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So you've bought a new video game. You're not quite sure it's what you really want at the moment, but it got pretty good reviews (not that that means anything), and it's a genre or series you enjoy, so what the hell. It's just fifty bucks, and you can always take it back if it sucks.

You take it home, unwrap the crinkly plastic packaging, and — if you're particularly studious — read the manual. Then you put it in your system and start to play. And play. And play. And play. Stop for a bathroom break — Didn't I go just before I started? — and play some more. And play. And play. And play. And then suddenly you hear an annoying beeping noise — it's your alarm. It's 7:00 am, and you need to get moving to class.

But the game follows you. Every time you stop playing, you feel like you still have some pending business. You're seeing passwords in your Alpha-Bits. You try and power-slide on the drive to class. Clouds are looking suspiciously like troop formations to you. You feel like you have some unfinished business, and that business is developing your growing empire.

School's interminably long. You speed home and start playing again. You play. And play. And play. Maybe you beat the game somewhere in there, but that's no barrier — just an opportunity to start over and do things better this time. You play some more. You obtain the Infinity Plus One Sword. You beat the Bonus Boss. You get all the Lost Forevers you missed the first time through. You unlock the Bragging Rights Reward. You argue about the minutia of the game on message boards. You engage in impossibly involved Self-Imposed Challenges. Maybe you even write some execrable Fan Fic.

Don't feel bad. It's happened to the best of us. Video games are among the most addictive types of media, and they consume our time and energy in ways that a half-hour television program or a 600-page novel just can't. The Tetris Effect — when a game permeates every aspect of your life. Named after the original, Tetris, which has superimposed itself◊ on more ceiling tiles and eyelids than any video game ever.

An amusing variant can occur if you've got two such intrusive games (or two characters in the same game — even worse if they both have good points) at once, and have to split your time between them. Once they start intermingling in your head, the result can be anything from laugh-out-loud ridiculous to seriously creepy.

A similar effect among old-school computer programmers, known as the 'larval stage', can sometimes extend a year or more as the new hacker immerses him or herself completely in the system. See Archive Binge for the same thing among Web Comics fans. And, of course, we here at TV Tropes have our own version.

Extreme cases lead players to say: "I Know Mortal Kombat!".

There are as many examples as there are gamers — which is why this trope neither needs nor wants specific ones. If you'd like to discuss yours, might we suggest our fine forums, or else visit Troper Tales?

See also Ear Worm, the music equivalent.

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No personal examples, please. Take It To The Forums.

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Examples:

