People do all kinds of absurd stuff while driving, including but not limited to: eating, texting, reading books and apparently even playing the guitar. Ever since Pokémon Go came out, people have also been trying to catch Pidgeys and Zubats while driving, because you can never have enough Pidgeys and Zubats.
While sales numbers are the tried and true method of calculating the most successful video game console in a generation, on Facebook everything's a popularity contest, and the most popular console in the U.S. is the Xbox One.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota say they've found a link between motion sickness and iPad gaming. The fact they played Gameloft's Call of Duty clone, Modern Combat is delightful to me, but the game itself isn't what makes people queasy. It's how games are played on the tablet in general.
By now we should all be on board with the idea that texting while driving is a particularly dangerous and irresponsible thing. But how does it affect one's driving within Mario Kart? A physician and some elementary schoolers found it significantly increases the risk of driving backwards, among other hazards.
China, the middle kingdom. The Orient. The place where the legality of game consoles are suspect has always been the home of internet cafes. The number of internet cafes, which served as dens to many of China's netizens, has suddenly gone down over the course of 2011-2012—by as many as 10,000.
I'm not sure what to make of this study, by researchers in Germany and Australia. On a literal level, RPG gamers are better than others at fishing paper clips out of a container of ice-cold water. Scientists think that means they're desensitized either to pain or, going further, important life events, even.
This local news report has all of the ingredients: Sex, teenage girls, the exploitation of them, video games, and a respected university's research. Here to synthesize it all for us is Life Coach Jenn Lee: "This is even worse than watching Miley Cyrus twerk."
Few words in the video games industry are as cynical as "whale," taken from a Las Vegas term for a high stakes gambler. The difference is, a Vegas high roller may actually win something with his money, and at minimum is comped for everything during his stay. In free-to-play games, a whale is nothing but a cash target.
Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia gathered 64 students together and had them each play either a violent or non-violent game. Then the researchers pretended to drop their pens to see what would happen.
China has released various studies in the past about the adverse effects of video games on the development of young people. Over the weekend the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Wuhan, Hubei province released a report showing that more than half the city's teenagers have less understanding about life and death…
More than a year ago, Abe Stein of the Game Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reached out to me about a survey he was conducting, an examination of sports video gamers. Stein, himself a committed sports gamer, wanted to know who made up this segment of gaming—long viewed as an outlier to the main gaming…
An East Carolina University doctoral student studying MMOs and video game addiction is looking for survey participants to help in a key component of his dissertation. Notably, the researcher conducting the survey is himself a World of Warcraft player.
There's a new insane study of children and video games out there, and it makes me grateful the Wii died without that ridiculous Vitality Sensor ever coming to market.
Two years ago, sleep researchers at Flinders University of Australia found that playing video games before bed was indistinct from watching a movie, in terms of the good night's rest a teenager would have after either. This week researchers at the same university said that "prolonged gaming" before bed is disruptive…
Researchers at Keele University in England decided it would be neat if they had 40 volunteers play either a violent or non-violent video game for ten minutes and then submerge one of their hands in ice-cold water. This study into the sort of silly things researchers can make subjects do yielded fresh information on…
Earlier this month on Children's Day, the China Youth Internet Association in conjunction with the Communication University of China released a study indicating that more than half of all minors ages 13-18 are learning about sex through sex in video games and video game related materials.
You might not expect a study coming out of Brigham Young University's School of Family Life to have anything good to say about video games. And maybe this doesn't. But it says something a lot worse about books, and I'll take that as a win in this culture war.
The Wall Street Journal has news of yet another gaming study, but this one's pretty darn interesting: Rather than judge video games' effect on violent behavior or socialization, the study looks at whether games can help people escape nightmares.
Could you kill one person to save five?
Is gaming addiction a real psychological affliction that should be recognized by the American Psychiatric Association? According to some studies as many as ten percent of all gamers could be considered gaming addicts. A new study from Texas A&M's Christopher J. Ferguson explains how those studies are doing it wrong.
