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 recognizably 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."

The USC report also states that women, Native Americans and the elderly weren't accurately represented by the virtual video game populace. Blacks, however, were well represented in numbers, but mostly in sports games and "titles that reinforce stereotypes" like 50 Cent Bulletproof.

Williams calls the lack of inclusion of minorities in games "a missed sales opportunity."

Clearly, we can all pick and choose examples where minorities are better represented in video games released over the years—the study "visible characters that were clearly human," excluding first-person shooters—but even a cursory scan of 2008's biggest hits is pretty heavy on the white dude. Speaking, as a white dude, that does get pretty boring. Let's mix it up, mkay?

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

Video game studies - especially concerning violence -are a staple of weekend fare, and every time we put one up, the reactions are pretty typical. It's not to say they're wrong, but Chris LaVigne's examination may help you focus your thinking the next time you read about one of these things, and wonder how it got its results.

Researchers often pair up completely unrelated games but act like they're equivalents. One experiment contrasts sci-fi first-person horror game Doom 3 with falling-bricks puzzle game Tetris. Another pairs dark and suspenseful stealth game Manhunt with a colourful, fast-paced game based on the Animaniacs cartoon. Modern blockbuster titles with lifelike graphics and complex gameplay are compared with shareware versions of Pac-Man. You get the feeling that if video game researchers studied fruit, they'd see no difference between an apple and an orange.

Yes, but don't both appear in Pac-Man? OK, kidding. Let's continue:

Most researchers assume that video games are completely interchangeable with one another, a concept any gamer would find as ludicrous as the idea that all books are the same or all movies are basically identical. One study by two American media researchers acknowledged this limitation. In an article published in the Journal of Communication in 2007, James Ivory and Sriram Kalyanaraman carefully chose to contrast violent and non-violent games with very similar gameplay styles and presentations. Probably not coincidentally, their study found no significant differences in aggression levels between the players of the different games.

Of course, to understand the obvious differences that LaVigne points out would require one to have some exposure to current video games. And if one does, you're probably not arguing against that person in the first place. I think that's why so many studies have such an uptake in the mass media - that lack of understanding, coupled with the credibility of a respected university bootstrapped to the study or its researchers.

Interesting side note: In effect, one of LaVigne's criticisms of the validity of video game studies reads a lot like ... a criticism of the validity of video game reviews. "Ranking games with numerical values gives the illusion of precision without really meaning anything," he says. So true.

Why Video Game Research is Flawed [Maison Neuve]

In the study, published Friday in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers surveyed more than 2,500 "frequent game players" and conducted four experiments on more than 300 college undergraduates. "We found that, on average, violent content didn't add to motivation for play," said lead author Andrew Przybylski of the University of Rochester, which cooperated with Orlando-based think tank Immersyve on the project.

"The reason why children gravitate to something like 'Halo,' 'Halo 3' or 'World of Warcraft' or 'Team Fortress' isn't necessarily because they want to get at the blood or the acts of violence," he said.

Here's how they determined it. Using Half-Life 2, players were given either a shotgun weapon or a psychic power. Players with a shotgun were told they were in a kill-or-be-killed scenario, and deaths were rendered in a very bloody and violent way. The psychic power gamers "were essentially playing a game of tag," and when they were able to hit an opponent with the ability, "the person just floated up very serenely into the air before evaporating."

After playing, the study subjects were asked how fun the game was and if they'd like to play it again. There was not enough of a difference in the two groups' responses to determine that violence had any affect on its perceived fun.

Craig Anderson, the director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University, lauded the studies' methodology and said they made a strong contribution to understanding video games, how they're designed, who plays them, and why.

Przybylski said the findings should encourage designers to make games that make players feel like they're competent, can act autonomously, and stay connected with other players

"That's probably a better place for them to put their efforts than being able to very realistically depict someone's arm falling off," he said.

Blood and Gore Don't Make Games More Enjoyable: Study [Canadian Press]

A study of 40 adults in their 60s and 70s found that, after playing Rise of Nations, they "improved their scores on a number of tests of cognitive functions." The lead researcher also says that, for older adults, "playing video games with (your) grandkids would also be a great idea." But before Grandma goes out to curbstomp Timmy in Gears of War 2, remember this is the first study to make these kinds of findings and suggest such benefits for older persons.

They note that more research is needed to bolster the findings. It's unclear if other games would have the same benefits, or if they persist over time.