• This short story.
• Katamari Damacy. The game builds so much momentum with its "always roll forward" pressure that you're likely to see debris on the sidewalk as potential things to make into stars or planets or whatever long after the power button is off. Bonus Ear Worm for "Na naaaa na-na na-na na na naaaa..."
• Star Trek The Next Generation: "The Game".
  • Crap.
    • Thank you very much.
    • FFFFFFFFFFF-
• Resident Evil gamesmaking you want to kill anything and everything that moves in hopes of saving the world!
• The Sluggy Freelance storyline "Years of Yarncraft" parodies this extensively, even using drug terminology to refer to the titular MMORPG (Torg refers to the End Game content as "super-freebased").
• Flintlocke's Guide To Azeroth Presents: The Five Stages of Warcraft!
• Speaking of Warcraft, South Park did an episode in which the main characters did nothing but play and level up solely by killing boars. This took many weeks, and the entire cast became incredibly fat and grotesque as a result.
• Years before World Of Warcraft existed "EverCrack" had already played out every standard MMORPG addiction and divorce story.
• Doug got a Super Pretendo. When local bully Roger Klotz bothered him in class, he imagined his game's targeting system locking on.
• Red Dwarf had "Better Than Life" which in the TV series was a VR game that responded to subconscious desires, while in the books it was a Lotus Eater Machine game that made people unaware they were playing it, frequently causing them to starve to death in a virtual world.
• The Civilization series strives on this trope. The advertisement surrounding Civ 4 use the phrase "one more turn", including starting a fake site for Civilization-holics called "no more turns". When you reach the "end of history" (win or lose), the options given to you are "End game" and "Just...one...more...turn!"
  • Civilization's sci-fi brother, Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri is just as bad, complete with the options after you've beaten the game consisting of "Good, I'm done, now go away!" and "C'mon, lemme play a couple more turns!"
    • Not to mention that if you try to quit you hear the immortal plea: "Please don't go! The drones need you! They look up to you!"
  • In the Guinness World Records 2008 Gamer's Edition, there is one story that Iain Banks had to write another novel, and Civ 4 managed to stop any work on that novel. He got over that addiction by uninstalling the game, deleting his saves and smashing the CD with a hammer.
• This site. Literally lose hours reading through it.
  • The Internet in general, given a string of links to entertaining content, or a suitably dense and hyperlinked database. It can be just as fun trying to reconstruct how exactly you got from "looking at pictures of butterflies" to "novel philosophical arguments on the decline of Man", via "seasonal recipes for acorn squash".
    • Featured in this xkcd comic.
  • Wikipedia, too.
• In a similar vein to the already-mentioned Zero Punctuation review of Peggle, in Yahtzee's review of Call Of Duty 4, he explained that there are two types of games: those that he stops playing out of frustration, and those that he stops playing when he realizes he should have eaten two hours ago. (For the record, Call of Duty 4 was of the second type.)
• The Guitar Hero series, and by extension Rock Band. A quick progression: "Well this is fun" becomes "I wonder what the next songs are going to be" becomes "I should try on a harder difficulty" becomes "I NEED to get 5 stars on EVERYTHING on expert."
  • After playing for an hour or two (or even five minutes if you have sensitive eyes), stare at the floor. It's kinda trippy. For those too lazy the floor looks like it's rippling or alternatively, BOILING.
• Puzzle Quest, loving nicknamed "Puzzle Crack" by the guys at the Gamer Cast Network podcasts and many on their forums.
• Most games in Maxis' Sim family, particularly Sim City and The Sims, especially since they have no "win condition" so you can theoretically keep playing indefinitely.
  • In The Sims, you can spend days upon days constructing and reconstructing the homes and daily lives of your Sims with loving detail. It is somewhat fortunate that the game tends to get old fairly quickly for most players.
    • On the other hand, Sims 3 is coming out with major changes to bring doom to us all...
  • The task queue in the upper left hand corner is particularly likely to get superimposed in a player's head. After switching off the game, it's hard not to picture those little tiles all lined up as you decide what to do next. ("Toilet tile, then refrigerator tile, then food tile, then bed tile...wait, gotta nudge a shower tile in there somewhere...")
• Any Grand Theft Auto game. Do not operate a vehicle, heavy machinery or go out in public within 24 hours of playing a pre-GTA IV game
  • Grand Theft Auto leaves the player with the intuitive understanding that they can get where they're going quicker by just edging those other cars out of the way with a casual bump against their sides, fenders and/or bumpers. The Carmageddon games on the other hand, instill the impulse to beat repeatedly against fellow motorists until their engine erupts with a satisfying fireball.
• Spelunky. Spelunky.
• The Football Manager games lampshade The Tetris Effect with the player status screen, which has an entry which starts at "not yet addicted" and advances accordingly as the player racks up hundreds of hours and several in-game seasons of gameplay. Which does happen.
