For the third BoRT I think it is easiest to talk about games blending with reality when I was a kid and games seemed to be a lot more magical since you didn’t quite understand the real world yet. I grew up in a Nintendo household where I played NES games with my mom, since she bought the system to play with my dad, watched my brother beat n64 and gamecube games, and tried to play games on any system only to give up on the third or so level since I didn’t understand what was going on. That didn’t stop the games from playing a big part of my childhood. After playing pokemon for the first time I immediately ran to my dog and tried to train her to do tricks, not bite or anything just to basic dog tricks, but in my mind I was training a pokemon (keep in mind I was around 4 years old).

How does that previous experience with games continue when you get older though? It’s not like after playing a lot of melee I think I can wave dash in real life or grow a tail to mimic a Yoshi back air. Instead I find that I play games to enjoy the different worlds that the games open up and that I only want to experience those worlds as I am playing games. I have also never gotten so invested in a game that I have had some embarrassing mix up outside of the game like the prompt for this blog seemed to suggest could happen.

Unfortunately I haven’t ever really gotten so immersed in a game that it bled over into the real world like the Blogs of the Round Table people seemed to hope happened but I have seen other people get that excited about whatever game they like. Weirdly enough I have only seen it happen on purpose when people are cosplaying a character of a game. I have never cosplayed, and never intend to, but I don’t judge other people for doing it and I can enjoy their creativity towards some of the costumes they come up with when dressing up like another person who was in a video game.
I realize now though that my work actually attempts to apply video game logic when dealing with rowdy college kids. I work in the dining hall and when we don’t want students to enter a certain part because it is being cleaned or something we block the entrance with a blockade of tables and chairs. This is a similar to a tactic used in games to keep players going in the right direction. Unfortunately many gamers try to jump over the tables or blockage to get out of bounds and fail and many students still try to get past our blockade to get to areas they aren’t supposed to be in. That is basically the closest my life gets to breaking the barrier between video games and reality, and it isn’t even my idea to so, it’s my bosses.