5 Weird & Shocking Medical Conditions Caused By Games

When you think about it, the majority of games revolve around your character hurting or killing people, or if said character is Nathan Drake, a small country of people. How Drake still allowed to walk the streets as a free man is beyond us.

But sometimes games can hurt back in the real world through odd medical ailments that mess with your body and senses in strange, sometimes alarming ways.

So join us as we play doctor for the day to look at some of the weird and shocking medical conditions caused by games.

5. The Tetris Effect / Game Transfer Phenomena

AKA: Pajitnovitis

The Tetris Effect is a weird phenomenon that occurs after a massive Tetris session. It’s a term used to describe the point that Tetris starts to take over a person’s thought process, mental imagery and even their dreams. 

This description almost sounds like a viable script draft for Inception 2, but it's actually a pretty freaky condition. The term was first used publicly in a blog post by Garth Earling in 1996.

In his post called “Possible future risk of virtual reality”, Earling explained that he had first heard the term used in Adelaide, Australia.

Earling also revealed that the 1995 shooter Descent had the same effect when people got into their car, causing drivers to grow confused at their vehicle’s lack of weaponry.

Incidentally, 1995 was the year that Adelaide suffered its worst car-related kill/death ratio to date, earning it noob status in the eyes of the global community. 

Fair enough, that last part isn’t true, but drivers suffering from The Tetris Effect as a result of playing too much Descent actually did start reaching for weapon fire buttons in their car that weren’t there. It’s quite unsettling when you think about it.

In 2011 The Tetris Effect was revisited again in a report by UK professor Mark Griffith that discussed Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP). Griffiths explained that GTP is what happens when prolonged exposure to a game makes it difficult to distinguish real life from the virtual experience. 

We don't mean that people can’t tell the difference between the two, because if you do wake up one morning believing that you’re Niko Bellic on a crime spree, then you probably are a little mad in the head to begin with. This has more to do with weird, fleeting subconscious blips. 

That battlecruiser came out of nowhere officer, honest.

So to use Tetris as an example again – if you play way too much Tetris in one sitting, chances are you’ll start to view the real world as a big game of Tetris, as well as seeing Tetris shapes in at the edge of your peripheral vision.

Think of it as a screen burn effect, where you turn off an LCD television screen and the image stays burned on the glass for a while afterwards. Sufferers sometimes see Tetris shapes when they close their eyes, in their dreams and in every day instances.

For example, imagine you’re driving past a row of buildings. If you suffer from The Tetris Effect, you could start to become infatuated with the shapes for a brief moment and start imagining all the different ways they can fit together. Then you’d probably crash your car into a school, and you definitely don’t want that.

It sounds almost too mad to be real, but it’s a real condition that had a fair few documented cases back in the day, although it’s rarely heard of today. What’s next, button down businessmen stealing cheese wheels from shops after too much Skyrim? It could happen people.

4. PlayStation Thumb

Don’t worry, this isn’t some sort of anti-Sony fanboy term, as it applies to any format that has a controller with a d-pad. PlayStation Thumb is actually a roundabout way of saying “Blisters”, except these are blisters that make your regular blisters pop themselves in fear.

Originally called “Leather Thumb” among Atari 2600 users, and then “Nintenditis” when NES hit the scene, the term found its way into the popular subconscious in the mid-nineties as the PlayStation brand began dominating the console market. 

To be fair, you can get blisters from any game if you try hard enough, but the real culprits are any games that require you to roll the d-pad around multiple times in any given play session.

Pick up any control pad and perform the motion required to pull off a Shoryuken in Street Fighter IV - or if you don’t know Street Fighter - just roll your thumb around the d-pad clockwise as hard as you can. 

Now do that 100 times a row in rapid succession. Congratulations, you now have PlayStation thumb. You silly sod.

Things only got worse when the Dreamcast launched in 1999, boasting one of the most sadistically designed, thumb cutting d-pads of all time. Sega clearly hated thumbs back in the day.

The silent killer of the late 90s-early 2000s. 

There is surely a circle of hell reserved for history’s most detestable souls where the only thing to do all day is pull off fierce Shoryukens on a Dreamcast controller 24 hours a day, every day, for the rest of time. Pray for their souls.

PlayStation Thumb can get much worse than blisters however, as extended d-pad abuse can lead to stressed tendons, busted nerves and torn ligaments. Go one step further and you can develop the dreaded ailment Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. More on this bad boy later.

3. Video Game Addiction

We’re choosing to be cautious with video game addiction, because the medical world at large still refuses to acknowledge it as a genuine medical condition, although many health professionals are still trying to get it recognised.

