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study

Mag Announces Top 50 Developers

A new study from Gamasutra and sister divisions Game Developer magazine and Game Deveolper Research division has selected the top 50 developers in the gaming industry today. It was based on reputation and sales data, through anonymous surveys and assessments of sales charts in the US, the UK, and Japan, the number of games released each year, and the average metacritic rating. While the sales data is handy, the all-encompassing approach taken by the study to include reputation, as well, makes this study interesting. According to Gamasutra, "the resulting report is the only multi-input empirical ranking available for game development studios."

Hit the jump for the top 20 devs on the list.

More »

study

Kids Can Burn Calories While Gaming


There's yet another study on obesity, children, and video games. Y'know, just for a change of pace. But wait! This one was done by The Mayo Clinic, making it somewhat reputable! And what makes this study different from all the others? Instead of looking at, "Do video games make kids fat? Y/N," the study looked at just how much energy kids used while playing traditional games, watching TV, playing virtual camera games placing the child on the screen, watching TV while walking on a treadmill, and playing a dancing game. The study had a small sample group, with 15 children considered in the "normal" weight range for their age and height, and 10 children considered mildly obese.

The most interesting result of the study? The dancing game actually expended more energy than walking on the treadmill. Hit the jump for exactly what those results were.

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girl gamers

Stuff We Already Know About Female Gamers: Now In A Study!

A report by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has released the SHOCKING findings (re: not so shocking) that 38% of gamers are female. The study also showed that the average female gamer played for 7.4 hours a week, with the most common platforms of choice being the Nintendo DS and the PC (particularly The Sims). According to the article on dbTechno, females are also the people who predominantly make up the casual gamer market. It was also found that many female gamers enjoy social games, such as MMOs.

Jeez, I feel like such a statistic. As a female who is permanently attached to her DS and spends way too many hours playing The Sims, I fit the profile they describe to a T (although accounting for all the DS-playing I do on the bus and Sim playing I do in front of the TV, 7.4 hours is - ahem - a conservative estimate). Does this describe other female gamers, too?

ESA report shows 38% of gamers are female [dbtechno.com, via Gamasutra]


study

Boys' Brains Make Them Want To Win

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.

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science

Video Games Damage Your Frontal Lobe

Stop playing video games immediately - you are hurting your brain! A doctor Chou Yuan-hua from the Department of Psychiatry of Taipei Veterans General Hospital conducted a study on 30 25 year-olds, monitoring their brains for blood flow during a 30 minute gaming session. He discovered that the act of playing video games "obviously causes a decreased blood flow in the brain" with increasing severity when the games in question are violent.
Noting that the study focused on subjects who played video games for only 30 minutes, Chou said many youngsters spend far more time on video games each day, unaware that doing so on a long term basis could damage the frontal lobe of the brain, as well as the anterior cingulate gyrus.
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survey says

NPD: Gaming is a Stress Reliever

About 63 percent of the U.S. population play video games, and a majority of them see game playing as a way to alleviate stress and to help them unwind, according to a new study conducted by the NPD Group.

The report is based on online survey responses from 5,039 members of NPD's online consumer panel conducted from Oct. 11 to Oct. 18.

Of those who game, 30 percent said they are spending more time gaming this year than last year while another 30 percent or so said they are spending less time and nearly 40 percent say they are spending about the same amount of time. The heaviest gamers in the survey were 18 to 34.

"The new type of game experiences brought to the market over the past several years are succeeding in reaching a broader audience. The challenge for the industry is that consumers are a fickle group, and with the great variety of options pulling at their limited free time, they're going to be easily distracted unless something really compels them to stay with gaming," said Anita Frazier, industry analyst, The NPD Group. "To reach these less involved consumers, the industry has to work even harder, but doing so can produce great rewards."
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fox news

Study: Violent TV, Video Games Make Adults More Violent

Researchers at the University of Michigan have "found that repeated exposure to violent television shows and video games have a stronger influence on aggressive behavior than being poor, having a substance abuse or growing up with abusive parents", according to a Fox Business report on the findings. Based on over thirty years of research on a sample set of 856 third graders, the study contends that exposure to violent content has "a stronger influence on aggressive behavior than being poor, having a substance abuse or growing up with abusive parents." Virtual violence, researchers found, has "profoundly serious implications for society." More »

study

Video Game Content "Concerns" European Parents

A recent UK survey (funded by Microsoft) finds parents to be worried about video games. As reported by the BBC, two interesting findings include:
• 75% of parents are concerned about video game content.
• 43% of parents were not aware of ratings system.
There's more than one way to read these numbers, of course. More »

study

A Renter Does Not A Buyer Make

Here's some confirmation of what most of us already knew: a study by Frank N. Magid Associates shows that renting is bad for game sales. In particular, check out these two findings:

1. Nearly 50% of all console game renters didn't purchase a single game they rented last year.
2. Only 9% of renters bought 11% or more of the games they rented.

