The New-Brunswick Telegraph Journal reports the findings of Economics student Ryan MacLeod, who has crunched some demographics numbers to determine that, the more men play games, the more their income drops.

He’s put a number on that, the paper reports:

The effect is so notable that for every minute a video game is played, MacLeod’s research suggests gamers can expect a 0.4 per cent decrease in income.

And more from MacLeod:

“My work confirms that, in general, the more income a person has, the more time they spent playing video games,” MacLeod said. “But that playing video games could also have a negative effect on a person’s income.”

I’ve long wondered how much money avid gamers commit to their gaming hobby each year. When you add and subtract all your game purchases, trade-ins and whatnot, what’s the tab at year’s end? And, as the story notes, if your income is lower, is it because of some subtle effect playing games has on earning power? Or is it simply that you played games so much, you cost yourself time that could have been used to make more income?

Mt. A student’s research finds playing video games can lead to lower income

[Pic]

Writes the Los Angeles Times:

Military researchers have found that two groups of personnel are particularly good at spotting anomalies: those with hunting backgrounds, who traipsed through the woods as youths looking to bag a deer or turkey; and those who grew up in tough urban neighborhoods, where it is often important to know what gang controls which block.

Personnel who fit neither category, often young men who grew up in the suburbs and developed a liking for video games, do not seem to have the depth perception and peripheral vision of the others, even if their eyesight is 20/20.

Note, this isn’t explosive ordnance disposal, they’re talking about riding in a humvee and picking up details that someone might have buried explosives in the road. This is important because, of bombs discovered before they went off, like 90 percent of them were found because someone’s spidey-sense went off.

The story quotes a sergeant major who finds the research fits with his own observations. “The gamers are very focused on the screen rather than the whole surrounding,” he said. Country boys and hood rats have a more finely-tuned radar – that head on a swivel mentality when you’re potentially in a dangerous situation.

Some Troops Have a Sixth Sense for Bombs [Los Angeles Times via Game Politics]

Deniz Ince, 11, is the lead author on the study, to be presented Monday in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology. Ince, who enjoys playing the Wii, found his fingers ached when he squeezed oranges. He set about researching the matter to determine if video games were linked to it.

The study surveyed 171 of Ince’s schoolmates, aged 7 to 12 years old. Eighty percent said they played consoles or handhelds, and half of those said they played less than an hour a day. A third said they played one to two hours daily, and 7 and 6 percent said they played 2 to 3 or 3 or more hours a day, respectively.

The study found that each additional hour of use increased the likelihood of experiencing pain by 50 percent. It also found a higher pain incidence in younger children than older.

The study’s senior author, Dr. Yasuf Yazici of New York University, said “the younger the kids, the more significant the pain.” Why exactly couldn’t be proven by the research, although the researchers believe it might be because muscles and tendons in younger kids are still developing.

The survey respondents said the pain they felt was “generally mild,” although some 22 percent found it enough to limit how much they played. Interestingly, playing a Wii exclusively resulted in more self-reported pain, regardless of the player’s age or how much he or she played per day.

Video Games Can Play Havoc With Kids’ Joints [HealthDay on U.S. News & World Report]

The ESA’s study said 54 were added since 2008, a 27% rise in the number of video game-related degree programs in the US. Among states, California quite expectedly offers the most video game-related degrees, at 46 institutions, with the University of California-Irvine recently establishing a centre for games and virtual worlds research. New York, Texas and Florida are the other leading states, in that order.

The utility of these programs extends beyond game creation; the ESA also said a poll found that 70% of “major employers” use some form of interactive software, including games, in employee training. Of those, three-fourths expect to expand their usage of such methods in the next three to five years.

Like any popular and growing field, graduates can certainly expect to find a competitive jobs environment. But the growth and the mainstreaming of programs built specifically for game design show the industry’s deepening acceptance by and impact to big business in America.

More Colleges than Ever Offering Gaming Degrees [CNET]

A team of U.S. and European researchers found that, even though players spent less time looking at them, ads associated with violence were more memorable than ones not. The test subjects played a racing game (named AdRacer, pictured above) in which the goal was to run over targets on a road course. Ads were displayed as billboards on the roadside. When the targets became pedestrians, running over them spattered blood all over the screen.

