Video Games Can Save People

The latest academic research has found that games such as Half Life and Doom could actually be used to train people in fire safety, evacuation procedures and even save lives. Missing a link? Let us explain. By using the engines from games such as these, which involve looking at a scenario from a first-person perspective, the team at the university was able to adapt the environment into a 3D model of a real world building. In just three weeks a single developer was able to programme three fire evacuation procedures complete with smoke and fire which the Durham experts say is significantly quicker and more cost effective than beginning from scratch. The scientists found three main advantages of using this technology. That it can be used to identify problems with the layout of the building, that it can help familiarise people with evacuation procedures and that it can teach good fire safety. Many dangerous situations occur in a fire because people don't know the bits of the building they don't use on a daily basis, like the fire exits and stairwells, well enough and therefore panic due to the unfamiliarity with procedure.

As opposed to starting from scratch this method takes a huge wedge of time off building a virtual reality model. The games are also tested extensively before use in both usability and performance also meaning less work for the team. According to the boffins the code within these games also enables easy programming of features such as wind, smoke, fire and water. Lead author Dr Shamus Smith from Durham University's Computer Science department said, "Although virtual environment toolkits are available, they usually only provide a subset of the tools needed to build complete virtual worlds." Dr Smith explains further that in order to include features such as fire and water the programmer usually requires additional programming skills and a substantial time investment on the part of the developer. "By using readily available computer games, these features can be very easily simulated and are obviously vital in creating a virtual fire evacuation scenario".

Steve Wharton, of Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service agreed that, "Using virtual models such as this one is an excellent way to raise fire safety awareness and test the effectiveness of a building's design. Virtual models also provide an effective way to train fire-fighters in a realistic, yet safe, environment." Further to the theoretic usefulness of this simulation, the team tested it on real people, showing them the difference between the usual simulation and the computer game-based one, those tested agreed unamimously that the latter was the most helpful and realistic, and that they really enjoyed shooting the fire demons in the ladies' loo on level six. ( www.atomicmpc.com.au )

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Violent Video Games 'Could Help Save Lives'

Codes used to create virtual worlds for "shoot 'em up" games such as Doom 3 and Half Life 2 could be modified to build 3D fire safety simulators, according to research by Durham University. The games' sophisticated software could be converted to recreate real buildings, then modified to create a number of emergency scenarios, much more easily and cheaply than traditional virtual reality programmes. The study, published today in the Fire Safety Journal, found that games in which the player saw the environment from the first person perspective and normally involved the player using weapons to fight a number of enemies, had the greatest capability to be converted. The scientists said the simulations could identify problems with the layout of a building, help familiarise people with evacuation routines and teach people good practice in fire safety. Lead author Dr Shamus Smith from Durham University's Computer Science department said: "Although virtual environment toolkits are available, they usually only provide a subset of the tools needed to build complete virtual worlds. Although you can create fire and smoke for example, it is not very straightforward.

"In order to include these features using toolkits, it often requires additional programming skills and a substantial time investment on the part of the developer. "By using readily available computer games, these features can be very easily simulated and are obviously vital in creating a virtual fire evacuation scenario." Steve Wharton, deputy community safety manager at County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service, said: "Using virtual models such as this one is an excellent way to raise fire safety awareness and test the effectiveness of a building's design. "Virtual models also provide an effective way to train firefighters in a realistic, yet safe, environment." ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

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Video Games Benefit From The Credit Crunch

Financial worries are forcing us all to tighten our belts, and encouraging a sort of “make do and mend” culture across the country. Sales of sewing machines are on the up, says Argos, as people take to customising their own clothes rather than splashing out on new threads; bread-making machines, too, are enjoying a surge in popularity, says Comet, with people opting to bake their own loaves to save dough. Despite these straitened times, the video-games industry is enjoying record sales, even as spending on other entertainment declines. According to the latest figures, more video games were bought last year than DVDs. Sales were up 20 per cent, raking in $32 billion (£22 billion), while sales of films on DVD and Blu-ray, by contrast, dropped by 6 per cent, earning just $29 billion worldwide. It seems that consumers are quickly warming to the idea of video games not only as a good-value form of entertainment, but as something that can be enjoyed by all ages and abilities, together, as a social activity.

Consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, with its clever motion-sensitive controllers, and games such as Rock Star and Guitar Hero, are proving hugely attractive to consumers who may never previously have considered giving gaming a go. Video-games parties are all the rage. Guests are invited to bring a dish and a bottle of wine and the evening is spent in a convivial if competitive atmosphere as people duel against one another on SingStar, a karaoke game, or Guitar Hero, where players must strum a plastic guitar plugged into the games console in time with the on-screen instructions. “Consumers are staying in and spending more money on being entertained at home,” says Aaron Greenberg, head of interactive entertainment product management at Microsoft, which makes the Xbox 360 games console. “The credit crunch is a fact for folks in the US and Europe, so people are being much more cautious.” And it’s women who are largely driving the video-games market, buying 21 per cent more games last year than they did in 2007, according to researchers at TNS. “The Nintendo DS and the Wii have bought a demographic into the market that is not normally associated with gaming,” says Chris Barnes, an account manager with TNS.

