Computer games make people lose interest in books

The rock'n'roll generation's era lasted from Heartbreak Hotel to the death of Steve Jobs (an ex-counterculture dropout whose whole ethos was informed by rock'n'roll, and a love of Dylan and the Beatles, among others). Music was important to us, it was how we defined ourselves and it was what made us different to our parents, who felt alienated by its loudness, nihilism, hedonism and anti-authoritarian stance.


But now all that has come to an end. My kids can't annoy me by playing loud music – I'm more likely to annoy them by saying that it's all been done before, and isn't really any different to the stuff I was listening to when I was their age. Modern music is one huge buffet from which modern kids can pick and choose any bits they like from the past 50 years. Everything is accessible and nothing is fresh. Music just isn't that important any more – or so it seems.

Instead my kids are part of the digital generation, born to the bip-bip-bip of Space Invaders and 80s electro-pop. Their world revolves around the microchip. If you buy a new computer, you can take it out of its box, plug it in and instantly you are sitting there, like Captain Kirk, at the helm of an enormously powerful machine that can take you anywhere in the universe. A modern computer can be your office, your communications device, your reference library, you can listen to music on it, you can make music on it … and, of course, you can play games.


To my kids, computer games are the most important thing in the world. In the same way that we might have waited for the new Rolling Stones album or the latest Clash single, my kids now wait expectantly for the new Fifa simulation, or the latest Gears Of War, and the amount of time they put into playing these games is terrifying to someone of my generation.


That's the important part, though. That is how they've rebelled. It is the thing they do that I did not do when I was their age. I do play a lot of games, but gaming has not completely taken over my life.
For my boys, games are more important than TV, films, music and books. Because, of course, games incorporate all of those elements so comprehensively and so seductively.


OK, I must stop now and confess that I have no daughters. Maybe girls are different? I know games aren't such a big part of their world (although the biggest selling and most popular games of all time, such as The Sims and FarmVille, are those that appeal to girls more than boys). And speaking purely subjectively, my wife is obsessed by Angry Birds and Tiny Wings. Games are not going to go away, they are simply going to become more immersive, more beguiling and more time-devouring. They are taking over. So I was delighted when they asked me to be a judge for the new GameCity prize.

Required at Holyrood For Computer Games Industry to Reach

The SNP Government has reaffirmed its support for the computer games industry in Dundee and across Scotland.


MSP for Dundee City West Joe FitzPatrick is confident that the games industry has a bright future but he said, during First Minister’s Question time today at Holyrood, that for the sector to achieve its full potential, greater powers for the Scottish Parliament must be in place, including control of the tax levers.


Speaking in Parliament, he said: “In Dundee and across Scotland the SNP Government have supported the creative and digital industries.

“I am currently in the process of establishing a Cross Party Group focussed on the Computer Games Industry in Scotland to maintain this support.


“The Scottish Government has already showed clear leadership on this issue in the face of Westminster neglect, with £3.35 million direct support provided to the games sector as part of an overall £6.75 million given by the Scottish Government and its agencies in the last year.
“Over the last few weeks I have been in contact with TIGA to discuss this interesting proposal for a Creative Content Fund to provide direct funding to games developers that can then be recouped from the profits made by successful developers and reinvested yet again to allow even more small businesses to flourish.


“TIGA’s Games Tax Relief proposal estimates that while it would initially cost around £200 million in loss as tax receipts, they would ultimately generate almost £400m in extra tax receipts for the Treasury as these businesses grow.

“If the Scottish Government was given control over these vital tax powers then we would be able to get crucial support to these small businesses, enabling them to create jobs and fuel the economic recovery.


“TIGA and the industry recognise this but the UK Government is at odds with the best interests of the games industry’s needs in Scotland.


“The First Minister has promised a meeting between the SNP Government and TIGA to discuss the Creative Content Fund and the best way to move forward.”

Playing computer games should protect eyes

Playing video games could help to correct 'lazy eye' syndrome in teenagers.

Amblyopia or 'lazy eye' is a visual disorder that develops in early childhood. Affected children are not able to focus properly with one of their eyes and the other eye will make up for this, making the affected eye 'lazy'

It had been thought that the condition could not be corrected if it wasn't detected and treated before a child reached 11.

However, a new study found the condition could be improved in children aged 10 to 18-years-old by playing computer games.

Dr Somen Ghosh, lead researcher at the Calcutta National Medical College, found that 30 per cent of sufferers reported 'significant vision gains' after playing at least an hour of video games per day, when combined with normal clinical treatment. 

