I find that if I go for a walk around New York City after a few hours of GTA4, I have to resist the urge to break into a car and steal it so I can get to where I’m going faster.
I remember back in Duke Nukem 3D days when I entered a movie theatre I’d have the impulse to shoot at the projection window (the first or an early level of DN3D had a movie theatre, and there were baddies in the projection room that would shoot at you.)
Oh, and definitely GTA. Whenever I’ve stepped outside after a long session, my subconscious spends a few seconds trying to decide who to carjack in order to get to my destination.
GTA for me as well. One time I was walking down the street, and passed an empty, running police car with the door open - the cop was at the ATM about 50 yards away. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to not jump in, take off with the car, and head to my nearby hideout where I could take the shotgun and then change clothes.
You realize you guys are all providing plenty of ammo for the “GTA is evil and ought to be banned” crowd, right?
Oh, yes. I can hear the sound in my head now.
Yeah but we can just run over those guys…
Er, I mean, GTA might give people an appetite for destruction, but it also provides an outlet for it too. It’s probably the latter that is more significant, as aggressive impluses are instinctive anyway.
After playing Splinter Cell (prior to Conviction) I would find myself feeling more comfortable in shadows and dark places.
And Portal, for how much easier cleaning would be if you had your own portal gun. Also for how you’d never have to walk up and down the stairs again.
Violent video games have become more popular even as the crime rate has fallen. Clearly, violent video games should not only be allowed, but made mandatory! “What are you doing with that baseball glove Timmy?! You put that down right now and go finish your Grand Theft Auto assignment!”
Stairs? Nah, I’d put one somewhere in or near my apartment, and one in my hometown. It’d make visiting family much easier, and I’d save about a thousand bucks a year on airfare.
In Mass Effect, rather than good vs. evil choices, you choose between “paragon” and “renegade” actions. Paragon is the “minimize civilian casualties, cultivate alliances” path, while renegade is the “collateral damage is acceptable if it assures completing the mission, torture is the best way to get vital information in a ticking time-bomb scenario, we don’t need to kowtow to aliens/foreigners” path. While daydreaming about this one day, I thought, “Of course, the game is scripted so that you can always take the paragon path and still accomplish all of your goals. It doesn’t work that way in real life.”. But then it hit me: Can you really tell when you have to take the renegade route? How many times has a nation or other organization taken the renegade path when it could have gone paragon?
Somehow I think a related quote is: “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.”
Psychonauts has provided me with a very colorful and quirky palette for which to mentally picture other people’s neuroses and overall psyche. Everyone’s mind is a Tim Burton cartoony dsytopic wonderland filled with over-the-top villains, cute “emotional baggage”, and bright moving figments of imagination.
All the time, I think. I have the opposite attitude; I think that nations (and corporations and individuals for that matter) again and again take the “Renegade path” only to discover that quite often it doesn’t work. We have a deep seated, irrational tendency to believe in the effectiveness of ruthlessness regardless of how seldom it works or how often it results in disaster. When the dictator lies and claims the trains run on time, when the torturer lies and claims that he’s getting vital information from his victims, we tend to believe him because on some level we confuse ruthlessness with effectiveness.
Except when it does work. The first Emperor of the Qin was a right bastard, but without him there’d be no Chinese civilization as we know it. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, but without that move there may be no United States today. Genghis Khan . . . oh, my, Genghis Khan . . . we simply wouldn’t live in the same world without ol’ Genghis Khan.
Like I said, treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?
Which is rarely. What people seem to have an aversion to believing is that there are if anything many more things that cannot be achieved by ruthlessness and brutality than there things that can. Sure, you can massacre people and steal their land and that works sometimes; but torture isn’t going to be a reliable source of information no matter how many strained nuke-on-a-timer hypotheticals people come up with trying to justify it. History is full of nations and individuals choosing to do ruthless things in the name of practicality, of so-called “realpolitik”, which in the end turns into disaster because of the effects of the very ruthlessness that was supposedly so very practical.
OMG YES! After a bit of Katamari, I’ll be wondering how to do a speed run to clean the house. “I’ll start on the counter and pick up all the papers. Those usually bulk you up pretty well, so I’ll head to that pile of books…”
In a similar vein to others, the Metal Gear Solids get me to constantly think about my movements and the best way to get around. It was especially noticeable when playing without radar and especially in MGS3. When I was alone or nearly so in a building, I’d instinctively peer around corners, case the room for hiding spots, and plan escape routes.
Playing some of the old NES RPGs like Bard’s Tale and Wizardry eventually turned me on to D&D. While the gaming is certainly compelling, I really enjoyed the idea of a set of rules that somewhat describe the real world (not in the scientific sense, although that’s certainly cool too). It made me think, “How would this action be handled in gaming rules,” which got me looking at things in new and interesting ways. For similar reasons, I also really enjoy the Sim series, especially SimCity and The Sims.
True. But in Civilization, you get a conquest victory ! 
Seriously, though, I often get these “WTF am I doing ?!” moments when playing 4X or strategy games. As in “Did I just destroy an entire culture just to take control of that one oil patch ?” or “Did I just knowingly send these guys to their deaths just to buy me some time/victory points/save on upkeep ?”.
I’ve asked myself a similar question several times while playing World of Warcraft, when I’m trying to level up a “gathering” skill, like Herbalism. There’s that moment where you stop and realize, “I just slaughtered a bunch of sentient, sapient creatures for no other reason than they were between me and this flower.”
In many cases, this isn’t such an issue — often these sapient creatures are, in the game’s story, aggressors who are known to actively attack travelers or engage in other intentional hostile acts (whether or not the player actually witnesses these things), so they can be reasonably considered “declared enemies”. Other times, though, they’re simply primitives who mostly mind their own business … unless you waltz into their village/encampment/territory to steal their resources. They’ll attack you then, but really, in that situation, you’re the hostile invader and they’re simply defending their territory.
I’m a bit of a roleplayer, so I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll only grab that herb if I can do so without disturbing the “natives” who were simply minding their own business.