“The birth of casual gaming has made gaming more widely acceptable, and console and games publishers are falling over themselves to produce products that don’t target the traditional gamer. Wii Fit and Guitar Hero have proven to be a massive success.” The price of consoles – with a Nintendo Wii costing as little as £179, and an Xbox 360 even less – is seen as crucial to redefining video gaming as an entertainment proposition with mass appeal. Add to that the almost endless replay value of many games, as well as the inherent fun factor of competing with friends and family in singing contests and virtual tennis, and it’s easy to see why video gaming is the perfect antidote to the credit crunch. The nation’s new-found passion is having a positive knock-on effect in other areas. There are numerous studies showing that the rapid-fire imagery in video games is helping us to process everyday images and information with increasing speed and accuracy, and in some cases improves hand-to-eye co-ordination to such an extent that trainee surgeons are using video games to hone their fine motor skills. “Our environment, because of technology, is changing, and therefore the abilities we need in order to navigate these highly information-laden environments are changing,” says Susana Urbina, a professor of psychology at the University of North Florida.

Moreover, rhythm-action video games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero are encouraging children to pick up musical instruments. About 2.5 million British youngsters have progressed to real music-making after playing console games, according to Youth Music, the UK’s largest music charity. And it’s not just the video-games industry that’s enjoying a boom. Sales of “netbooks” – cheap, ultra-portable laptops that have minimal memory and storage, but are small enough to carry everywhere and capable of connecting to the web – are on the up. Netbooks, such as the Asus Eee PC and Acer Aspire One, now account for 10 per cent of all computers sold in Europe, say analysts at IDC. Many netbooks – some costing less than £200 – also bring a new kind of operating system to consumers. Lots of them run a version of the open-source Linux platform, a competitor to Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s OS X, which is easy to use and economical to run. It seems that is carrying over into people’s regular computer usage too, with consumers seemingly more willing to try out free software, such as Open Office and Google Docs, which are alternatives to Microsoft Office. These programs not only reduce costs, but in many cases are more useful, because documents are stored on the internet rather than on a single-computer hard drive, so they can be accessed from any machine. Tech-savvy Britons are also livening up the long, cash-strapped winter nights by turning to catch-up TV services on the web. It is, after all, much cheaper to watch the first series of Little Dorrit for free on the BBC’s iPlayer service than splash out on cinema tickets. Traffic to the iPlayer service has surged in recent months, with more than 41 million TV show requests from iPlayer last December alone. Channel 4 offers a similar service with 4OD, as does ITV, while Sky’s Sky Player provides access to its recently screened films and television shows. ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

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Game Addiction Similar To Drug Addiction

A new scientific study proves that video gamers who crave to play their favorite game exhibit about the same symptoms, neurologically speaking, as drug addicts looking to score their next dose. The same areas of the brain lit up, when MRI imaging was used on a few “game addicts,” whereas in the control group, those areas remained unaffected. The mechanisms that trigger the activation of these areas are still largely unknown, and researchers are working hard to determine what it is exactly that keeps people locked in front of a computer for hours. The research was prompted by the fact that nearly ten or more million people are engaged in the on-line game World of Warcraft (WoW), with many players spending an insane amount of time playing on-line. Some people even play for 16 to 20 hours a day, which leaves them with virtually no personal life to speak of. Thus, the only satisfaction they get in life is doing the same actions over and over again, while their families and friends are lost, as is their health. Chih-Hung Ko, a neurobiologist at the Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital in Taiwan, and colleagues placed 10 WoW fans in the MRI machine, alongside 10 non-addicts, and followed their brain images while the test subjects were shown pictures of the game. While in the ten people in the control group there was little reaction, in the “addicts” several portions of their brain lit up “like a Christmas tree.” ( news.softpedia.com )

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PC Game Industry Rocks, AMD Says

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced that the PC gaming industry is "blooming," following the industry's positive reception of the company's ATI Radeon HD 4800 graphic card series. Randy Ho, AMD's channels sales manager of the graphics and chipset business in ASEAN, said AMD has sold around two million units of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series recently, and that the momentum continues with a growing list of high-performance gaming systems announced by their partner OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), including Acer, Fujitsu Siemens, Gateway, HP, and Medion. Ho added that Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Velocity Micro, Maingear, CyberPower, iBuyPower, Commodore Gaming, ExtremePC, Biohazard, Puget Systems and other system integrators have also announced systems shipping with ATI Radeon HD 4800 series graphics. The executive said a lot of their company's partner OEMs and system integrators (SIs) are now delivering immersive game play with the use of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 line of graphics cards. He said the card series is available in numerous configurations, including systems based on AMD Phenom X3 and AMD Phenom X4 processors, as well as Intel Core i7 and Core 2 processors. ( www.pcworld.com )

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Valve Boss Lets Off Steam About DRM

President of valve software Gabe Newell has said that he thinks the DRM on computer games is "just dumb". In email correspondence with a fan, Newell wrote that "The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't)... We really, really discourage other developers and publishers from using the broken DRM offerings, and in general there is a groundswell to abandon those approaches." Recent PC games - including Spore, Bioshock and Mass Effect - have caused outrage among gamers for refusing to work across multiple machines, even when uninstalled.
( www.theinquirer.net )

