Games & Health

I was catching up on Rock, Paper, Shotgun just then (which is, by the way, probably my top favourite gaming news site) and sat through a very strange gameplay video of the upcoming RTS-with-RPG-elements Demigod.  Strangeness aside, it's a game I've been keeping an eye on for some time, and even though it looks like the confused lovechild of Unreal Tournament and Rise of Legends, I'm still interested in finding out more about it.

So I was keen to watch the video, but my body wouldn't let me.  My eyes did that neat Magic Eye trick, where they cross themselves, and the thing you're staring at fades into a kind of visual white noise; where - if you were actually looking at a Magic Eye image - you'd see the hidden picture emerge.  Obviously, this time, there was no hidden picture.  But my eyes did it anyway, and I couldn't stop them.  This is something that has happened many times before, but this is (in my recollection) the first time it's happened whilst watching a trailer online (i.e. whilst doing something totally passive).

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You probably can't see this one properly, as it's been resized  Image courtesy of Magic Eye; click for original image.

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There are huge implications of danger in this - er, let's call it a 'condition'.  This condition.  It's happened before when I've been stirring a pot of something at the stove, or even frying things - I find that I cannot see what it is I'm watching, which (when you're dealing with boiling water or spitting oil) can be very dangerous.  My mind seems to detach itself from my eyes, and it almost feels like I'm watching an internal movie that I can't quite see, but if I just concentrate enough, it'll resolve itself.  It never does.  Whenever it's happened in the past, I have wondered if there's something wrong with me, or if it's just tiredness; I've learned to step back from whatever I'm doing (and if it's cooking, to turn the heat down or off).

It happened once whilst I was driving.  I don't own a car right now and haven't driven for a while, and that's probably a good thing.  It was scary enough that one time - I might as well have been sitting in someone else's body, seeing indistinctly and without any sense of real recognition or alertness; it was as though a film of slightly oily plastic had been placed over my eyes, and my brain had disengaged from my body and taken a hike.  I knew it was happening, and I attempted to wrench my eyesight and brain back together, but for the longest time I couldn't.  I nearly had an accident.

Despite my fumbling attempts above being a very real effort to describe the feeling I get when this happens, they don't really do it justice.  It's like falling, like letting go; a release of the constant monitoring that our eyes are forced to employ each and every moment we're awake; a looking inwards, towards something never clearly defined and yet vastly important - it feels, in a very real sense, as though my brain has spontaneously decided that whatever I'm looking at is trivial, and something deep within me requires my attention instead.  As New-Agey as that sounds, and probably is, I never come out of it feeling like I've reached any sort of personal conclusion or experienced any kind of great epiphany.

So it's like forced meditation for no reason and with no result?

That's not really it, either, but probably the closest I've come to encapsulating the feeling with words.  It terrifies me, too - it would probably terrify anyone.  Whilst on one hand it's a sublimely relaxing feeling (I get the sense that my cares and worries are pointless, and there's an incalculable feeling of peace, as though my mind is getting rest it deeply needs but that my body has denied it thus far), there are, as I mentioned, dangers involved in giving it free rein.  I always find myself fighting it, trying to wrest control of my mind and body back again, yet it never passes until it's done.  Done with what, I don't know.  Confusing me, maybe?

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What my mind would secretly have me become?  Image sourced from Dedroidify; click for the article (about meditation) in which the image appears.

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Anyway, watching a trailer isn't very important in the grand scheme of things, and I wasn't doing anything critical with the rest of my body either, but it got me thinking that it's been happening a lot more often since I began gaming again (roughly two years ago).

I've had another, slightly related condition which has also worsened since I recommenced gaming, wherein my eyes sometimes just freak out for a second or so - it feels like they're twitching back and forth rapidly, a form of completely involuntary eye-rolling that happens at incredibly high speeds.  I wonder what it looks like to other people; I've never had the chance to ask, nobody seems to be around when it happens.  It doesn't hurt, but again, I might as well not have eyes at those times, for the total lack of useful information they provide to me.  And it's just as dangerous in its own way as the Magic Eye condition, even though it's usually shorter in duration.  This has happened so often that I stopped paying attention to it altogether a year or so ago, until I mentioned it to Digit one day, whereupon he looked at me weirdly and said, "You do realise that's not normal, right?"  Well, no, I hadn't realised that it was abnormal - I'd gotten used to it.

So I'm now wondering, is there some sort of correlation between the images and animations I see in games, and the entire process of gaming - the sitting still for long periods of time with high adrenaline and intense concentration, engaging in repetitive movements with my fingers and eyes, in front of a monitor that I can't CONSCIOUSLY see flickering but which is, nonetheless, flickering - that's affecting my brain in an adverse manner, and by extension, my body?

In other words, is this healthy?  Should I go to see a doctor?

Digit told me once about an episode he had as a young boy when gaming with a friend; he pretty much had a seizure and passed out altogether.  Not sure what the official diagnosis was, but with a bit of projecting I could easily see such a seizure being the end result of a buildup of the two conditions I mentioned above.  It doesn't appear to be getting worse in intensity, precisely, just frequency; yet it's not lessening, either.  I'm technically unemployed, but what work I do on a freelance basis involves the use of computers for similar long periods of time (website design and photo retouching), so I can't get away from it altogether even if I stop gaming.

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A new book talking about the possible application of games to business.  Image sourced from The Health Care Blog; click to read the article, which talks about the encouragingly wide variety of health- and fitness-focused games that have sprung up recently.  At least we know they're useful for some aspects of staying healthy!

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Have any of you had similar problems with your eyes in the past?  Is there any information about these conditions - assuming other people have them - and are there ways to reduce the effect on one's body whilst maintaining one's gaming habits?  Perhaps it's inadequate light, or something, I really have no idea.  Vitamin deficiencies, perhaps?

On a tangent: have you had any game- or computer-related conditions at all, eyes or otherwise?  How did you discover, diagnose and deal with them, and are they still a problem for you?