The news here is not so much that video games are some magical anti-senility exercise — just that they can be mentally and intellectually stimulating, the same as (presumably) reading, doing crossword puzzles, enjoying the arts, arguing with your in-laws, or other pursuits that call upon critical thinking. I'm sure all of those other things would be considered a good way to keep your mind sharp as you get older. Nice to know that, when I hit 65, games will be waiting to help me get to 100 with mine intact.

Video Games May Do the Aging Brain Good [Reuters, which is not pronounced "Rooters."]

Allstate's offering specialized computer games to some 100,000 customers in Pennsylvania between 50 and 75. The games they play are not necessarily driving specific; they test for visual alertness and try to slow cognitive decline. The developer, San Francisco based Posit Science will track the number of hours the drivers play, and their performance will be compared with the accident rates of their demographic.

Drivers in their 50s are considered among the safest, but the accident rate spikes sharply once they reach their mid-60s. Allstate wants to know why.

I'm a bit pissed this is only for the geezer drivers. I have quite a bit of experience in driving/video-game studies and was very eager to share my results with Allstate. I'm sure they'd give me a break on my next policy.

Drivers May Get Insurance Breaks for Playing Video Games [CNN]

Murphy approaches video gaming as a sports psychologist, with 30 years of experience in that field. The American Psychological Association’s annual convention this month already discussed research showing the benefits video games deliver in learning and problem solving. Also at the convention, Murphy gave a presentation advocating for the study of competitive and cooperative behavior in gamers.

I had called him out of curiosity about my own approach to video games, whether it was shared in great numbers by others, and what that may say about the gaming community. We ended up talking more about competitive behavior and performance psychology, how it can help define gamers, and be deepened by studying them.

Video games are not treated as seriously in studies as they should be, Murphy argues. He considers that gamers’ behavior can be studied in the same context as participatory athletics, and that researchers might find that online play can deliver the same benefits. Colleagues elsewhere think that the lessons taught by online cooperation and competition could deliver similar payouts in assertion and self-esteem, and are worth a serious look.

“The gamer generation tends to be less risk averse and more willing to try things, even in the face of overfailure,” said Nicholas Yee, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, whose Daedalus Project studies behavior in MMORPG players. “It’s not the main focus of the field, yet, but there is a little data we can extrapolate from it.”

In his presentation at the APA’s meeting, Murphy laid out the case for the study of video game behavior by sports and performance psychologists. He pointed out that video game play rivals youth sports as the social competition venue for young people. Video games also offer advantages in that lab study can capture real-time behavior and decisions in ways that studying athletes can’t. There are also extremely large populations that are easy to find (such as World of WarCraft’s 8 million gamers). Finally, it’s another way to test sports psychology’s theories in a new area of behavior.

Broadly speaking, sports psychology has identified two orientations we all have toward competition and goal-setting. “One is ego orientation: You want to beat others,” Murphy said. “The other is task orientation: I want to get better, I want to learn the skills and improve them.” It’s not an either-or proposition, even though it showed up that way in my behavior with NCAA ‘09. Among gamers, you would probably find these four types:

• High ego, high task: Extremely committed to skill development and want to be recognized as winners. Highly competitive.

• Low ego, high task: Strong team players in cooperative games and environments, and motivated to complete single-player titles.

• High ego, low task: Strong desire to be a winner, but not that invested in developing the skills necessary. In other words, rarely reads the instruction manual.

• Low ego, low task: Participates in a particular game as primarily a social activity among friends, doesn’t want to be left out.

It might surprise you that high ego, high task is the largest group among gamers, according to Murphy. All other groups were equally distributed. That, taken with Yee’s point that gamers are less risk averse, paints a more positive picture of gamers than perpetuated by cultural stereotypes, that of the antisocial loner who prefers virtual interactions in the comfort of his parents’ basement.

As a man who grew up in the analog 1980s, gaming came nowhere near the kind of legitimacy that physical athletic pursuits had for setting goals or achieving them, or certifying you as a well rounded person. But properly researched, it’s possible that it could be seen in that light.

Murphy drew this analogy: Participation on athletic teams is believed to offer lessons of leadership or problem solving elsewhere, and experiences with video games can help gamers set up structured expectations and results in real world pursuits.

“The young, college-bound population that have played lots of different types of video games, it may have caused them to develop some sort of general skill sets to figure out the lay of the land in a complex, challenging environment,” Murphy said. “Because they’ve done that in games, they’re good at seeing what is the goal, and how do you win at the game?”

