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.”

There’s always a ‘but.’ The thing that struck me most about Anne Allison’s otherwise interesting essay was for me –- a “gamer” and someone who writes about games –- was that she clearly had little experience with games themselves. As it turned out, she was apparently inspired to look into the Pokémon phenomenon after her children started playing; beyond purchasing and observing, she herself had no experience with gaming. My criticisms weren’t aimed at her thinking or writing or research, per se – no, my quibble was with nit-picky details that didn’t quite ring true.

On the Inside Looking Out

One of the fascinating bits of being an academic is that we can attain “expert” status while being “outsiders.” For some of us, our outsider status is almost a given. It’s impossible for me to be an “insider” when writing about the late nineteenth century or the 1930s or even the 1980s. And really, that’s OK. Generations of social scientists and academics in the humanities have built careers and a sizeable body of work and solid conclusions while being outsiders. The dissonance comes when dealing with topics where “insider” status is a necessary for “expert” status. In the gaming world, outsiders don’t generally become experts –- writers don’t get picked up just because they can write well on any subject. A certain hands-on familiarity with our subject is demanded of us. It is almost a given that gaming is part of our daily life, independent of writing – something that is impossible to replicate when I’m looking at, say, 1930s advertisements.

Allison, a fine anthropologist who has a fascinating body of work on Japan, was clearly an outsider. And it occurred to me that as people (academics) get more and more interested in gaming of various forms, virtual worlds, and the like, the more of this sort of scholarship we’re going to see. At this point in time, I think many people are still a little too lost when it comes to, say, MMOs to write an article tackling the issue – I chatted with one of my advisors, who is a technophobe in his daily life but reasonably enthusiastic regarding subjects that aren’t widely studied yet (in his case, film, and most recently underground and independent film in China), about my plans to do a more current look at the Chinese gaming milieu. To my great surprise, he thought it was a fabulous idea, and added that plenty of academics would like to look at such issues in China and Korea, but don’t know where to start.

But what about when people do start realizing where those starting points are? Do we have whole books to look forward to that just “don’t get it”? And really, who am I to say another academic just doesn’t “get it,” when their scholarship is otherwise unimpeachable? Am I privileging the fan voice? Am I engaging in the same sort of behavior that privileges the ‘native’ voice –- the idea that, say, my Chinese friends are simply more capable of being good Chinese historians than I? It’s not so much an issue of privileging as a difference on opinion as to what constitutes ‘expert’ status. Anne Allison –- as fine an anthropologist as she is -– wouldn’t stand a chance of attaining ‘expert’ status with her writing about the game industry. It’s clear from her writing that she is an ‘outsider.’ But where oh where are those insiders? How is it that I study at a school that houses people like Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Grand Text Auto, and I still get the curious stare when delineating my weekend responsibilities?

Inside Out, Outside In

Part of my problem when grappling with this issue is that I simply cannot break away from my disciplinary boundaries. Oh, sure, an article here or there is one thing, but the idea of writing my dissertation or staking my career on gaming? Even if I could convince my advisors — a dubious proposition at best — I just couldn’t bring myself to make the leap. I’m sure I’m not the only person facing such a dilemma. While game studies provides a safe haven for many people, it never would’ve occurred to me to go to graduate school for it — I’m not sure I’d even been particularly happy. I like what I study, but I also like branching out — and I have a suspicion that means I’m going to be sandwiched in between two fields that don’t really want my work, at least as it relates to gaming.

Systemic change is difficult to affect in academia. Critiques of the ‘traditional’ academic structure abound, and there are plenty of people trying to think ‘outside the box.’ Unfortunately, even the “outside of the boxers” frequently wind up reinforcing the box — it’s difficult to get outside the structure totally. Our studies and careers are predicated on being able to fit into some category or another. Specialization is the name of the game, and once something gets really entrenched, it frequently becomes a means to an end.

The Afterlives of Game Studies?

