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We’re always hearing from experts and the media that videogames are supposedly creating a generation of idiots by rotting young children’s minds, but they hardly ever have the evidence to back up their claims. Now, a new study published this week in the journal Psychological Science bucks the trend by actually providing some facts: it’s the time spent playing games that causes problem, not their actual content.
Psychologists Robert Weis and Brittany Cerankosky tested the effect of videogames on young minds with the help of 64 boys aged six to nine, none of whom had ever owned a console before. Half of the group were randomly chosen to receive a PlayStation 2, while the other half served as a control group and went without. The happy new console owners also received copies of Nicktoons: Battle for Volcano Island, Shrek Smash N’ Crash Racing, and Sonic Riders. Read more →
I’m looking for you, the readers of NG, to give me some feedback on the ways you would consider helping the place stay open and expand. Things are fine at the moment, but I’m always looking for ways to grow. As such the feedback you give on this poll will be very important in deciding the directions and choices the site makes.
The $3 per month ad-free service probably needs a bit more explaining. Essentially you would sign up to pay $3 (likely less as time goes on) via PayPal per month. In return you get zero adverts site-wide (with options to turn them back on if you wish) and a small coffee icon next to your name. The coffee icon represents that once a month, you buy us a brew.
I am also more than open to your ideas. If you think NG coffee would really be a good thing, let me know. If you think the site could cope with another advert here or there, that option’s available. I have a few other ideas myself (bank robbery, porno etc.) but for now that list shows the ones I think have most promise.
A study of “814 users of Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra, and attendees of the Game Developers Conference” (available here, for $2k+) showed that there are more people calling themselves “game developers” who make iPhone applications than for the DS and the PSP. No figures or useful context are given and the news comes via a post on Electronista.
I would say that this shows there are more amateur developers. The iPhone is a cheap way to become a very small developer and the shift in percentages (no figures are given, just proportions) towards Apple simply reflects this.
However, I am clearly wrong as Gizmodo have decided this shows that Apple are destroying Nintendo and Sony (helpfully illustrated with a graphic of the situation, seen in this article). Apparently a race with unspecified rules among hand held developers exists and Apple are winning it.
Maths. Serious business.
A study released today has issued stark warnings that the supply of original ideas from which all video games are based on may run out within the next two years.
Pumped dry by liberals?
Video game ideas are found underground all over the world in deep deposits, but they may not be as deep as once thought.
The impending short-fall of originality is expected to be much larger than the World War Two Shooter Drought of the last decade which saw dozens of games forced to use the same idea.
Not all game production companys have been caught unaware however; a senior at Activision Blizzard told NGR that “we have been expecting and training for this for a while now.”
“We believe we, and many other large game companies, have the ground-work in place to allow one single idea to be stretched much further than previously thought possible.”
It is also expected that idea hybrids will become more common, with announcements of Madden of Duty and Bejewelled Clone Hero being just two recent examples of what many are calling a short-term, yet viable solution.
The US Government has said that if supplies reach critical levels they will start a new war outside of the Middle East on which games can be based.
All around the globe energy drink is being consumed and awkward naps on benches are taking place. The annual Global Game Jam has begun and sees small collectives in dozens of countries come together to see just how much they can create.
The GGJ aims to get teams of developers to “rapidly prototype video game designs and hopefully inject new ideas to help grow the game industry.” The end goal being for each team to create a full game within the 48 hours available, with a given theme and some constraints. The coolest thing is that no professional training is needed as any coder, designer or developer is welcome to join in.
Sarcastic Gamer’s Yamster is taking part in the Scottish Game Jam. He’s wearing quite a nice hat (they have a couple of live video feeds #1 #2). If he’s not dead from exhaustion and/or too much junk food, we’ll be giving him a call later on this weekend to find out all the happenings.
Voting was open all weekend and despite my best efforts it seems the Negative Gamer community has deemed 3D to be nothing more than a gimmick. Just less than a quarter of us think that 3D gaming is the future and 10% decided to give other answers (ranging from the useful; “only once 3D TVs are perfected (no glasses) and cheap”. To the useless; “balls”).
I think I was expecting a larger result for the “future” people, but perhaps that’s my gadget-loving self day dreaming. Maybe my simple want for more toys clouded my vision. Or maybe the majority of you are just wrong. Time will tell, hopefully in 3D.
