research

News

For 34 Years, Kids Have Wanted Video Games For Christmas

8:30PM Luke Plunkett | Market research firm Permuto Discoveries have published a list of the top-selling Christmas gifts for kids over the past 40 years. Unsurprisingly, over the past few years at least, video games have dominated. More »
Culture

Study: Playing Games Hurts Income, By The Minute

7:20AM Stephen Totilo | Studies about video games say the darnedest things. Either it is plainly obvious that being a gamer hurts your income — because you have to spend money on these games! — or there is a mathematical revelation here. More »
Culture

Gamers Not Great At Finding Explosives

3:30PM Owen Good | Soldiers who grew up in the burbs playing video games instead of shooting varmints in the country, or avoiding trouble in a bad neighbourhood, are singled out by Army research as particularly poor at spotting roadside bombs. More »
News

Gamer Kid Leads Study Showing Connection To Joint Pain

11:00AM Owen Good | A St. Louis fifth-grader, with help from his father (a rheumatologist) and researchers from New York University, led a study showing kids were more likely to complain of joint pain the more they played video games. More »
Culture

What Do Gay Gamers Want From Their Games?

1:40AM Mike Fahey | A DigiPen gaming school student has created a new “Gaymer” survey, hoping to determine what homosexual, bisexual and heterosexual gamers look for in a video game. More »
Culture

ESA Report: More Than 250 Colleges Offer Game Degrees

6:00AM Owen Good | More than 50 game development programs have been added to US colleges’ curricula in the past year, bringing to 254 the number of universities offering degrees in video game design, programming and art, according to the Entertainment Software Association. More »
Culture

Let’s Learn About American Otaku

8:00PM Brian Ashcraft | The results of the Otaku USA readership poll were published in the most recent issue of Japanese game mag Famitsu. Ready to have a look? Are you? More »
News

Xbox 360’s Processor Delivers Budget Supercomputing

12:40PM Owen Good | A team of researchers pulled off some supercomputing on the cheap using a single Xbox 360’s graphical processing unit, instead of an array of processors operating in tandem, the BBC reports. More »
News

Measuring The Time It Takes Between A Button Press And On-Screen Action

5:30PM Luke Plunkett | Digital Foundry’s long-running blog on Eurogamer often throws up some interesting technical studies on games, but few have ever been as interesting, or as comprehensive, as this piece on controller latency. More »
Culture

UC-Irvine Establishes Games Research Center

6:00AM Owen Good | The University of California-Irvine, already home to a game culture lab, has established the centre for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds. Twenty faculty members from the university’s computer science, humanities, education and other departments will collaborate on its work. More »