I admit I harbor some suspicion for ‘_______ studies’ programs, be it ‘Asian studies’ or ‘American studies’ or ‘game studies.’ This stems partly from the fact that area studies (of which East Asian 'studies' is an honored part) is the granddaddy of all those other studies programs — which means we’ve had considerably more time to ruminate on the meaning of our ‘field’ and the benefits and limitations of the (in theory) multidisciplinary approach to a particular area. We also have a collection of books with frightening (for a youngster at the beginning of his or her career) titles such as Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, with even more terrifying essays contained within. The great cynics of area studies make scientists’ doom and gloom predictions about global warming sound positively cheery in comparison.

One of the greatest critiques is that despite the best intentions of most of these sorts of programs, they frequently wind up becoming an end unto themselves — not a space for a variety of disciplines to gather, but a discipline in and of itself. I have the utmost respect for many of the ‘game studies’ academics I’ve had the pleasure of having exchanges with, but I have to wonder where the field is going to be in 20 or 30 years — will we be seeing a volume entitled Playing Games: The Afterlives of Game Studies? One would hope not, but surveying the scene from the area studies corner of the Academy leaves me with a slightly sour taste in my mouth. While I don’t think Ian Bogost et al. need to worry about being put in service to the 21st century equivalent of the Cold War, I’d be surprised if some of the same things that have tripped up area studies don’t wind up being obstacles for our much younger disciplinary cousin.

Blundering Towards Enlightenment

At the Kotaku pre-E3 party, an MA student introduced himself to me and queried me regarding my academic path. He expressed some surprise when I said I was an historian — ‘Oh, but I thought you were in game studies?’. He looked mildly disappointed when I said no, just a boring modern Chinese historian here. It got me thinking — will ‘game studies’ become an exclusive club, like many other ‘studies’ are? What boxes on the CV are we going to have to mark to be considered valid and serious researchers of games? How is the discipline hierarchy going to shake out?

There are clearly a lot of interesting and creative people currently working on gaming in an academic context, and I sincerely hope that ‘game studies’ continues to be a place where academics from a variety of disciplines (but common research theme) have space to share. I hope that even the older and stodgier disciplines like my own will begin to come around to the idea that games and gaming are legitimate fields of inquiry, and valid sources to draw from. This, perhaps, is the greatest challenge: academics are frequently cranky and highly defensive of their respective disciplines. Many of us do cross boundaries with ease, but it can be a tough row to hoe when it comes to breaking new paths, especially when it comes to what constitutes an appropriate source base. It took quite some time for film to develop into an accepted source for historical study, for example, and students of material culture still find themselves up against a brick wall when talking to certain colleagues.

I’ll admit that I won’t be upsetting the apple cart in history any time soon — I wouldn’t be allowed to write my dissertation on such a ‘new’ topic as gaming or virtual worlds in China, even if I wanted to, and it would probably be academic suicide (at least as far as traditional history departments are concerned). That doesn’t mean I’m not going to throw my hat into the ring, of course — but trailblazing visionary/rebel I am not, at least not when it comes to arguing for games. I already have a little notebook with references, citations, and impressions for my not-so-far-away article, but the constraints of working within a reasonably stuffy discipline mean that until I have tenure, it’s a sideline. An interesting and productive sideline, but a sideline nonetheless. I do hope that there will be room for my future students to maneuver between the rigid, traditional structure and the ‘upstart’ fields like game studies.

Game studies, like any discipline, will be going through growing pains — we’ve been writing histories for thousands of years and it seems that every year brings some new problem that needs to be hashed out. Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer addressed some of these issues in a recent interview that appeared on GameSetWatch:

… there is already a field called game studies, and some of us aren't comfortable with where that's going or don't feel we quite fit in there. Game studies is taking a fairly traditional academic approach to research and scholarship, and as a professor who has done my share of papers and conferences, I'm trying to go another way. I want to write about games at the place where they are being discussed most vigorously, online and amongst gamers. I greatly respect what game studies is doing - and I've benefited from this work - but I've reached the point in my career where I'm not terribly interested in traditional academic research anymore.

In many respects, we’re coming from the same position and, at the same time, pretty far apart. It’s not that I’m not interested in traditional academic research regarding games, I’m simply interested in it on my own terms – and in my own field. I wonder, though, if that leaves me on the outside looking in and the inside looking out. It’s an odd gap to straddle — I just hope it's not an impossibly wide gap to bridge.

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!)