The game might be one’s high school or college career. “If the game is to get a high GPA, so, how do you do that? What are the strategies? It was an eerie conversation to have,” Murphy said, for gamers seemed able to zero in on the bottom line result, on the expectation that certain choices or conditions would objectively increase one’s progression toward that goal. Clearly, that kind of refined approach can have its benefits in life after school.

It’s not the only way a game can be framed in terms of the real world. Yee’s surveys have shown a relationship between gamers and the avatars they choose — and also the roles within an MMO guild they accept. “People create avatars that idealize or express who they are, and oftentimes they choose characters whose features are exaggerated., So it has a kind of multiplication effect, your avatar has more of those traits that you want, and then some of those effects persist outside the game environment.”

For example, someone creates an avatar that is physically taller or more imposing. Studies have shown that taller persons exhibit more confidence and show more assertive negotiations. Through his research, Yee has observed some carryover to those who choose these kinds of avatars in MMOs, Yee said, less so in real life than in online relationships. Where participating in a guild, for some. might be a crutch alternative to physical interactions with friends, it can also offer new experiences.

“People will say, ‘I never thought of myself as a leader in life, and then they become a guild leader, and they got something out of that,” Yee said. But, “It’s really dependent on what a player brings to a game.”

A study conducted at Fordham University saw 122 students, fifth through seventh grade, asked to think outloud for 20 minutes while playing a video game they've never seen before. Surprisingly, the older children were more interested in playing the game, while the younger ones were more interested in planning and learning the game first.

"The younger kids are focusing more on their planning and problem solving while they are actually playing the game, while adolescents are focusing less on their planning and strategizing and more on the here and now," said Fordham psychologist Fran Blumberg, who conducted the research last year and plans to submit it for publication. "They're thinking less strategically than the younger kids."

The Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison took a random sample of 2,000 chat room posts about World of Warcraft to see what players were talking about. The researchers found the discussions encouraged "scientific thinking."

The forums show that gamers are "creating an environment in which informal scientific reasoning practices are being learned," said Sean Duncan, a doctoral student who worked on the "World of Warcraft" report with lead author Constance Steinkuehler.

Oh boy, that must have been a great sample!

I'd still like to see a study done on younger audiences with a game such as Killer 7 or Rez. Check out the link below for a few more studies.

Studies: Video games may benefit students, surgeons (Thanks, Lump_Beefbroth!)

He said: "The results of this small-scale Dr Kawashima project have shown how a targeted and managed use of such a game can help to enhance pupil numeracy skills and classroom behaviour."

There was also a noticeable impact on behaviour and levels of concentration throughout the school day, with the children becoming more self-confident.

Mr [Derek] Robertson [who designed the study], a former teacher and university lecturer, said: "It had a real calming effect on children in the class.

"In fact I have never before seen such gains across the board."

With all the chatter about the use of games in schools, it's nice to see a concrete (if small) study conducted on easy applications of gaming within the bounds of education. The researchers are hoping to do bigger studies in the future to have a better and more statistically significant sample to pull from.

Daily computer game boosts maths [BBC, thanks James T!]

... The study needed an external factor that influenced study time. It found it in video games, specifically by dividing the students based on whether their roommates had brought gaming rigs to school. About half of the males and a quarter of the females fell into this group. But the impact of access to gaming didn't depend on the students' gender: those with video games in their rooms spent about two-thirds of an hour less on academic work per day out of a mean of 3.5 hours of study time. That decrease closely tracked the amount of time that the students reported spending gaming, suggesting that there was a direct transfer of effort between the two activities.

As Ars Technica points out, this is not really a gaming problem, rather a time management one. A life outside of academia is to be strongly encouraged (everyone needs an outlet for stuff not relating to books, lectures, tests, and essays), but it has to be balanced out with academic requirements. Isn't this simple common sense?

Deathmatch: video games vs. study time, a flawless GPA victory [Ars Technica via GamePolitics]

What the survey fails to take into account is the fact that most drivers between the ages of 16-24 suck, and probably shouldn't be driving in the first place. No offense to any young drivers out there, but it's true. I'd daresay some of them are better off imagining they're in a video game.

Besides, everything you do affects how you drive. Take it from David Perry, who randomly showed up in the BBC article I took the story from.

"Anything that affects your emotions will affect how you drive. The guy in front, the music on the stereo...those are the things that make you speed up, not a game you played an hour ago."

