I'd be interested to know whether this guy gets the Tetris effect: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo</a> According to the video description, he's the best Tetris player in the world, and I can believe it: the end of the video is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
The only similar effect that I've ever experienced was that after few hours of continuous playing of Frozen Bubble, I saw <i>everything</i> insanely blocky. Even quite round shapes were looking like blocks. But that was over within few minutes.<p>I play tetris a lot, but when doing so, I don't think about it. Tetris is a game that you can play without actually thinking about it. I play ltris, and if I play another variant that has different colors for different shapes, or some other minor difference, I'm completely screwed. In fact, I play tetris in order to be able to think about something else, it employs my hands and I can clearly think about something I want. The game itself is just a complete routine.<p>(And by the way, I can play tetris completely in my head, without a computer. Just close eyes and imagine playing it. And it actually feels like playing tetris. Shapes randomly appearing at the top, that I try to place as I would in the real game, then they make rows, disappear, and after some time, it gets so fast that it overwhelms me and I lose :-))
I experience this with RockBand and Starcraft, but has anyone had this experience with <i>math</i>?<p>During exam time I'd often experience hallucinations of equations, but even crazier were the dreams: sometimes I couldn't wake up unless I performed a mathematical operation on some regular object, ie. "what's the Laplace Transform of this blue chesterfield?"
Amazing! Now there's a name for this experience. I was a server admin for Tetrinet2 and naturally had all my friends playing for hours at a time. We all talked about how we'd dream falling blocks, the background music, etc.
Once, when leaving my girlfriend's apartment after a marathon Halo 2 session, I heard a sound in the distance. Wanting to see what happened, I tried to "zoom in." My right thumb even moved to where "B" would have been if I were holding an Xbox controller.<p>edit: I've also, of course, tried to Ctrl-Z when writing on paper... many times...
I never knew there was a name for this. I experience this both with writing code, and for running a company in general. Sometimes I see myself making strategic business decisions as I drift asleep or in the morning just before waking up.
>They might also see images of falling Tetris shapes at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes.<p>I get an effect similar to this after playing airsoft, except it looks like BBs flying towards me.<p>What I find interesting is that it's not all-that common while playing to see BBs flying towards me. It happens several times a game, but only for seconds at a time. So if this is the same effect (not just a different one with similar symptoms), it's not caused simply by an overload or repetition of a particular stimulus.<p>(It's not just me: my friend said he gets the same effect. But I haven't asked around, so I couldn't say if it's widespread.)
I got this quite a bit from halo 2... It's what convinced me to stop playing competitively. Not worth dreaming about everything in FPS form. It gets weird.
This absolutely happened to me in high school when playing Tetris on my graphing calculator. I'd see the shapes falling as I fell asleep at night. I always thought it was because I felt only semi-conscious for stats class in the morning, and I was returning to that "half awake" state while falling asleep.<p>Cool to find out it's a real phenomenon.
I always considered that the "Syphon Filter Effect" in honor of this TV spot: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrBM-265ns" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrBM-265ns</a><p>I don't think that commercial would get OK'd today. A video game that makes you hallucinate shooting innocent bystanders? It's so pre-columbine.
I spent a week in middle school at a barbershop quartet camp. For several days afterwards I heard dominant seventh chords whenever I heard white noise. I especially remember listening to the air coming in through the crack in the car door on the ride home and hearing chord progressions for the entire two hour trip.
During my undergrad WoW days, I'd get this quite a bit.<p>I got it when I cooked professionally, and would dream about cooking on the line at work.<p>These days I dream about coding a lot, and occasionally of dealing w startup logistics, which is always funny.<p>Its a good sign of when I need a day with just a bit less of whatever has been occupying my mind all night
Funny, during work I was listening to a segment in a Radiolab episode about sleep: <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/05/25" rel="nofollow">http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/05/25</a><p>it's the last segment.
I've had this happen to me with Tetris and not batted an eye. When it happened with Nethack, though... I freaked out and didn't play again for a year. That shit was scary.