Sensorimotor Contagion - Virtual Media Literacy Bleeding Into Real-Life Perception

Description

Have you ever tried to press CRTL + Z when making a mistake writing with pen on paper? This is an example of mistakenly applying sensorimotor skills tied to virtual literacy in real life. We frame this as a type of “contagion”. Game scholars describe contagion as adopting game avatars’ fictional behaviors in real-life after imaginatively identifying with these avatars (Gualeni & Vella 2020). This involves a “bleed” from imaginative to real-life practices (Fisher 2024). We, instead, move away from cases of “infectious imagination” to look at contagious real interactions with virtual elements that are not part of a fictional world, such as interfaces, controlling devices, or extradiegetic background music. We focus on cases where people (want to, mistakenly) perform real-life actions based on real-life perceptual cues, because they were conditioned to connect similar cues to said actions in virtual contexts. Think of a Dark Souls player whose body tenses up, as if bracing for a fight, because they suddenly hear music start in their real-life environment (a reliable indicator of an impending boss battle in Dark Souls).

Period	13 Sept 2025
Event title	Perception in Games and Virtual Worlds
Event type	Workshop
Location	Berlin, Germany, BerlinShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International