We also spoke on the difficulties of it being a stable field .... He was comfortable with the term game criticism, but had some reservations. Like the rest of us, he is nervous.

"Narrative games are barely past the infant stage, and critical commentary and analysis about them are even less developed," he warned. "Everyone is still trying to figure out who everyone else is, and in this process communities form themselves. We are on the ground floor of this effort to try to figure out how to talk intelligently about video games - how to analyze them and develop a critical language to discuss them. We're not like other disciplines (I'm not even sure I would call us a discipline yet), because we're all figuring this out together; we don't even have the terms yet."

He told me, "Part of our trepidation about what to call it is that there is already a field called game studies, and some of us aren't comfortable with where that's going or don't feel we quite fit in there ...."

A lot of us are treading (or going to tread) in a relative no man's land — outside our 'home' disciplines, but not at home in game studies. In any case, it's an interesting interview — and the whole series is definitely worth a look. There's some wonderfully thoughtful musings and discussion about gaming, the gaming community, and beyond.

Game Community Interviews, Part 4 - The Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott [GameSetWatch]

So, sorry, no bursting-at-the-cups Ivy from SCIV in this one, just good ol' 2D renders, and maybe some cabinet art. The list features Marian from Double Dragon (seriously, they punched her in the stomach at the beginning of Double Dragon. And no one batted an eye!) Carmen Sandiego and Meryl Silverburgh from MGS. But leading off is Pauline from Donkey Kong, who's dressed like she belongs in a polygamist cult. Pauline was sort of the George Lazenby of the Mario franchise. Made one big appearance and that was it, although she did get some TV work out of it. I hope Pauline's still cashing royalty checks, spending them on cheap whiskey and ranting about Princess Peach.

Mediocre Game Babes [Games Radar]

I poked my head in to the public 'pecha kucha' session for UCSD's SoftWhere 2008, but couldn't stay for the whole thing since I had a paper to write and was feeling really under the weather; I did get a chance later to talk with one of my professors, who participated in the event, and have been checking out the roundups floating around the internet at this point. I've got my own opinions on the '___ Studies' ghetto, being part of it myself — though an attempt to create a field of 'software studies' is, at the very least, not burdened with Cold War politics. Anyways, there are some concise (and not so concise) appraisals of the event floating around. Anne Helmond, who presented on the relationship between search engines and the blogosphere, had this to say:

The title of the workshop ‘SoftWhere’ embodies the question of demarcating an area of study. Our current society is penetrated by and shaped by software and should thus be subject to appropriate critique. The ubiquity of software has led to a software culture and we are now living in a software society. What does it mean to live in such a software society instead of an industrial society? A world which is created by software is opaque and that is why we need to study software. We should question the streams behind, embedded in and woven through our society and look at what is happening behind the screens. SoftWhere? SoftEverywhere!

Liz Losh has a much longer and detailed explanation of the various presentations, of which there were a great many, spanning a lot of subjects, over at virtualpolitik. I've heard videos of the presentations might pop up in the future — considering the bite-sized nature of the presentations, I hope they do. And the format of confining academics to six minutes and forty seconds of presentation time? Brilliant.

SoftWhere 2008: Software Studies Workshop [Anne Helmond] & Speed Dating [virtualpolitik]

When you take or teach courses called, for example, Game Studies 101; when you hold a degree in "new media studies" (wink, wink); when you publish your research in a journal called Game Studies; or when you actually are a professor of game studies, you end up feeling like you know what games do - and what they should do.

That wouldn't be so bad - it's business-as-usual for academics, in fact - if game studies didn't harbor what amounts to a desperate need to lay claim to ownership of game design as well as theory. It turns out that they don't just want to write articles and grant Ph.D.'s - they want to design our games, too.

Well, Ian Bogost — one of those people Travis is referring to — fired back

A considerable portion of my first book and my other writings object to the very idea that game studies stands alone. You cite a three-year-old prolegomenon by Aarseth, one meant as a provocation (something he's known for), and decide to attribute it to all game scholars. You make a "plea to gamers to turn the tables on Aarseth and other doyens of game studies" (myself included). Many (most?) of us already have done work to turn those very tables. Do you actually read any game studies scholarship?