• Pokemon.
  • "Ok, I just want to catch a Caterpie. Hey it's close to evolving, why not level it up. Hell, go for Butterfree. Might as well beat a Gym while I've got this Butterfree. Mt. Moon has those fossils, I wanna get one. Hey it's Cerulean, might as well beat Misty. Oh, there's [Rival]. Hey there's Bill. *Checks Clock* I've been playing for HOW LONG?"
  • It has gotten to the point where it becomes Fetish Fuel for some. You know you may obsessed when you are sexually aroused by Pikachu.
• Mario Kart , the chaos and hilarity that occurs in races never gets old.
• Final Fantasy. Later games can start to feel more like interactive movies.
  • And thus, earlier games are more likely to cause this effect!
• It may not be a videogame, but.... OH MY GOD, SUDOKU!!!!
  • And Go.
• Spore hangs a lampshade by granting achievements based on play time (at least at 50 and 100 hours).
  • Super Smash Brothers Brawl does the same thing. Awarding the first achievement at 30 instead of 50 hours can be viewed either as a mercy or as a sinister gateway drug.
• Parodied in 30 Rock when Frank appears after three months with a full beard mentioning that he played a game for a couple of hours, only to informed that it has been three months, to his surprise.
• Rhythm Heaven requires spot on timing and intense memorization, if you're not remembering exactly when you're supposed to tap the screen or how many times, or when to flick the stylus when the ping pong ball gets too close to you when you're not playing the DS then you don't own Rhythm Heaven.
• The Elder Scrolls games.
• Audiosurf certainly exhibits this. You can easily spend six hours playing songs in it before you notice your wrist is getting sore from moving the mouse around so much.
• PopCap is good at making these sorts of games. Notable examples from them include Peggle (as described by Yahtzee in the page quote) and Plants vs. Zombies.
  • And their action puzzle games...
• Zoo Keeper. The fact that it is so addictive and yet so insubstantial at the same time is summed up neatly in this review.
• Rpgingmaster brings this little known example. Big Kahuna Reef 2- A pretty nameless game my mother picked up in a bargain bin at a convenience store she was convinced would only be enjoyable for a week. It's simple "line up three or more of the same thing to break stuff" gameplay didn't dispel the illusion...at first. Then my dad, who disdains all games outside of the original Super Mario Bros, plays its once, and three weeks later is determined to beat all three hundred levels. My mother and I, on his recommendation, tried it ourselves, and WE think the damn thing is So Cool Its Awesome!
  • Burdaloo, another Match-3 type game, lampshades this with the "Addicted" trophy, which you gain by racking up a total of 40 hours playtime.
• Harvest Moon. It's amazing how a series that's hardly any more then a dating sim with farm elements in it can be so addictive.
  • Dating Sim? 90% of the game is just watching virtual grass grow! ...And yet it's so addictive.
• Sins Of A Solar Empire: Hours upon hours of galactic conquest with Shiny Looking Spaceships and gratuitous Scenery Porn.
• A fictional example: one of the secret marvels described in GURPS Warehouse 23 is a videogame called Astro Globs! that is so addictive that you literally can't stop playing it. The first person to try it out nearly died of dehydration.
• Ginormo Sword
• Disgaea not only is a game of this type, it even hangs a lampshade on it once Laharl becomes overlord:
  ...do you want me to give human kids an addictive video game that will deprive them of their sleep?
• Browser add-on example: StumbleUpon. Here's one article on it.
• Fire Emblem. "Okay, all I have to do is beat the boss. But I should go. Just one more turn. Just one more turn. Just one more turn..." until you descend into madness.
  • Or until one of your favorite characters dies and you throw the game at the wall in frustration. Then you turn it back on and restart the battle all over again. "I'll just play up to where I was...okay, maybe I can go another turn..."
    • Seeing as this game's characters are so well-designed and well-developed that they ALL become your "favorite characters" (with a few notable exceptions), one can all too easily fine oneself creating quite a large hole in the frustration wall by about the 50th obvious, preventable, and easy-but-deadly mistake.
  • Not to mention waiting for characters for support. "Okay, Matthew and Serra should be ready to support by the end of this chapter...oh, wait, we've beaten it. Okay, I'll just wait a turn or two...Hmm...doo, doo dooo....Okay, they made small talk. Time to sieze the castle!
  • You know you have a problem when you start being amazed that everyone in Real Life is moving At the same time
