Jack Thompson is still awaiting a decision that may or may not result in disbarment. Game Politics has procured transcripts of testimony from Jack’s misconduct trial despite threats to sue the site. The transcripts offer a keen insight into the pundit who still is able to provide “expert analysis” on Fox news.
I received a Nintendo DS and Brain Age 2 for Christmas this past year, and I have been playing it religiously since then. Anecdotally, I see a difference in myself; not a major one, but I feel like I am able to focus better and calculate faster than I could before. Interestingly, a short while later, I ran across this article, Keeping Your Brain Fit, from U.S. News, about the possible benefits of activities like my new morning ritual of Brain Age 2. The article is not centered on video games per se, but it does discuss them, with the adviso that most of these games have not been tested in relation to increased brain functioning.
Have you ever wondered what fun things you could do with a Wiimote other than playing super cool Wii games? Johnny Chung Lee, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon seems to have some good ideas. For example, using a Wiimote, an array of infrared LED´s that one could buy at RadioShack and some bits of reflective tape, he shows us how to make a system that will track the location of a person´s fingers in mid-air. In other words, one can use the Wiimote´s bluetooth connection to have the PC track the movement of the user’s hands and interact with windows a la Minority Report.
This is a post from the Wired Magazine site. (http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2007/11/tabularasa)
The main thread is that they have broken the MMO mold and created a model where you don’t have to commit countless hours of effort to the MMO to be successful. “a PC game that … was designed to appeal to the average Joe who’s probably not interested in learning what “gold farming” or “damage over time” means and just wants to amuse himself by saving the universe.”. Having done the “kill a dozen boars” to death in WoW, I am most interested to try this. Anyone online with Tabula Rasa yet?
I <3 you, Scientific American, I always have. And I thank you for your latest post that finally tell us why some kids can be total jerks. “It’s a natural behavior and it’s surprising that the idea that children and adolescents learn aggression from the media is still relevant,” says Richard Tremblay in the article “Taming Baby Rage: Why are some kids so angry.”
(I could not find a picture that really shouted DKP, but I thought this one was nice anyway…from google images)
In my past research I found that DKP (Dragon Kill Point) systems are more than just micro economic systems. DKP also supports the political legitimacy of the leaders within raiding guilds, and builds a rational means of reciprocity within a guild community. This is significant as guilds are a major source of cultural reproduction and learning within MMORPGs. After the jump is the abstract for a paper I have on up on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN): Read the rest of this entry »
The Carnegie Mellon library system has released (in beta) two games meant to get at using the library system. The first game, Within Range, is not the most interesting but it asks students to re-shelve books based on LoC subjects and the Dewey Decimal System. Useful for helping them find books in the brick and mortar library but not riveting gaming. The second game, I’ll Get It, is a much like Diner Dash (only in a library). You have to look up the patron’s topic and choose from 2 books or 2 internet sources what you will bring back to the patron based upon their research question. This one is a bit more interesting especially since it goes in waves and gets more harried as time passes.
How effective is this? Can we teach students how to use a virtual library and expect them to extrapolate that out to the real world? Or will they simply google the topic and go from there?
Playing video games for cash is not exactly new, but the connection with gambling almost immediately discussed in an article I recently read on the Yahoo! Games page about Tournament.com immediately caught my attention.
In the article, Tournament.com founder Marcus Pearcey claims that his website, in which players pay an entrance fee to participate in games to win money, is not a gambling site because, “Gambling rewards a player based purely on luck, while Tournament.com is a service that rewards players based on their skill.” Despite this view, according to the article, 14 U.S. states have banned this sort of gaming. Read the rest of this entry »
” Japanese women have overtaken their male counterparts to become the biggest users of Nintendo’s Wii and DS machines” reports the Times Online. I’m happy to see their hypothesis come to fruition: Nintendo took itself out of the pixel-pushing shooter hegemony under the assumption that it would allow the market to grow, and so it did.
There was a time, not so long ago, when men and women in the games industry were suggesting pink backdrops, costume changes, and a variety of nebulous terms such as “community building activities” (often manifested as gossip) as ways to engage “girls”. But according to the article, women are drawn to the sports games, particularly the ones that utlize the Wii’s novel control pannel. As many of us anticipated, concerns that “girls” do not like competition ( a big lol on that one) were ill-placed.