Now, the utility of this memory association has its own costs. Namely, what happens to a Dr. Scholl’s or a Betty Crocker when they’re the hit ad in Manhunt 5. Certainly an advertiser could expect some controversy if not only their brand was associated with a nasty-violent game, but was deliberately (warning: corporate word alert) leveraging the violence for extra (incoming buzzword alert) mindshare.

An Advert for In-Game Violence [MIT Technology Review via Game Politics]

Or at least the brains of adolescent girls, who were the subject of the study, funded by Tetris marketer Blue Planet Software. Adolescent girls’ brains are still developing, as any adolescent boy can tell you, so their brains are more susceptible to the sort of change Haier was looking for, and change he indeed found. The girls were given MRI scans before and after three months of Tetris, and after the testing period it was found that certain areas (in blue above) showed greater efficiency, while others (in red) showed thicker cortexes, indicating more brain matter.

Future benefits of this study, says co-investigator Dr. Richard Haier, might be to “demonstrate that a player of Tetris does see lasting effects that generalize to other activity,” showing for example that engaging in activities like playing some games might help fight off the mental decline that occurs with aging.

The full study is being published in Thursday’s BMC Research Notes, but we get the general gist. Adolescent girls who play Tetris on a regular basis grow up to be completely awesome.

How Tetris Changes Your Brain [Wired]

The result is inside NPD’s 2009 Gamer Segmentation Report, and is based on a January survey of nearly 21,000 people. NPD breaks the population down into seven segments, the largest being Secondary Gamers, at 33.6 million. These are mostly female gamers who play less than four hours a week, none of it on a console.

Console gamers, mostly male, are the next largest and fastest-growing segment, at 32.9 million. Then comes Heavy Portable Gamers, heavy describing the amount of play, not their weight. Which is a good thing, most of their 30 million are kids. (Their average age is 19. Ni-ni-ni-ni-nineteen.)

GameSpot broke down the report further. But you get the idea. Video games are everywhere – even someone who doesn’t consider himself or herself a gamer, but plays a flash game at work, is a gamer for purposes of this study. So, yay us.

U.S. Gamer Population: 170 Million [GameSpot via Blue's News]

And we’re not talking music or ringtones or other non-gaming stuff, here. We’re talking items “purchased and exchanged online in games, virtual worlds, and social networks”. So that’s everything from gamerpics to themes to MMO items to tweens buying crap for their Habbo’s room.

The survey polled 1,927 people, both men and women, across a range of ethnicities and ages (12-64). Of those 1.927, 51% couldn’t remember how much they spent, and those who could said, on average, they spent around $US30.

Study: 12% Of Americans Purchasing Virtual Goods [Gamasutra]

The study surveyed the “top 150 games in a year across nine platforms and all rating levels” with each title weighted by popularity, finding that less than 3% of game characters were “recognizably Hispanic.” Of those Hispanics, the study claims that all were “non-playable, background characters.” Dom from Gears excepted of course. (And I always thought Tyson Rios from Army of Two was Hispanic, but maybe not recognisably enough.)

The study claims that more Hispanic children play games than white children.

“For identity formation, that’s a problem. And for generating interest in technology, it may place underrepresented groups behind the curve,” points out study leader Dmitri Williams, a social psychologist and assistant professor at USC. “Ironically, they may even be less likely to become game makers themselves, helping to perpetuate the cycle.”

Video Game Minority Report: Lots Of Players, Few Characters [Science Daily]

The authors of the study found that there were 74 cases of car-surfing between 1999 and 2008 in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Texas. They also found more than 350 videos showing children car surfing on YouTube between 2006 and 2008.

The group says that while car surfing started out as a byproduct of the hyphy movement, it “has since swept the US, propelled by depictions in movies, video games, and in song lyrics detailing every step of the activity.”

The big three to blame, according to the group, is Jackass, YouTube and Grand Theft Auto.

According to the study, and this handy-dandy graph, spikes in the number of car-surfing related injuries have spiked around the time of Grand Theft Auto games hitting. Though by around, I mean within a year or so.

When Jackass no longer airs and no new GTA’s release, those injuries drop.

“During the years in which no new edition of Grand Theft Auto was released and Jackass was not aired, there was a coincident drop in car-surfing fatalities.”

Seems like a weak link at best. Me? I blame Teen Wolf.

Neurological injuries from car surfing [The Journal of Neurosurgery, thanks Jeremy]