  • "All right, so I've just finished this level, and... there, it's saved. Ok so it's 2 a.m. and I've already done one more level than I should, so it's time to go to bed. Oh wait, the next chapter's name just came up... Ah yeah, I remember that level from last time! It was really fun. I'll just watch the opening scene. (*watches opening scene*). Well now I'm at the inventory screen, so I might as well go to the map screen so I can save and not have to watch the cutscene again tomorrow. Well here I am at the map, and it seems I've got two more character slots than the last battle... I'd better choose two really quick, it won't take too long. Darn, I want to add Boyd, but I'm out of steel axes... better buy one from the shopkeeper now so I don't forget later and have to start all over, like those other 5 times time I sent a guy in without any weapons. Oh cool, the shop's allowing forged throwing weapons now... I don't want to waste that spear I have, so I'll just make a quick +2 javelin for Oscar while I'm at the store, then I'll save again and get off. Oh wait, I'd better check support while I'm back at base. And adding bonus experience doesn't really take that long either, plus it's on the same page. Ok, back at the map screen... Oh wow, I just remembered there were a bunch of peg knights that came out of that top-right corner last time and gave me a bunch of trouble... I'd better put Shinon closer to that side of the start formation in case I'm dumb and forget tomorrow. Close call! Anyway... (*rearranges team some more*). Ok so the first guy's right in killing distance of Ike, so I'll just go ahead and do that right now since it'll get the first boss dialogue and stuff out of the way and all the real obvious moves will be over with at the beginning when I start again. Ok and Titania can reach this guy too, so he's going down. Oh crap, now Titania's in range of those 3 sword knights and she's got an axe out, plus they'll all be able to attack because of this stupid new rule that enemy horsemen can all run in and attack you then get out of the way so the other ones can attack you, which totally kills off your characters when you make the tiniest misjudgment. Stupid rule. Ok so I'd better take care of that now... I'll have Oscar go up there next to her and swap her axe with her iron lance. Grr, now I'm halfway through the turn... might as well finish it out, cause I don't like to start halfway through when I can't remember half the strategy I was going for in the first place. (*finishes turn*). Now I've gotta watch the enemy turn before I can save................................................................................"
    • "All right, so I've just finished this level, and... there, it's saved. Ok so it's 4 a.m. and I've already done one more level than I should, so it's time to go to bed. Oh wait..."
• Bejeweled. If you can see jewels tumbling under your eyelids when you blink... well, you're not the only one....
  • More horrifying is the fact that Bejeweled and Peggle add-ons exist for World Of Warcraft, so that you suddenly find yourself with hours of /played time in World Of Warcraft that consist of sitting in one place playing with the Bejeweled add-on. It's some kind of meta-addiction.
• Spyro The Dragon. Oddly enough the majority of the original game won't affect you too much (aside from having to perfect speed ramps and whatnot to get anywhere near 100%) but the Dream Weavers World has the added affect of being very illusionary. After spending a lot of time in that world, things can get freaky if you look away...
• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and its sequel. "Well, lemme just complete this mission. WOW, that weapon looks awesome, I gotta teach one of my guys that ability! I'll just complete a few more missions... Wow, I should really teach them that ability too... hey, a new Job class! Gotta try that out... and teach them that ability... and to do so I'll need to play another mission... or two... or three... or four... or..." Actually, strategy RP Gs in general tend to be monstrously addictive, particularly when they're on handhelds.
  • Don't discount Final Fantasy Tactics for Playstation. A normal match could reach twenty minutes easily. Trying to level up characters or get items? Hour, no problem.
• Roller Coaster Tycoon is no surprise, since the average time a stage might take is 3 hours.
  • This troper still sees Roller Coaster Tycoon in his sleep. And he hasn't played the game for a year. And amusement parks are basically him trying to figure out how to build every ride in the game.
• Sim City... let's see, we'll start off with a few zones and a power plant... okay, we got rewards... Hmm, we got a nice little city... Oh, first skyscraper appears... Let's see, those whiny citizens... chuck in a few meteorites... Rebuild... HOLY MOLY IT'S 3 A.M.
  • In fact, some of the scenarios of Sim City 3000 Unlimited had to completed within a few hours time. And with easier zoning tactics and more realistic play in Sim City 4 Deluxe, you're bound to just sit and stare, and watch the sun come up both in game and outside your room...
• Zuma. "Oh hey, make the colored balls go poof, that sounds fun." Four hours later, you're screaming at the TV screen to give you a goddamn purple combo ball because you're almost to that point where you fill up that pretty bar and the balls shrink back a little bit and...hey, when did the sun sneak up? Screw the sun; you just got a blue combo. Ear Worm jungle music, too, that will drive anybody not playing the game up the freaking wall.
• Three words: Super Smash Bros.
  • Including making and sharing hacks.
• Dwarf Fortress: Wow, this looks weird. Huh, I can go up and down, too. And I can build walls. Oooh, look, goblins. When did it become Sunday?
  • And of course, the infamous ASCII dreams...
    • And once you start thinking in ASCII, it's probably time to put the dorfs down.
• Special mention goes to Lemmings, a game so addictive that Terry Pratchett wrote its mechanics into a Discworld novel (Interesting Times), and noted:
