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MTV decided to find out. Using the Wii's Nintendo Channel - which tracks the playing habits of 1.6 million Americans - they've yanked out some data on what games you're playing, and for how long.
Researchers at the University of Illinois have found that playing real-time strategy games can help men and women in their 60s and 70s improve their mental skills.
Is PC gaming giving way to today's more versatile and powerful consoles? Not according to a market study recently conducted by research group JPR, which claims that more gaming PC's have been sold over the past three years than Xbox 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Wiis combined. The study, which tracks the sales of three different classes of gaming PCs over since Q3 2005, found that 196 million units have been sold between then and Q3 2008, compared to a worldwide total of 74.7 million consoles. As Edge points out, this of course doesn't take into effect handheld gaming systems like the DS and PSP, which sold a combined 125 million units during the same period.
Fresh from the "Study finds violent video games do X to kids" pile, we now find -- shock -- playing them results in "a greater variation in Heart Rate Variability." This isn't straight out one's pulse quickening. HRV is "the oscillation in the interval between consecutive heartbeats" -- more or less, a measure of minute changes in heart rate.
iPhone owners love their gaming, according to a report due out later today from the NPD Group.
It's been a while since we've had a really good "video games make our children violent" study, and I was beginning to fear we've given up on the idea, but then the story "Violent video games linked to child aggression" showed up on CNN.com this morning and my fears were completely assuaged. The story is about a study conducted by Dr. Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D., of Iowa State University, who studied three groups of children in both the United States and Japan to gage their violence levels three to six months after playing violent video games, versus children who did not play violent video games. The results may not surprise you at all.
A study released today by the Entertainment Software Association finds that seventy percent of major employers in the U.S. utilise some form of gaming technology in their training programs. From simple quizzes to complex tool manipulation, more and more employers are integrating interactive entertainment into their education regiment, with 78% of organisations not currently employing such methods stating they plan to offer it within the next five years.
Employers find that using games to train not only reduces costs and increases efficiency, employees retain training through interactive means more than they would a simple slide presentation or training videos (known in wage-slave parlance as "Nap Time").
Interesting number, for sure, but the statistics I really want to see is how much interactive gaming goes on in the workplace that employers are completely unaware of. Of course that would require cameras in the bathrooms to monitor DS and PSP usage, which is still unfortunately illegal. Hit the jump for more numbers!
Playing video games ranks among the top leisure activities for Europeans, according to Nielsen research recently conducted on behalf of the Interactive Software Federation of Europe. 40 percent of Europeans, the study found, play between six and 14 hours a week, which puts gaming alongside other mainstream entertainment studied, like TV, internet surfing and hanging out with pals.
Unsurprisingly, 72 percent of the survey respondents said they play games "for fun," 57 percent replied games "stimulate the imagination," and 45 percent say it "makes them think."
The study also found a low level of negative sentiment toward video games - close to half of non-gamers said they don't play simply because they don't have time.
Hit the jump for the full results!
Can't figure out why your old lady won't sit and play Halo 3 with you, guys? Don't know why the man in your life won't stop playing Call of Duty 4 until the wee hours of the morning, ladies? According to a new study by the Stanford School of Medicine, the part of the brain that gives of a feeling of reward and accomplishment is more active in men than in women.
Twenty-two men and women were given a simple game, in which they had to control a number of balls and a wall in a certain way to protect territory and ultimately win the game, while their brain patterns were tracked on a fMRI machine.
"The females 'got' the game, and they moved the wall in the direction you would expect," said Reiss, who is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. "They appeared motivated to succeed at the game. The males were just a lot more motivated to succeed."Both groups showed activity in the mesocorticolimbic center, which is the part of the brain associated with rewards and addictions, but the males showed a lot more activity.
So there you have it. Could this really be the reason your girlfriend won't play Xbox with you? I guess it would account for the higher number of males that play video games than females, and would also make sense why not all guys love games, and why not all girls don't. After all, having a gendered brain doesn't mean that your brain is exactly the same as everyone else of your gender, just similar. I think it also comes down to nature vs. nurture, too: video games are becoming a bigger part of our culture, so regardless of how your brain is wired, you'll be more inclined to play games. More information on the study in the press release after the jump.
Some academics get all the fun: five members of the Ivory Tower were interviewed by Gamasutra, and their topic was migration in virtual worlds. What's the MMO landscape going to look like in a few years? What about single player games? And why do people give up their level 80 Night Elf to go grind in another playground? Neils Clark digs in with some PhDs and PhD candidates to examine the shift:
I started each interview out with a simple premise: that gamers were moving in tribes. World of Warcraft, in my mind, wasn't the 'king of the mountain' because it was the best world out there, whatever our criteria might be. It was prominent because the right people played it, giving it a kind of social gravitational mass. The social bonds, whether forged in or outside of a game, influenced when gamers would move, and for how long they would stay. Some of these interviews dug deeply into this idea, while others carved out their own intriguing territory.
It's an interesting set of interviews from another side of the gaming world: the people who are eyeball-deep researching this stuff.
The Academics Speak: Is There Life After World Of Warcraft? [Gamasutra]
