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Health bars and power ups: The 'freaky and unpleasant' world when video games leak into the physical realm

Video games are the biggest form of entertainment in the world, but sometimes they bleed into people's lives offline in surprising and disturbing ways.

Christian Dines' hands were twitching. As though he were still gripping his video game controller, about to make a killer move. But the game was switched off and his hands were free. The US-based sustainability advisor had also noticed how, when he glanced at objects in his room, he felt an urge to absorb or "collect" them, like weapons or power-ups in his game.
He swallowed hard. "I thought, 'what the hell is this?' It was something I'd never experienced before as a gamer," he says. After a week of playing the same game maybe two or three hours a day, Dines' virtual experience was spilling over, disturbingly, into reality.
"It all only lasted a couple of days, but the effect was disorientating," he recalls. "It's unnerving to be distracted in some way by a screen when you're no longer in front of it."
Dines had, it seems, experienced something called Game Transfer Phenomenon, a condition in which the physical world and video games bleed together. While this might not be very common, for gamers who experience it, the condition can be extremely unsettling. And potentially even dangerous.

AI chips not ice creams - minister's dig at Indian start-ups sparks debate

India's Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal's recent comments about the country's start-up ecosystem have sparked a massive debate on social media and evoked strong reactions from some entrepreneurs.
At the second edition of Startup Mahakumbh, a government-led start-up conclave last week, Goyal seemed to take a hard look at India's consumer start-ups as he urged entrepreneurs to explore more innovations in technology in order to help the country progress.
Poking fun at the rise of food delivery apps, artisanal brands and online betting apps in the country, he compared them with the innovations being made by the "other side", which many took to mean China.
He said that while "they" were making leaps in machine learning, robotics and building "next-gen factories that can compete with the rest of the world", India's start-ups were still largely focussed on lifestyle products like gluten-free ice creams.
His comments sparked a flurry of reactions from India's top innovators, with some arguing that he was only encouraging creators to be more ambitious and others calling it an unfair criticism of the start-up ecosystem, a major contributor to the country's economy.

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