A further 60 per cent showed at least some improvement.  

Dr Somen Ghosh said: 'We should never give up on our patients, even the older children, but instead offer them hope and treatment designed to help them achieve better vision.'

One group remained the control, two groups took a variety of nutrients while one group was required to play video games for at least one hour per day.  

Saurav Sen, 16, received a second chance to achieve good vision when Dr. Ghosh invited him to participate in the study. 

He said: 'Playing the shooting games while using just my weaker eye was hard at first, but after a few months I could win all game levels easily. 

'I'm very happy that I stuck with the program. My vision has improved a lot, so that I now have no trouble studying or taking exams'

Dr Ghosh was inspired to conduct further research after scientists at the Peadiatric Eye Disease Investigation Group (PEDIG) reported vision gains in 27 per cent of older children involved in a study.

He presented his findings at the American Academy of Opthalmology's annual meeting. 

Many children are not diagnosed with lazy eye until their first eye test. In the UK children should have a routine eye examination before they reach five.

However, one in five school children have an undetected eye problem because eye tests are no longer routine in schools according to the Royal National Institute for the Blind.

Dr Ghosh began by treating four groups of 10 to 18-year-olds using the same 'patching' method which forces the weaker eye work to harder. He then split the subjects into four groups which each received different supplementary treatments
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Playing Computer Games Helps Feeling Life

More than half of the people with Parkinson's disease who took part in a small pilot study led by the University of California - San Francisco (UCSF) School of Nursing and Red Hill Studios showed small improvements in walking speed, balance and stride length after three months of playing computer-based physical therapy games.

And when they successfully completed one game level, they "often moved on to harder levels for more beneficial effect. The subjects improved their games scores while improving their gait and balance," he added.

Parkinson's disease is a chronic, progressive neurological disorder of unknown cause that targets cells in the brain that control movement. It affects about 1 million people in the United States. Symptoms include tremors, slowness of movement, poor balance, and stiffness in the limbs and trunk.

UCSF and Red Hill Studios, a California serious games developer, were the first US research team to be awarded federal funds to develop low-cost computerized physical therapy games, which the UCSF statement describes as a "burgeoning field".


Teams from both organizations worked together to design nine "clinically inspired" games that aim to improve coordination in people with Parkinson's disease.

In earlier work, the team at UCSF had already established which specific body movements and gestures are beneficial for slowing the physical progression of Parkinson's.

The team at Red Hill developed the games around these movements. The games are similar to the motion sensing games you can play on the Wii and the XBox (Kinect). The players have to win points by moving their bodies in certain ways.

A UCSF press release dated 19 October describes how the specialized games are not like off-the-shelf computer games. They have been designed to encourage scientifically tested physical movements to help people whose motor skills have been affected, for instance as in Parkinson's disease.

Each game has several levels of difficulty, and the clinical team was also able to tailor them to suit each patient's particular ability range.





Bob Hone, creative director of Red Hill Studios and the lead principal investigator of the study, said each participant was able to find his or her gaming "sweet spot", the point where the physical challenge was neither too hard nor too easy, but "just right".

Computer games help us get fun

(CBS) There's no cure for Parkinson's disease, but symptoms of the debilitating neurological disorder sometimes respond to medication and surgery, along with physical therapy. And now researchers are touting a new and surprising weapon against Parkinson's.
They're talking computer games.

Parkinson's patients who played experimental computer-based physical therapy games experienced small improvements in balance and walking ability, according to a pilot study conducted by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco School of Nursing and a game maker. After playing the games three times a week for 12 weeks, more than half of the 20 participants showed improved balance, walking speed, and stride length, according to a written statement issued by the university.


Balance and gait problems are common among Parkinson's, which is marked by slowness of movement and muscular rigidity. One million Americans - mostly older men - have the disease, according to the Parkinson's Disease Foundation.


The nine experimental games - similar to the Wii and Kinect games that have become popular in recent years - reward players for moving their bodies in specific ways. And the games can be custom-programmed so that each player given an appropriate challenge.

"Each subject found his or her own gaming 'sweet spot' - the spot where the physical challenge was not too hard, not too easy, just right,'' Bob Hone, creative director of game maker Red Hill Studios, said in the statement. "And when subjects mastered one game level, they often moved on to harder levels for more beneficial effect."


What's next for researchers? You guessed it.
"Now that we have this preliminary positive result, we want to conduct a longer term clinical trial with more subjects to confirm these initial findings," researcher Dr. Glenna Dowling, professor and chair of the physiological nursing at UCSF.