As I pointed out last November, the videogame industry has not seen a large decline in sales in 2009, contrary to what you may have read. Most of the data cited simply reflected the fact that 2008 was a record breaking year and most the big games have been moved into this year.
Whilst talking on the topic of GameStop, popular industry analyst Michael Pachter has predicted that we will see higher sales of software in 2010, but lower sales of hardware. It’s not really a rebound (that would require something to rebound from) and it’s not going to lead to the gaming world being coated in gold, but it’s sensible and settling.
Either later this year or perhaps next we’re going to start learning about the “next” generation of consoles. But for now, I would be surprised at any new significant hardware being released in the next 12 months. Most people have their console/s of choice now so I assume the decline in hardware sales is one to be expected.
Basically; cheer up, everything is quite good and not very dramatic.
Nominations for this year’s Negative Gamer Awards are closing soon. If you’ve yet to tell us which games, events or people you think should win each of our awards, what the hell are you waiting for? Head to the official nominations post and leave a comment!
There is one award that, once the nominations have been decided upon, you get to pick the winner of. The People’s Choice Award For Biggest Disappointment is for the thing that has most let you down this year. The one thing that has left you hurt, that ran around and/or deserted you.
Not all nominations for the award will make the final shortlist, but those that will shall join last year’s nominees in shame. So far the list look like this;
Add your say right here! You can nominate as many things as you like and the final short lists will be calculated using SCIENCE in the next few days.
In a study conducted by Scott Owens at the University of Mississippi, Nintendo’s Wii and Wii Fit were offered to eight families for a period of three months. Casually monitoring both console use and fitness levels for the three months during and prior to loan, the study attempted to assess the overall impact of the software and balance board on the families’ physical fitness and well-being.
Apparently while children exhibited mild aerobic benefits, the family whole “revealed no significant changes in daily physical activity, muscular fitness, flexibility, balance or body composition”, with the failings attributed in no small part to console use dropping a hilarious 82 percent over the course of the experiment. Daily use was monitored using the built-in, unmodified system software, logging an apex average of 22 minutes in the earliest stages of the three months before grinding to a lethargic mean of just four minutes a day in the study’s closing window.
I completed writing up and handing in my dissertation last September. I would have shared it sooner but due to not wanting the automatic plagiarism detector to flag me up, and me not having a copy of the final thing when I went to the US, it’s taken until now (the day of my graduation (I got a “pass”)) for me to share it with you.
So, here you go, the dissertation for my Masters Degree in Advanced Computer Science;
Simple Robotic Evolution to Find Optimum Organism Attributes (pdf)
Let me know what you think, there are graphs and everything.
According to worrying reports out this week, the video game industry has failed to continue its annual trend of doing better than the year before, generating fears of a total industry collapse.
A year on year loss of an increase in profits is claimed to be the start of a great video game collapse, sparked by the current economic climate and fuelled by public fear, in part being fanned by poor journalism.
Scientists warn such a collapse could lead to children leaving the home or a decrease in juvenile violence.
This dramatic fall from grace has been “hard hitting” on the family run video game industry, an insider has told NGR.
“Without this increase in profits, we simply aren’t making more money than last year, and that’s a real problem.”
This November has been the second most profitable November since records began.
Ignoring all data prior to 2008’s record breaking sales, the industry is falling at a rate unseen in the past and shows no sign of slowing its decline.
One troubled parent told NGR they were worried the violence inherent in all games would lead their son to a life of crime if games were to disappear.
Games (specifically multiplayer role-playing games) allow players to try out new personalities and behaviors due to their rules that vary so much — or so little — from the real world. You can be a spell-casting Wizard, an insane, noble, sometimes ignorant Barbarian, or a conspiring CEO.
Effectively, games allow people to try things that they’d never be able to do in the real world. One group has put that notion to the test. Claiming that most guilds in MMORPG’s tend to follow the hierarchy and patterns of your average street gang, and they have the math to prove it.
Read more →
I love graphs. Everybody loves graphs! They can take any information and if passed through the hands of a skilled statistician can make bad news look good, good news look bad, and in this case, slightly bad news look down-right awful.
