I'm a game developer, professionally!

You may know me from things like: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, Gone Home, Bioshock 2, or maybe something else.

Right now I work as a Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy Entertainment in Stockholm, Sweden

Perhaps there are other aspects of my personality that may also be revealed here on this website


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Johnnemann

This is something that's a trope in writing, and I've heard people talk about it. I'm not sure I've ever felt it!

I can think of three likely possibilities:

  1. subconsciously noticing the direction of people's gaze through cues that come across as a feeling rather than a visual thing. This would seem to preclude a couple common experiences, though - "I felt his eyes drilling into my back as I walked up the stairs", or "The place was abandoned, but nevertheless I had the feeling of being watched"
  2. being self-conscious of your appearance or some aspect, or of being in a place or doing an action that makes you embarrassed or wary. This is the thing that I think I've felt, but properly would be used to indicate the subject's mental state rather than the actions of others (which often seems to be indicated when people say this)
  3. some actual physically-explainable detection of sight on our bodies. I find this to be a stretch for obvious reasons, but maybe there's something I haven't thought of

Can you feel eyes crawling over your skin? Someone checking out your ass as you bend over? Can you feel the weight of the crowd's gaze as you step on stage? How?


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in reply to @johnnemann's post:

people can hallucinate just about any kind of sensory or meta-sensory input, so it's no surprise that "the feeling of someone else's presence and attention", something we use a variety of senses and unconscious processes to perceive, can light up in our brains if we're getting even a tiny shred of the normal input that confirms that. and other situations yeah i think it's just pronounced self-consciousness creating that same feeling. there's no scientific reason i know of that would cause someone's gaze to effect anything physically - it's interesting how we think of it as this beam-like thing emanating from the viewer when obviously it's really just little black circular windows in their head letting light in from all over.

I suspect it's partly a "sudden awareness of bodily position relative to environment" thing. Like, if I'm sitting here typing and then my instincts realize that my back is to the door and someone could be standing there.

i’d like to attribute to subtle changes in air pressure that we’ve been evolutionarily trained to assume is the presence of another person, or maybe some latent bird dna softly detecting electromagnetic fields, like knowing that a crt is on somewhere nearby. but its probably paranoia.