Addiction can take many forms, and the popular belief is that people aren’t getting addicted to games specifically, but it’s more the ‘action and reward’ nature of completing objectives, winning games and receiving something special that they enjoy. 

Then you have the addictive competitive element and the social experience of playing and conversing with people online. These things make games addictive sure, but all of these addictive equal parts can be found in many walks of life besides gaming.

Back in 2005, the topic of video game addiction became a particularly hot one after South Korean Starcraft fan Seungseob Lee went into cardiac arrest after playing the game for fifty hours straight at an internet café.

The media quickly erupted into a frenzy of demonising games, as if Lee’s copy of Starcraft actually became sentient, plunged a sharp knife into Lee’s heart, and ran off into the night in search of more victims. 

"Drop down, increase speed, reverse direction!"

Still, it was a sad case, as Lee’s girlfriend had reportedly broken up with him weeks earlier due to his intense addiction, as well as his employer firing him for being late to work all the time. Didn’t they know that Zerg rushing takes time?

While Lee’s death is an extreme case, general symptoms of video game addiction are said to be significant weight loss or gain, lack of personal hygiene, lowered social interaction and disrupted sleep pattern, which is basically how idiots perceive geeks to be.

This has been happening for year though, as all of these factors caused such a stir in the UK during the early 80s, that UK politician George Foulkes drafted a political bill called “The Control of Space Invaders (and other Electronic Games.)” 

Foulkes condemned Taito’s 1978 smash Space Invaders for causing “deviancy” and for delivering “addictive properties”, and he even proposed that the government ban it in the UK. To be fair, the game did cause a currency shortage in Japan, so he might have had a point there.

2. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is the same as taking all of the nerves in your wrist, laying them on a table and hammering them with a mallet as hard as you can.

This is PlayStation Thumb’s meaner, uglier big brother, and if you wake up to find yourself with this condition, it might be a good idea to lay off games for a while. 

Essentially, you are pressing down so much on your wrist in one position over such a long period of time, that the bones and ligaments in your wrist will narrow, and then potentially swell to the size of a golf ball. It will also hurt as if said golf ball was being battered by a nine-iron.

Treating Carpal Tunnel Syndrome can be relatively easy, but in the most severe instances, you’d have to undergo wrist surgery. If you did that – well let’ just say – you’re going to have a lot of trouble keeping up with other Call of Duty players online say, forever.

If you noticed a bad pain in your wrist from playing games, you should probably use some common sense and just stop, but then again people have been known to get it from excessive mouse use, so anyone who uses a mouse constantly at their job is at risk too.

But if – for some insane reason – you want Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, some indie developers have created Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: The Game, by modifying the Dance Dance Revolution format for your hands. By all means, be our guest. 

Fear this.

In our travels across the wide expanse of game-related medical conditions, we stumbled across a genre-exclusive form of the ailment called First-Person Shooter Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Look up your medical dictionary - it’s not in there.

This form of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is said to have affected millions of people around the globe already, although this sounds a little bit over exaggerated. But then again, games are still relatively new in the grand scheme of history, and medical boffins are still researching the ways games affect us.

So beware Skyrim PC players! Yes, the Skyrim creation kit looks like a sexy piece of tech, but prolonged mouse use could result in a rather sore wrist. Then your days of taking arrows to the knee are over. For a few weeks. 

1. Guitar Hero Eyes

This is a really weird by-product of playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band for a long time. Well actually, this one can happen after as little time as 20 minutes. It’s not a medical ailment in the true sense – your eyes aren’t going to burst out your skull or anything like that – but it is freaky.

Similar to The Tetris Effect, Guitar Hero Eyes is what happens when you sit in a stationary position, while watching a constantly moving object – in this case, the cascading note track – and then look at something stationary like a wall. 

The wall will look like it’s morphing away from you, which is kind of weird when it happens the first time. Guitar Hero Eyes is also known by its scientific name Motion Aftereffect, and you can see it in motion for yourself online. 

The first clearly recorded account of Motion Aftereffect was penned by Jan Evangelista Purkyne in 1820. Purkyne was a top scientist from Eastern Europe, and he first saw the phenomenon after viewing a marching cavalry parade.

Watching a row of men and horses walking isn’t quite the same as busting out a high score on the Dragonforce face-melter Through the Fire and Flames, but hey, they were simpler times. We do hear that Purkyne was an absolute demon on his Flying V however.

This was a massive hit back in 1820.