The Children Computer Games Be Very Popular

Children's brains could be left damaged and they could suffer temporary 'dementia' by playing computer games, a leading scientist has warned.
Eminent neurologist Baroness Susan Greenfield said yesterday that spending time online gaming and browsing internet sites such as Facebook could pose problems for millions of youngsters.
She told attendees at a Dorset conference that an unhealthy addiction to technology could disable connections in the brain, literally 'blowing the mind.'

With children spending around 2,000 hours a year staring at computer screens the health effects have been widely debated.
Baroness Greenfield - a former director at the Royal Institution, the oldest independent research body in the world - took the opportunity to outline the dangers of online gaming and browsing at the opening of a £2.5million science centre at Sherbourne Girls' School.
Although she acknowledged that certain technologies can encourage creativity the baroness said in her speech - The Future of the Brain and The Brain of the Future - that overall the effects are negative.

She said connections in the brain 'can be temporarily disabled by activities with a strong sensory content - effectively 'blowing the mind'.
'Or they can be inactivated permanently by degeneration - i.e.dementia.'
As well as 'dementia' she said other symptoms could include shortened attention span and a tendency for reckless behaviour.
However, she did not reveal any research that had made a connection between screen technologies and brain degeneration.
Professor Mark Griffiths, a psychologist and Directory of Nottingham Trent University’s International Gaming Research Unit, said he knew of no scientific evidence that such a link existed.
He said: 'If anything the fact computer games are arousing can aid education by keeping children engaged.'

However, he added: 'There is some evidence that when played to excess, video game playing can in some extreme cases be addictive, especially online video game playing where the game never pauses or ends, and has the potential to be a 24/7 activity.'

The baroness also warned that many people are now living their lives through applications such as Facebook.
She said: 'What does it say about their identity if they are defining themselves by how others see them?
'There is a need to be outside, to climb trees and feel the grass under your feet and in your face.'
Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE was the Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain between 1998 and 2010.
Jenny Dwyer, Sherborne Girls' Headmistress, admitted that Some of Baroness Greenfield's views were 'controversial', but said she hoped her thoughts on modern technology would stimulate 'lively debate' among staff and pupils.

The mainstream of the game player will not with computer

Even though personal computers forever changed the video game industry back in the early nineties, they are not the leading platforms for games anymore, according to John Carmack, a legendary game designer whose Doom and Wolfenstein revolutionized the industry. Game consoles are much more popular devices used for video gaming and therefore id Software's latest Rage title was tailored for Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3.

"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games. That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console [Rage] versions will have larger audiences than the PC version," said John Carmack, the lead programmer at id Software, in an interview with IndustryGamers web-site.


Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases," added Mr. Carmack. 


The recently released highly-anticipated Rage video game has major issues with quality on personal computers. id Software said that the problems were conditioned by driver issues of ATI Catalyst and Nvidia ForceWare and would be resolved shortly. The main reason for the issues is that the latest title by id was designed with PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 video game consoles in mind, whereas the PC version is essentially a port with high-quality graphics.
 

"You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements. We chose the latter. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it.

Every PC games all from the video

Move over, Pokemon, a new video game with the potential to start a 'collect 'em all' craze is coming to town. On Thursday, Singapore will be among one of the first countries in the world to get Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, a unique video game that can transform plastic action figures into moving digital warriors on your TV screen.

The game uses a wireless dock that can read specially coded chips embedded in the action figures. When players put their Skylander characters onto the dock, a similar looking creature is generated and added into the game world. As the characters level up and gain new abilities in-game, this information is saved back into the chip so that players can carry their powered-up creatures with them. There are a total of 32 characters to collect, and players can pit their warriors against a friend's in the game's two player battle modes.


Skyland: Spyro's Adventure is available for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii consoles, as well as for the PC and Mac. A version for the 3DS handheld gaming device, which plays slightly differently, is expected to hit stores here on Oct 25. The games will be available at IT stores such as Challenger and retailers like Toys 'R' Us.

A starter pack consisting of the video game software, the dock, and three standard action figures will go for $109 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii versions. The PC and Mac version will go for $89.90. Additional action figures are priced at $19.90 each, or $49.90 for a set of three. Extra levels, also stored in figurines that can be read by the dock, are available in adventure pack sets for $49.90 each.

