This one has a video! Not to mention, it also has a story about how a kid started playing Everquest, started withdrawing from his friends and family, and then killed himself two days before Thanksgiving, his brains blown out in his chair with the game running on his computer.

Is Everquest a killer? Hardly. Or, in fact, I’d give it a definitive no. The kid didn’t know how to handle a failed relationship, which was started in-game, apparently.

The Los Angeles Times ran a story today, following in line with nearly every single U.S. based publication this week, about the American Medical Association possibly placing a label on video game addiction as a verifiable psychiatric disorder. And regardless of whether it is defined as such, this is yet another sign that the face of video games is distorting into a hideous, ugly demon to point your finger at.

There obviously is something to be said about people’s lack of self-control and the way behavior surrounding intense gaming is similar to behavior in drug addicts, but I have a feeling the classification by the AMA may do more harm than good.

Who knows, perhaps treatment will cure us all, and the sinners will be saved.

Yes, it’s heroin. We melt the Horde into a spoon and shoot it into our veins. Although, I guess my grades did slip a bit freshman year because of Starcraft.

There’s yet another news story suggesting that playing video games is an addiction which ruins people’s lives. Teenagers isolate themselves in their rooms and don’t come out for hours.

I’ve got some news for you–if a teenager has an internet connection to a computer in his room and doesn’t come out for hours, he’s not only playing video games. I guarantee it.

This isn’t the first story we’ve posted on this issue, and as a matter of fact William featured one in a post just last week. But this one had a somewhat rational ending.

Read the full article »

Do you hate those on-screen keyboards you have to use to type in consoles as much as I do? Then you may be interested in a new project coming from a collaboration between researchers at the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Tampere called TwoStick:

“TwoStick is a novel text entry method for game controllers. The design is based on the review of previous work and several rounds of pilot testing. We compared user performance with TwoStick experimentally to a selection keyboard which is the de facto standard of game controller text entry. Eight participants completed 20 fifteen-minute sessions with both text entry methods. Soon TwoStick outperformed the selection keyboard and was faster in the end. Qualitative results indicated that TwoStick was more fun and easier to use than the selection keyboard.”

Not sure how this could be incorporated into a game exactly, but it’s still an interesting new way to type on a console. Below is a video showing the system in action.

The people over at Georgia Tech’s research lab have created a virtual reality world that you can interact with. But rather than fighting aliens on a strange planet, you’re presented with a scenario probably a little more close to home: an argument.

When you strap on a backpack with a computer and a visual headset, you’re thrust into the middle of a marital dispute between Trip and Grace, two virtual characters projected into the real world. The married couple is embroiled in an argument and wants you to take sides. From there, you can work towards a truce, pit them against each other, or just pretend nothing bad is happening. A researcher types the words behind you for the characters to respond to. Read the full article »

 

The photos above come from a feature from ZDNet about new military technology. Note the white object attached to the soldier on the left. Look familiar? It seems the U.S. army is using the Xbox 360 controller to pilot a new piece of equipment. The SUGV is essentially a robot used to check the interior of buildings for enemies and explosives. This can help keep soldiers away from potential dangers. Variations on this design are already in use in Afghanistan and Iraq. It does make sense that the military would use an Xbox controller for its prototype, as it is an already functional controller and the people using it are probably already familiar with it.

Video games can do more than entertain. They can help you learn, and apparently fight cancer.

Patient Taylor Carol was allowed to play the video game “Re-Mission” as much as he wanted, and the indication is that he’s enjoying learning about the way his body is trying to fight off the cancer.

Once again, another positive video-game story to the rescue. It’s such a nice change to read about the good things video games are doing for kids, instead of learning that politicians are trying to blame them for society’s ills…

There’s a really interesting article up by Hal Licino over at Hub Pages comparing a Mac Plus from 1986 to a modern PC with an AMD Dualcore processor. In a crazy experiment, he took the two machines and ran them through a series of tests to determine how the new technology stack up to the old. Of course the 86 Mac can’t perform some of the more complicated tasks of today (like play WoW), but that wasn’t the point of the test. The idea was to see how technology has progressed in terms of the simple, everyday tasks that people of both eras performed. Thus, he tested the computers based on how they ran different functions in Microsoft Word, Excel, and the time it took the machine to boot.

So which computer won? Believe it or not, the Mac just barely beat out the AMD. What this shows is, though computers today can perform more complex tasks, the simple tasks require much more effort on the processor. This is because modern computers have to run through much more code with many more features. The processors may be more powerful, but they’re weighed down by how many functions software companies heave upon them.

It’s definitely one random experiment, but with some fascinating results.

Popular Mechanics was recently given a behind-the-scenes look at Microsoft’s “Surface,” a new entirely touch-based computer interface. But it’s more than just a touchscreen like the ones you’d find in a mall display. Codenamed “Milan”, the tabletop surface acts as a computer desktop that you can interact with almost like, well, an actual desktop. The screen uses multi-touch technology, so it can recognize and distinguish between several individual finger points. This means you can shuffle around items on the desktop as if they were actual objects in front of you.

Aside from that, the “surface” can interact wirelessly with devices set on top of it, such as a digital camera or a PDA, and swap files between them. Crazier still, it can “connect” to a glass of water, meaning it can recognize the object and build a visual display around it. Read the full article »

A recent and ongoing study at Vanderbilt suggests that playing video games may help improve your eyesight. The study goes like this. Each participant is given a series of vision tests. Then the students are broken into three groups: One group plays a puzzle video game that is not expected to affect vision; another group plays action video games; and a third group plays a video game that Jeff Nyquist, Vanderbilt University doctoral candidate and one of the study’s investigators, designed with the goal of improving vision. At the end of the five weeks, their vision is tested again. “The hope is that this research will help us to develop a video game that’s a rehabilitative tool,” said Nyquist.

EARTHtimes featured a study on how boys are influenced by exposure to video game magazines. University of Illinois researchers Professor Kristen Harrison and doctoral student Bradley Bond found that video game magazines that depict characters drawn with extreme muscularity increase some boys’ desire for muscle mass.

“In a nutshell, we found that exposure to video gaming magazines, which are immensely popular, increased boys’ subsequent drive for muscularity, more than exposure to other, more realistic ‘ideal-body’ magazines like sports, fashion and fitness,” Harrison said.

Their findings will be published in the journal Body Image this summer.