  • "Not only did I wipe Lemmings from my hard disc, I overwrote it so's I couldn't get it back."
• Golden Eye on the N64. After numerous attempts at playing the game levels through on 007 mode, one may start wanting to shoot cameras in parking garages and office buildings.
• Myst had an ad line: "It will become your world." The beauty of its scenery and music is seductive. If you like games where the point is to explore and ponder, it will definitely suck you in and keep you there. For a long, long time. You just keep walking everywhere until the clues come together ... Or until you give up and go find a solution book. The sequels were largely like this, too.
• Baldur's Gate II lampshades this trope; occasionally the dialogue on the loading screen mentions that "While the characters in the game do not need to eat, you do," and suggests that you take a break.
• Earthbound can be guilty of this too, and if you've been playing for 4 hours straight your dad will call you in-game and say you should probably take a rest round about now... However if you say no he will be much more understanding of your important quest to save the world than your real dad will be.
• Rogue Galaxy pokes fun at this trope a little. If you've been playing for a long time one character will say "Wow, you've been playing forever! Why don't you call it a day?" Also an example of Breaking The Fourth Wall.
• Septerra core had a review on its cover going "Need... more... caffeine... Must... keep... playing..."
• Dance Dance Revolution has been known to cause people to imagine arrows flashing in their heads when a song comes on the radio.
• Lampshaded by Dungeon Keeper 2, in which your advisor would start telling you that your bed can banish fatigue and restore vitality when your system clock hits the wee hours and will even go so far as to outright tell you to go to bed.
• Solitaire. After hours of play, you close your eyes and still see the cards stacking in front of you.
• Perfect World. Okay, I just have to finish this quest... Ooh, not done yet, I have to kill 30 of these other things... Yes! Level up! Oh, look, Cultivation. Just a few more... DUNGEON QUEST! YES! I just have to find a squad to help me... Just a little more... I'm thirsty. Hey, how come my milk has a picture of me in the "have you seen me?" side?
• Ouendan/EBA. Must get S-level 300 perfect on EVERY song... *twitch*
• Civilization has been mentioned, but besides turn based strategy games, multiplayer online real time strategies can be worse on the psyche. I'm sure many people can recall 4+ hour long games of Age of Empires 2. The worst part? You. Can't. Pause. It.
  • Sword of the Stars... Turn based strategy game. 4 hours? Maybe when you really have no time at all. Multiplayer games are nonstop 20 hour carnages (of course, thanks to the turn based nature of the game you had some time for going to toilet or eating). This works for pretty much all turn based strategy games, especially those huge scale ones - right, I'll just conquer another thousand star systems and I'm off to bed!
• This happened once to Lisa Simpson - she wasn't prepared for she was playing game with Crash Bandicoot Captain Ersatz for whole week.
  • Well, she started playing when she was sick and didn't have anything else to do, but by the time she recovered she was hooked.
• The Thief series tends to make people edgy around doors, especially ones that open by the push of a button. Will someone be behind the door? Will they spot me? Oh Shi—! May also result in snarky mental commenting.
• The World's Hardest Game (which is a total lie), while very tough, will eat up several hours of your life.
• Those Eyemaze Grow games. You will not be able to stop running the puzzle over and over until you solve it. You have been warned.
• Play enough Tower Defense, and you'll be considering tower placements in any room you happen to be in.
  • On that note, everyone's favorite roguelike Elona, now has a TD-alike companion piece! For that matter, every goddamn game on kongregate rated 3.5 or above could possibly qualify. Balloon Invasion being this troper's personal favorite, followed by Bubble Tank.
• How come Minesweeper hasn't been mentioned yet? If you try expert mode (30x16, 99 mines) and can't beat it after two or three tries, STOP. You have been warned.
• EVE Online. Being late to work is one thing, missing a FLIGHT because the best wifi signal was a dozen gates away from yours and you just had to make sure you were training a skill before spending six hours on an ass-numbing triple 7...hopefully someone's caught on and is planning the intervention soon. Sure would be nice to see the sun again.
• How the feck has this list gone on so long without anybody mentioning the absolutely epic Inner Space, or its predecessor Elite? In b4 mass nostalgia attacks. Also, Sid Meier's Pirates! and Sid Meier in general.
• SPORE of course. Not the game itself, no no, but after torrenting a few expansion packs certainly the editor, despite its somewhat odd limitations. (Go ahead and try to create Kilrathi ships. Just try.) Must....Create...one....more....space ship...
• An episodes of Psych has Shawn's father discovering Grand Theft Auto IV (or one of them). Cue them returning the next day or so and the father hasn't slept and has to be prompted to stop, and even threatens his son when he tries to take the console away.

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