Computer games make us more easy to control

Maybe there’s a connection, or maybe there’s not, but I find it somewhat ironic that, during the same week in which the father of the Mac passes away, the man who basically helped to give birth of the modern PC game market (a market share that was perhaps the only thing Steve Jobs was unable to completely own and dominate, and the thing that kept many on Windows, despite OS X offering a superior experience on every other level) has also decided to throw in the towel.


As noted already, the PC version of Rage has been the source of much frustration and legitimate anger among gamers. Not just because of all the messed up textures, but due to the simple fact that it was created alongside the console version, instead of the normal developmental cycle: PC first, consoles later.

Many feel that it honestly dragged everything down, something that even Carmack himself stated in an interview a few months ago, during E3. Just fast forward to the two minute mark in which he states his biggest regret with developing Rage is how he viewed consoles and PCs equally, since they were in terms of graphical capabilities and processing six years ago at the start of the project…. but again, that was six years ago.


But now he’s singing a totally different tune, which completely infuriated PC fanboys that are turning in their id fanboy membership cards. Via an interview with Kotaku, he starts of by explaining the whole screw up involving the vast majority of everyone’s drivers not being up to snuff…


“The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$… We were quite happy with the performance improvements that we had made on AMD hardware in the months before launch; we had made significant internal changes to cater to what AMD engineers said would allow the highest performance with their driver and hardware architectures, and we went back and forth with custom extensions and driver versions.”

“We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems. When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn’t work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn’t help either. Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms.”


… Fair enough. id’s not the type of company to release a sub-par product on the marketplace and just sit back, shoulders in the air, and go “hey, what can you do?” They have been working their asses off to rectify the situation. But the future, as it pertains to other PC offerings looks rather grim, and the following statements is what has everyone livid…


“We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games… That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases.”

PC Games let us more with the spirit of freedom

 In the great bastion that is the video game industry, there was one company that still catered to the few, the proud, the hardcore PC gamer.John Carmack, id figurehead, sent a Tweet to calm the anger, saying, "Everyone, make sure you have latest Nvidia/Ati drivers to play Rage!" That was little consolation to gamers who insist they have the latest drivers installed in their souped-up PC rigs.



At least, that's what its mission statement might say. But it appears the company's latest release, Rage, is not up to snuff. All over id's forums and game websites around the Web, gamers are complaining about graphical problems with the game on their PC.

Curiously, it does not appear to be an issue with those playing the console version of Rage. Could it be that id is now slipping into the convention of catering to the console audience? It is, after all, a much more lucrative market these days.That company is called id Software, the maker of such cult classics as Doom and Quake. Even in a world where gaming is being overtaken by consoles, iPhones, and casual titles, id remains faithful to its hardcore audience.



This isn't just a story about a computer game that failed to live up to expectations. It is symbolic of the massive shift that the video game industry has undertaken in the last several years. If a company like id has more satisfied console gamers than PC gamers, that tells quite a story.

Microsoft Games Can Make You Feeling Great

Games For Windows is a functional system, but there just isn’t enough support from other developers, and it’s a distant third to services like Steam (4.5 stars) and Impulse (3.5 stars). Games For Windows currently offers fewer than 200 full games, the majority of which published by Microsoft. There are many great games from last year, but the selection isn’t nearly as great as Steam’s.You can learn most of what you need to know about Microsoft’s PC game service from the fact that its website’s URL is on xbox.com. Games For Windows was built to be the Windows equivalent to Xbox Live, with integration between the two services for Gamertags and achievements.

More New Than Old

With a few exceptions, Games For Windows is strictly for new games. A few games from the original Xbox era like Fable and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are available in the marketplace, but besides that there isn’t any classic game appeal.


Games For Windows puts less emphasis on sales and bundle deals than Steam or Impulse.Newer games, like Fable III and Bulletstorm, can cost $30 to $50, while older titles like Prince of Persia: Warrior Within and Assassin’s Creed are only $10 to $20.

Integration with Xbox Live

There also isn’t any actual cross-platform gameplay, so you’re still dealing with fellow Games for Windows players in multiplayer and not the thousands of gamers on Xbox Live, even if you’re playing a port from the Xbox 360.Online content integrates with Xbox Live, so achievements and information is shared between the services. Unfortunately, that’s it for usefulness outside of buying and organizing games. There isn’t any friends list, so you can’t quickly keep track of who’s playing what.



Compared to the wealth of games and features in Xbox Live, Microsoft’s Games for Windows Marketplace is a disappointment. It feels like little more than a vestigial market, something Microsoft tried and then forgot about. If you want to download PC games, stick to Impulse or Steam, our Editors’ Choice online PC gaming marketplace.