video games
cagapakis | January 19, 2011My friend Patrick is embarking on a 48 experiment, studying circadian rhythm and destroying his own in the process. He's also embarking on a social media experiment, live-streaming the whole thing on ustream.
Tune in to watch real science in action and the effects of sleep deprivation on scientists! You can even ask him questions during the three hours between experimental time points!
edyong | February 23, 2010I grew up in the days of the SNES and the Sega Megadrive. Even then, furious debates would rage about the harm (or lack thereof) that video games would inflict on growing children. A few decades later, little has changed. The debate still rages, fuelled more by the wisdom of repugnance than by data. With little regard for any actual evidence, pundits like Baroness Susan Greenfield, former Director of the Royal Institution, claim that video games negatively "rewire" our brains, infantilising us, depriving us of our very identities and even instigating the financial crisis.
Of course, the fact…
cagapakis | February 11, 2010BioShock2 came out a couple days ago, the sequel to the wildly successful video game BioShock. BioShock is a first-person-shooter video game set in Rapture, an underwater city overrun by violently insane genetically engineered mutants called "Splicers", creepy zombie-like girls, "Little Sisters", that harvest corpses for "ADAM"--sea slug stem-cells that provide super-human strength, regenerative powers, and the ability to rewrite the human genome with the injection of "plasmids"--and genetically engineered "Big Daddies" that protect them, mentally blank superhumans grafted into enormous…
edyong | August 24, 2009Our minds are battlegrounds where different media fight for attention. Through the Internet, desktops, mobile screens, TVs and more, we are constantly awash with headlines, links, images, icons, videos, animations and sound. This is the way of the 21st century - a saturated sensory environment where multi-tasking is the name of the game. Even as I type these words, my 24-inch monitor displays a Word document and a PDF side-by-side, while my headphones pump Lux Aeterna into my head (see image below).
You might think that this influx of media would make the heaviest of users better at…
edyong | March 29, 2009Anyone who has played video games for too long is probably familiar with the sore, tired and dry eyes that accompany extended bouts of shooting things with rocket launchers. So it might come as a surprise that playing games could actually improve a key aspect of our eyesight.
Renjie Li from the University of Rochester found that intensive practice at shoot-em-ups like Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2 improved a person's ability to spot the difference between subtly contrasting shades of grey. In the real world, this "contrast sensitivity function" is reflected in the crispness of…
edyong | March 16, 2009The effect that violent films and games have on our minds, and the implications for their place in society, has been a source of much heated debate. Now, a new study looks set to fan the flames even further. Several studies have found that violent media can desensitise people to real acts of violence, but Brad Bushman from the University of Michigan and Craig Anderson from Iowa State University have produced the first evidence that this can actually change a person's behaviour, affecting their decisions to help others in need.
Using professional actors, they found that after 20 minutes of…
edyong | January 11, 2009You've just been in a horrific car crash. You're unharmed but the vividness of the experience - the sight of a looming car, the crunching of metal, the overwhelming panic - has left you a bit traumatised. You want something to help take the edge off and fortunately a doctor is on hand to prescribe you with... Tetris.
Yes, that Tetris. According to Emily Holmes from the University of Oxford, the classic video game of falling coloured blocks could prevent people who have suffered through a traumatic experience from developing full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As ideas go, it's…
edyong | April 29, 2008
Forget 'smart drugs' or brain-training video games. According to new research, a deceptively simple memory task can do what no drug or game has done before - it can boost your 'fluid intelligence', your ability to adapt your powers of reasoning to new challenges. Fluid intelligence doesn't rely on previous knowledge, skills or experience. It's at work when we solve new problems or puzzles, when we draw inferences and spot patterns, and when we test ideas and design experiments. To see what I mean, try testing yours.
Fluid intelligence appears to be strongly influenced by inherited…
purepedantry | September 21, 2007Video games of late have gotten crazy complicated. Making life-like characters and realistic worlds is an incredible computational challenge. Popular Science lists the 10 Biggest Challenges in video game production, and number 4 struck my eye:
4. Artificial Intelligence
Like teaching 1,000 kids to think for themselves overnight
Problem: Once upon a time, the bad guys in videogames wandered around mindlessly, shooting at you while they waited to die. That doesn't cut it anymore. Players demand sophisticated enemies to fight and reliable in-game allies with which to fight them. Thing is, it's…
sb admin | April 17, 2007As a Nashville resident, and somebody who's really a 49ers fan but one who is developing some hometown interest in the Tennessee Titans, I was happy to see that last year's rookie quarterback Vince Young has been selected to be on the cover of the video game Madden '08.
So the only question that remains is: will cornerback Pacman Jones make it on the cover of "Grand Theft Auto IV"?
purepedantry | September 14, 2006I talked before about how I think the Internet represents the possibility for Alternaworlds -- worlds facilitated by social interaction on the Internet with their own rules and standards.
Well, this World of Warcraft business may be rapidly careening out of control, but it is beginning to fulfill most of the criterion for what I would call an alternaworld. MSNBC gives this rather late-to-the-party or Dad-has-just-discovered-how-the-mouse-works description:
In the physical world we vainly scrounge for glory. Bin Laden still taunts us, the bus doors close before we reach them and leave us…
purepedantry | August 9, 2006Apparently the sexual drive is insufficient at motivating many people to leave their apartments:
Having treated all types of addictions for more than 15 years, Orzack says there's little difference between drug use, excessive gambling and heavy game playing. And with millions of gamers hooked on mega-popular massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), she believes the problem is growing rapidly. In fact, Orzack says as much as 40 percent of World of Warcraft players are addicted to the game. TwitchGuru talks with Orzack to find out more about the issue of game addiction, and…