Game Transfer Phenomenon

The “Tetris Effect” refers to a desire by some people who play the video game Tetris for long periods of time to fit things (in real life) together like Tetris pieces, or in some cases “seeing” (in the dream-like, hypnagogic sense) colorful, rotating game pieces overlaying physical reality.

It’s thought that this might be partially the result of how our brains handle virtual imagery: it seems to treat digital objects and spaces similarly to how it treats real-deal versions of the same. Though interestingly, there’s some evidence that it might prioritize the fake over the tangible, more readily creating memories based on virtual things than physical things.

All of which may be related to what a psychologist named Angelica Ortiz de Gortari has called the “Game Transfer Phenomenon” (GTP), which is a more widely applicable version of what other researchers have noted for years in people who play Tetris and similar puzzle games.

Ortiz de Gortari defines GTP as something like a musical ear-worm or a strong accent in a TV show you binge-watch that you can’t seem to get out of your head, afterward.

This is partly the result of a diminishment in our “Attentional Inhibitory Control” (AIC), a process that allows us to filter out stimuli that’s distracting or which in some other way inhibits our capacity to function.

Intrusive thoughts, noises that aren’t relevant to what we’re doing, and TV screens behind the person we’re talking to are all things that are suppressed or neutralized by our AIC, and there’s evidence that passively watching TV can reduce our AIC’s potency, and playing video games might reduce it even further.

GTP can manifest as seeing colorful shapes rotating in space after a long Tetris session, then, but it might also mean seeing the real world in video game-like colors, or even perceiving health bars over the heads of (real) people and animals after a marathon session of World of Warcraft (which actually happened to one of her research subjects).

Ortiz de Gortari’s most recent study on this subject was published in 2024, and it shows that between 82% and 96% of the 623 male and female gamers she interviewed had experienced some form of GTP, and most of them never told anyone else about it because they were worried they might be called crazy for hallucinating game-related visuals in the real world.

She posits that this might be more of an issue as games become more realistic and real-life mimicking (in the sense that you can move around in and interact with photorealistic 3D spaces), and that this might even lead to dangerous situations, as gamers tend to be more violent and antisocial while playing games compared to how they would normally behave in real life, and the blending of these spaces (and the gamer’s previously separated behaviors) could muddle the division between them.

That said, those more extreme consequences are purely theoretical right now, and at the moment GTP mostly seems to be a more broadly applicable version of the Tetris Effect: our brains not filtering certain extraneous things, possibly because our long-term exposure to those things in virtual environments suggests to our cognitive processes that they’re important enough to remember and revisit later.