Oh, snap. I consider myself lucky to be in a field that doesn't really suffer from a 'real world' vs. 'academic' split — we have enough drama amongst ourselves. The debate continues in the comment sections of both pieces, and is worth paging through if you have the time.

Quibus Lusoribus Bono? Who is Game Studies Good For? [Escapist] & A Response to Roger Travis [Ian Bogost] [both via GrandTextAuto]

Titles covered include Revolution, a game about life in colonial Williamsburg; a series of handheld augmented reality games; Backflow, about the environmental issues of sewage; and Labyrinth, a game about math literacy.

Each post about the games includes a comprehensive article detailing its design and learning goals.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming [Henry Jenkins]

In his article "Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three," Juul conducts a history of matching tile games, attempting to create a genealogy of the form. The image above is the family tree he presents as a part of the analysis.

In addition to the inherent value of studying the development of a genre, Juul's paper also had practical application. He used it as a kind of design inspiration when he created his own casual game, High Seas - The Family Fortune, which is a matching tile game with physics and a few other twists.

Juul is also the author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, published in 2005 by the MIT Press.

Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games [The Ludologist]

Videogame, Player, Text is a new anthology with articles focused on player experiences in games. Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska are the editors, and contributors include Marie-Laure Ryan, Matteo Bittanti, Henry Lowood, Jesper Juul, and others. These are some of the names you might want to Google around for if you're interested in the academic study of games.

Table of contents after the jump.

Contents
Introduction: Videogame, player, text - Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska
1. Beyond Ludus: narrative, videogames and the split condition of digital textuality - Marie-Laure Ryan
2. All too urban: to live and die in SimCity - Matteo Bittanti
3. Play, modality and claims of realism in Full Spectrum Warrior - Geoff King
4. Why am I in Vietnam? - The history of a video game - Jon Dovey
5. 'It's Not Easy Being Green': real-time game performance in Warcraft - Henry Lowood
6. Being a determined agent in (the) World of Warcraft: text/play/identity - Tanya Krzywinska
7. Female Quake players and the politics of identity - Helen W. Kennedy
8. Of eye candy and id: the terrors and pleasures of Doom 3 - Bob Rehak
9. Second Life: the game of virtual life - Alison McMahan
10. Playing to solve Savoir-Faire - Nick Montfort
11. Without a goal - on open and expressive games - Jesper Juul
12. Pleasure, spectacle and reward in Capcom's Street Fighter series - David Surman
13. The trouble with Civilization - Diane Carr
14. Killing time: time past, time present and time future in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - Barry Atkins

Videogame, Player, Text [Manchester University Press]

Quick recap: a year and half ago, Reuters reported on a congressional briefing in which modders had turned Battlefield 2 into a terrorist training game. The report confused a lot of people, including Kotaku, because most of the details were incorrect. The truth was, the mod wasn't even a game, it was a satirical send-up that used footage from Battlefield and soundtrack dubs from Team America: World Police.

As a participant in the field of game studies, I like to try to evangelize the scholarly pursuit of games as a worthwhile intellectual pursuit. I think this is true not only for scholars in search of publication and tenure, but also for the general public. If we do our job well, we will help games achieve broader recognition and . With that in mind, I want to take advantage of the time I have here this week to share some recent work in the field of game studies. Here's the first, an article by Elizabeth Losh on the Sonic Jihad snafu.

Losh's article analyzes the way both consultants SAIC and Congress failed to understand both the technology and their own relationship with it as they investigated the possible threat.

While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists.

Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress [M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, via Gameology]

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]

A study, commissioned by PopCap Games, showed that women love a good game of Cake Mania, and they aren't shy about it. After media content providers were determined to deliver advertisements catering to the young male bracket on consoles, the study by Information Solutions Group (ISG) reveals that casual gamers are "predominantly female."

In another article:

Leading Japanese mobile company NTT Docomo has published a study on mobile gaming demographics showing that female players are much more likely to play before sleep... Figures showed that 59% of female users play mobile games more than four times a week in comparison to 51% of male users.

I say, all this proves is that our boyfriends aren't doing a good job entertaining us. Kim Phu

Study Says Women Dominate Casual Gaming [Wii QJ]
Who Plays Before Bed? [Next Gen]

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