Silicon Alley Insider’s recent Chart of the Day is all about video games, and is smugly titled “Video Game Industry Not So Recession Proof After All”. Incidentally, the phrase “recession proof” was coined all the way back in Novemeber 2007 when it was uttered by Nintendo man-in-charge Reggie Fils-Aime whilst talking about the Wii (and sales charts indicate he was right). The phrase was once waved around by the gaming community as a sign of our awesomeness but as time has worn on it’s now more often found in vague, hypocritical, phrases like “some said it was ‘recession-proof’, they were wrong”.
Back to the chart. This graph shows the demise of the gaming industry. Just look at it: The graph was really high, and then goes down. It’s described on Kotaku as charting “the decline in video game sales since 2007″. That can only mean one thing; we’re doomed. Unless you take a closer look.
Here at Negative Gamer we’re, well negative. We’re pessimistic, gloomy, grumpy, cynical, unenthusiastic and cantankerous, and it appears to be good measure! An Australian study has found that being grumpy is in fact good for you, enabling you to be better at making decisions and being more attentive.
Professor Joe Forgas at the University of South Wales took a group of volunteers and asked them to think about previous occasions that would make them happy or sad and then asked them to “judge the truth of urban myths and provided eyewitness accounts of events”. The researcher found that people in bad moods made better judgements and were better at communicating ideas than the happier enthusiastic gits, who were in turn more creative and co-operative.
A new piece of research has been published detailing findings that show a correlation between playing video games and a lesser ability to focus.
The study conducted at Iowa State University took 51 men aged between 18 and 33, recorded their gaming habits and then observed their brain as basic tests were conducted. The results showed that “high” gamers (with an average of 43 hours a week spent gaming) had noticeably different brain patterns than “low” gamers (with an average of just under two hours of gaming per week).
Whilst I don’t pretend to understand the majority of the scientific results in the paper, they do back up the following statement taken from the Discussion section of the article.
Together, these data may indicate that the video game experience is associated with a decrease in the efficiency of proactive cognitive control that supports one’s ability to maintain goal-directed action when the environment is not intrinsically engaging.
Can you predict review scores? Graham McAllister thinks so and I agree to a certain extent. Eurogamer reports that Graham Mr McAllister has been conducting research on predicting game review scores. I do agree that review scores can be predicted relatively accurately, however I don’t go down the scientific route with McAllister.
The research apparently involves “behavioural or sequential analysis” fancy terms for, if you fall asleep, you’re not enjoying the game, or if your controller gets hurled through the screen, you’re angry, etc. John Gottman who is responsible for this particular piece of the research might disagree with my blasé analysis. Reverse engineering of old reviews, particularly those of Edge magazine, is another method used in this research. They look at the correspondence between words and phrases used in a review and the score given to the game and chart them. This is a piece of the research I will admit to wanting to read. Read more →
Much of the scientific research in to the effects of video games on players’ behaviour concludes that violent games promote aggression. “Nonsense,” say the gamers. “I play Halo every day, and I’ve never killed anyone. These scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.”
I doubt gamers would say the same of this latest piece of research, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and written by several leading scientists in the field (including Doug Gentile who we interviewed last month), which shows that playing “prosocial” games can encourage people to be more helpful and considerate to others.
The paper presents the findings of three separate studies conducted using different scientific methods and in different countries. This, says the authors, is the best way to establish the true effect of video games on behaviour. Read more →
We all know that sometimes the lure of “just one more level” proves too much. It’s only when the sun begins to rise that you realise perhaps you’ve been playing a little too long. When Half Life 2 was released, I literally played the game from dusk til dawn. Is the occasional late night something to worry about though?
Research presented today at SLEEP 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, suggests that it might be. Amanda Woolems of the University of Arkansas found that “excessive” gamers sleep less than casual gamers. There was also a link between hours played and sleepiness and gamers who reported that gaming interfered with their sleep slept 1.6 hours a night less than others. Those claiming to be addicted to gaming also slept one hour less on weekdays. Read more →
I gathered up all the data I could carry from the major gaming sites over a 48 hour period. Why? So I can find out for my own personal amusement what the average breakdown in content is for the news I read every day.
I am well aware that I’m not a learned statistician and I’m also well aware than 48 hours really isn’t a long enough time period to fairly judge any site on. It is however enough to satisfy my curiosity. Please don’t take any of this as hard solid fact. Read more →
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