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Girls' Knickers Mark Difference Between Xbox And PS3

The main difference between Microsoft Xbox360 and the PS3 is nothing to do with technology. It is all down to girls' knickers. Obsessive hacks at kotaku.com did a side-by-side comparison of two versions of Soul Breed which is an RPG game that hit the PS3 last autumn which has now appeared on the Xbox 360. The monster-killing and baby-making RPG requires punters to capture the hearts of game heroines to 'create' a successor. When you manage this there is a movie which we guess implies that there's some adult action going on... and then the new successor is then revealed. Kotaku notes that the difference between the two versions comes down to knickers. For some reason the love interest in the Xbox360 version has a pair of slightly more sensible white silky pants, while the PS3 has something black and red which actually shows less in the buttock department. ( www.theinquirer.net )

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Apple iPod Touch, Nintendo Wii And Sony PlaySation Portable Expand Game Audience

There’s been a seismic shift in attitudes towards video games in the past few years. Once regarded as the preserve of teenage boys, computer games are now widely considered an entertainment medium on a par with movies and music. And perhaps most significantly, they’ve found favour with a wider audience than ever. Thanks to consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, everyone from young children to grandparents have been able to try gaming. Indeed, such is the change in gaming’s fortunes that industry analysts Verdict Research expect the market to grow by 42 per cent this year, making it worth £4.6 billion – £100 million more than music and video combined. But the success of consoles tells only half the story. Portable devices, such as the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable, are proving just as popular with gamers, who want the ease and convenience of being able to play a game any time, anywhere.

Mobile phone makers, too, are muscling in . Devices such as the Nokia N-Gage have been designed with gaming in mind. Apple is leading the charge, and positioning itself against the likes of Nintendo and Sony. Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, called the iPod touch Apple’s “funniest iPod ever” thanks to the slew of games available. Mobile gaming is big business, with analysts Screen Digest estimating that the UK market alone will be worth more than £80.5 million by 2012 – and that doesn’t include revenue from games sold for devices such as the iPod touch. Simon Jeffrey, president of Sega, recently said that the iPhone was as powerful as his company’s old Dreamcast games console, which was launched barely a decade ago.

( www.telegraph.co.uk )

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How Playing A Computer Game Helped Me Get Through The Trauma Of 9/11

Naomi Alderman : Videogames may be habit-forming – even addictive – but playing them can be a healthy response to traumatic events in real life. Why do people always say "computer games are addictive" as if that's a bad thing? There is endless hand-wringing about the supposedly addictive properties of gaming. The release of a new World of Warcraft Expansion Pack has brought the issue up again, but the idea of game addiction has been around for a while, contributing to the image of computer games as dangerous, disturbing and unhealthy.
( www.guardian.co.uk )

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Are Ads In Video Games Pushing The Limit?

For those of you gamers out there who have a good eye for detail, you'll notice something a little different about your Xbox Live gaming experience through October – Political Advertisements. Is the gaming world supposed to feel enlightened or outraged by these new ads? On one hand it's always a good thing to keep an open mind and not shelter yourself, especially when it comes to one of the most important decisions for our country's future. On the other hand, how far is the long and bothersome reach of advertising in general going to go? To the players, video games are a safe haven, a way of shutting off all the distractions around us and taking a break in some of our favorite worlds." ( gametopius.com )

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The Trouble Of Multiplayer

You’ve probably encountered them, whether in shops, on trains, or perhaps burgling your kitchen. Other people are everywhere, like some sort of uncontrolled disease. Recognisable by their not being you, with their different faces and opinions, they’re exactly the sort of thing that‘s wrong with society. History books show there has never been a war that wasn’t caused or exacerbated by the involvement of other people, and while anecdotal, I’ve yet to get into an argument which didn’t involve at least one other person. And they’re ruining my videogames.
( www.rockpapershotgun.com )

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But I'm a Girl Gamer

Girl gamers are notorious for their negative attitudes and their lack of sportsmanship. They love to cut down and crucify any other girl that might be giving them any competition. They call any girl around them “attention whores,” and they like to question her knowledge of games. ( gametopius.com )

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How We Interact With Our Games

Graham Bennett : There are a couple of factors of fundamental gameplay elements that can really make or break a game, like NPC pathing, the camera, or the controls. Of these key components, one of the first things a player will notice is the graphical interface. And, seeing as it’s the primary way the player receives information regarding their character’s status, the quality of an interface can elevate a game from mediocrity to greatness or it can easily break an otherwise positive experience. ( news.gotgame.com )

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The Most Evilest Fictional Videogames Ever

Gamesradar : It's almost inevitable that any long-running TV series will contain at least one "videogame episode." Sometimes the attempt at pop culture awareness is done well, but it’s generally an attempt by clueless writers to appear hip and socially relevant by tackling the supposed implications of violent games. The conversation, as I imagine it, goes something like this ... ( www.gamesradar.com )

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