In short: if you rent a game, you don't buy it. But who ever bought that whole "try before you buy" argument, anyway? Though I will admit to keeping a few games from my monthly mail rental service of choice.

Game Rentals Eating into Purchases
[via maxconsole]


study

Who Knew: Men Like Casual Games, Too

I'm used to reading lots of 'no, really?' news on a variety of subjects, but it does seem that gaming gets the worst of the lot. In a report that Reuters describes as "shatter[ing] a widely held industry belief,' it's revealed that ... men like casual games, too! They just don't like to admit it. And don't want to pay for it, thus are more likely to look for ways to obtain free copies or get around anti-piracy measures. I'm not sure why this is a shocking disclosure, considering we're talking about games like Bejeweled, not Dash For the Manolo Blahnik Clearance Rack: More »

serious gaming

Barbarians At the Game

Nick Yee had an unenviable task last week.

The Stanford research assistant and massively multiplayer online gaming expert was flown in to Denver to explain online gaming to a room full of criminal investigators, educators and internet safety experts from area district attorney offices, police departments and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Yee, whose landmark Daedalus Project continues to study behavior in MMOs, hoped to present to these members of Qwest Colorado Coalition for Online Safety a take on online gaming that they may not have heard before: That it can actually be good for you.

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kids today

Kids Spending Even More Time Playing Video Games

The NPD Group has issued a report on the state of video game hungry kids, indicating that the over a third of those who do play video games are spending more time with them than they were last year. The NPD's poll of 3,474 of two- to seventeen-year old gamers shows some interesting trends and habits among the younger crowd, indicating that some 39 percent of kids play their video games online as opposed to offline. Only 9 percent of those online gamers are actually paying for their online fix, however, with females, kids aged 15 to 17 and "super users"—those who play games more than 16 hours a week—leading the online gamer youth demographic. More »

uh oh

Video Games Fix Weak Woman Brains

We've long heard that, scientifically speaking, woman are not as good as men at tasks like mathematics. And while my wife, who is incidentally both a psychologist and smarter than me, may disagree with such assertions (or may not), one University of Toronto study has found that video games may give women a leg up in spatial task processing, thereby potentially closing the gap on topics like geometry (...or even driving?).
Our second experiment showed that both men and women can improve their spatial skills by playing a video game and that the women catch up to the men...
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games and kids

Study Finds Fault In Parental Controls, Parents

Global Consulting firm User Centric recently conducted a study on effectiveness of parental controls in electronic devices. 20 parents and 20 children were gathered, with the parents asked to set up parental controls and children asked to bypass them. The results will shock you. Well not really, I just wanted to feel like the nighttime news hook story commercial voice over guy. The results are pretty much what you'd expect. Confusion about ratings and how indeed to setup the controls themselves led to a 47% failure rate on video game consoles, with lesser degrees of failure for V-chips, mobile phones, and DVRs. I take two things from these results. First, parents need to better understand the ratings systems before they start trying to restrict access to them, and User Centric needs to perform another study on parents who aren't stupid. Hit the jump for User Centric's press release, discovered via GamePolitics. More »

i knew it

IBM - MMO Players Can Make Corporate Leaders

Eric Lessner is a member of the IBM think-tank Institute of Business Value, and as part of a study collaboration with MIT and Stanford, studied Everquest and WoW players. And he saw the games as excellent preparation for the business world.

For example the ability to bring together distributed groups of individuals - often who are on a volunteer or semi-volunteer basis - to be able to make more rapid decisions under conditions of uncertainty. To incorporate and use different sources of data and make decisions rapidly. To recognise people for their contribution. To be able to motivate.
Chalk up another win for videogames by anonymous expert who is smarter than you, making total the tally:

Gamers 10,271 Stupid People 0

Gaming's business end [via maxconsole]


you don't say

Kids Like M-Rated Games

In what comes as a surprise to no one, a study has established that kids really like M-rated games. The Journal of Adolescent Health has just published a study conducted by a team from the Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Michigan State University that "surveyed a total of 1254 students, aged 12-14, from Pennsylvania and South Carolina in 2004." And the surveyed teens responded in convincing numbers that they quite rather like M-rated games, and they also play games because 'there's nothing else to do.' More »

study

Kyoto Students Use DSes In Class

In a move that fuels the DS juggernaut in Japan, Kyoto's Yawata Municipal Board of Education approved using the Nintendo DS during junior high school English class. Previous tests showed that using Chuugaku Eitango Target 1800 DS vocab training software, students increased their English word knowledge by 40 percent over five months. Says Sophia University English literature professor: More »

new study

Game Addiction And Aggression Link "Weak"

An article in journo CyberPyschology & Behavior offers these factoids about game addiction based on surveying 7,000 online gamers using online questionnaires; More »