed hard. "I thought, 'what the hell is this?' It was something I'd never experienced before as a gamer," he says. After a week of playing the same game maybe two or three hours a day, Dines' virtual experience was spilling over, disturbingly, into reality.
"It all only lasted a couple of days, but the effect was disorientating," he recalls. "It's unnerving to be distracted in some way by a screen when you're no longer in front of it."
Dines had, it seems, experienced something called Game Transfer Phenomenon, a condition in which the physical world and video games bleed together. While this might not be very common, for gamers who experience it, the condition can be extremely unsettling. And potentially even dangerous.