ArsTechnica claims that last year's suspicious research conclusion, that gamers actually enjoy games with advertising more than those without, is probably just as bunk as it sounds.

Not only was the study funded by those that stood to profit from such a result, but it just doesn't sound right. A new study by ComScore Networks asserts that 63 percent of "hardcore gamers" (16+ hours per week), and 73 percent of more casual gamers polled, did not want in-game ads.

AT suggests an alternative:

The reality is that advertising generates $1-2 of profit per title sold. This is not the sort of massive subsidy that game designers would have you believe is necessary to keep the games coming. If advertising provided 25 or 30 percent of the title's development budget, the argument would make more sense. When a new game sells for $60, though, adding another buck to the price is hardly going to break anyone's bank.

The problem with this solution is that it does not take into account the cost of extra programming time required to create two version of the same game, even though the differences would probably be limited to texture swapping. I'm not sure how much work that would be, however. Eliza Gauger

Most gamers do not agree that advertising makes games more realistic [Ars Technica, thanks Frodo (who also provided the image for this post)]

According to a recent report by Agence France-Presse, anyone who is reading this is likely to be a disgusting fatty. Also? A no-good, filthy whore.

Computer games have been suspected of contributing to societal ills ranging from obesity and a breakdown of family communication to promiscuity and an inclination to violence, according to researchers.

Thank god someone's paying researchers to report on suspicions as opposed to correlation. They did, however, fail to mention that games are also suspected of making magical fairies come to life, and being exchangeable for fat, promiscuous sex in many gamer counter-cultures.

Anyway, that fat people are promiscuous is no surprise: getting a fat person to have sex with you is less a challenge of seduction than making sure not to mistake the cavernous, sweaty navel for another plungeable orifice that hangs beneath the groin. What is surprising that someone out there is being paid to report on the suspicion that sitting stationary on your flabby ass all day is likely to make you out-of-shape. Florian Eckhardt

Games make you have sex [Eurogamer]

Our first reaction when reading about yet another games-induce-violence study is to discount it utterly, but a discussion happening over on GamesFirst right now suggests that we do the opposite, and mine these studies for their true implications.

A man name Garrett wrote in to GF's coverage of a study claiming that playing video games causes numbness to violent acts, and among many other viable points, drew our attention to the following:

[...] In all five studies, the researchers took pains to note that the likelihood of aggressive behavior was inevitably related to parenting variables rather than the amount of game play. Murphy and Mitchell also noted that game play typically lead to more active family time because it tended to cut into television viewing, a finding I have also found in my own statistically-based work (Williams, 2004)." (Page 6 of https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/dcwill/www/Williams.pdf)

Shocking indeed. If you spent less time looking for researchers' heads to hunt and more time getting to understand what the results of that research mean, you might find that science is more on the side of us gamers than you believe.

Eliza Gauger

What We Missed in Videogame Violence Studies [GamesFirst!]

Wired has a great article up, detailing India's rise as a gamer society and the proliferation of cybercafes and gaming tournaments through India's growing middle class. India today is China of 2001: A rumbling cluster of highly compressed gamers ready to explode in a Big Bang across the entirety of the subcontinent.

One thing that the article mentions is currently hampering gaming from really catching on in India is the lack of Indian themed games, "with Hindu gods and Bollywood music." However, they note that we can probably expect the market to be flooded by games with names like Full Thang-Ta Warrior and Mecha-Shiva soon.

Another problem mentioned is the importance given to schools in an intensely competitive academic culture. There's just no time to game with all that book learning. That's why I dropped out of high school... suckers. Florian Eckhardt

Counter-Strike, India Style [Wired]

Gamasutra reports that according to a recent study, the elusive "casual gamer" is not as flighty a beast as previously thought:

A new report released by Macrovision Corporation, which operates the Trymedia Network for the digital distribution of PC games, reveals that, according to a recent worldwide survey, 37 percent of those who use casual games play nine or more two-hour 'sessions' each week.

This contrasts with assumptions that these mostly female, mostly older gamers were getting in a game of Solitaire or two during the gridlocked part of their morning commute and then returning to their lives as upstanding citizens.

"Just one more game," mutters Granny "Nubk1lla" Grace, gritting her dentures in front of the Xbox. Her wide-eyed grandchildren huddle in a far corner, clutching each other and praying mom and dad will return from vacation sooner than later, and then maybe they'll get something to eat and someone will check on the baby, who hasn't cried in an awful long time... Eliza gauger

Study: 'Casual' Players Exhibit Heavy Game Usage