When we play video games we are usually still aware of our reality. We still hunger, we see the edges of the screen in our peripheral, we feel the controller/keyboard with our hands. The good games are the ones that draw you in and make you forget about your reality, even hunger (at least for a while) and I can personally attest to that.
One of these games is the Dead Space series. A science fiction horror story that has you on the edge of your seat. The fun thing about Dead Space is that they include hallucinations. You, or the character, sees things that aren’t real. But lets think about that statement for a moment. A not real character seeing things that aren’t real? Well that’s any video game isn’t it, because they aren’t real. Yet we find ourselves needing to differentiate what is and isn’t real within something that we believe is not real. So perhaps games are real in a sense the same way a story can be. But back to Dead Space, these hallucinations are believed to be real by the character until proven otherwise. There is one cutscene where an enemy appears and tries to stab your character in the eye with a syringe. When you succeed in stopping them though they disappears and your character is the one holding syringe (pictures below). Even though it was a hallucination and not real and was likely not believed by the character even, it still had real consequences and was real enough that it needed to be fought off.
In the first game you search for your lover, find her, and then attempt to escape with her. Nearing the end of the escape you learn she died before you even arrived. She was another hallucination the whole time. Yet she seemed so real that this reveal shocked even you the player who is disconnected from their world. Games like these can pull you in and the better they are the less disconnected you feel, and therefore the more real it feels.