Video Games News, February 4, 2006

Declining Market Gets Brainy Boost: New games bring more people to video consoles
by Taiga Uranaka, The Japan Times 2/3/06
"There may be no monsters to slay or racing cars to spin, but new video games that claim to stimulate the brain or translate languages are being snapped up by a new crowd of gamers."

No Strong Link Seen Between Violent Video Games and Aggression
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2/3/06
"Contrary to popular opinion and most previous research, the new study found that players ' robust exposure” to a highly violent online game did not cause any substantial real-world aggression."
and
"Games are about solving problems, and it should tell us something that kids race home from school where they are often bored to get on games and solve problems. Clearly we need to capture that lightning in a bottle."

Boy, 15, Aped Video Games in Hit-and-Run
The Yomiuri Shimbun 2/4/06
"A 15-year-old boy arrested here in December on suspicion of recklessly driving a car without a license and fleeing the scene after injuring six people told police he wanted to use techniques he had learned from video racing games."

Profit Drops 31% at Top Maker of Video Games
AP 2/3/06
"SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 2 (AP) — Electronic Arts, America's largest video game publisher, reported significantly lower profit on Thursday and missed already downgraded expectations. A day after it laid off several hundred workers..."

Neverwinter Nights in Alberta: Conceptions of Narrativity through Fantasy Role-Playing Games in a Graduate Classroom
by Sean Gouglas, Stefan Sinclair, Olaf Ellefson, and Scott Sharplin, Innovate Online, Feb/Mar 2006
"ABSTRACT: Most humanities courses rarely require students to create the kinds of work they are studying. Sean Gouglas, Stéfan Sinclair, Olaf Ellefson, and Scott Sharplin outline the value of this rare experience by describing an assignment in their graduate humanities computing course in which students examined hypermedia narratives by authoring a Neverwinter Nights game module, a 10-minute unedited digital video, and a Web-based Flash assignment. Their first-hand experience sparked connections to narrative theory, examinations of software limitations, and the suitability of types of narrative to each formate. The range of narratives—and critical perspectives about those narratives—is, the authors feel, an indication that the assignment provided deep insights into the place of narrative in new media."

Teachers' Perceptions of Video Games: MMOGs and the Future of Preservice Teacher Education
by P. G. Schrader, Dongping Zheng, and Michael Young, Innovate Online, Feb/Mar 2006
"ABSTRACT: P.G. Schrader, Dongping Zheng, and Michael Young examine how preservice teachers' personal experiences with video games inform their views of gaming in the classroom. They link the results of their study to current literature and conclude that preservice teachers' experiences steer them away from game genres such as massively multiplayer online games and toward using games as rewards. The solution, the authors conclude, is to provide preservice teachers with new experiences in their training programs that make them aware of the educational potential of games in the classroom."

Libary displays history of video game exhibit
by Jacqueline Kuder, Arizona Daily Wildcat Online 2/4/06
"...The exhibit at Special Collections is a small part of the changing environment of gaming,..."

Video game fever between the stacks
by Cynthia Jeffries, News-Record.com 2/4/06
"...Two months ago, Greensboro Public Library hired an outreach teen librarian to look at ways of getting more teenagers into the branches.."

How Joysticks Work
by Tom Harris howstuffworks accessed 2/3/06
"Joysticks pull off a really neat trick. They take something entirely physical -- the movement of your hand -- and translate it into something entirely mathematical..."

Developer Replacing Stolen Games
Koaku 2/3/06
"After reading our story abo[someone]me shits stealing gaming equipment from a childrenÂ’s ward in a Glasgow hospital, someone from a well-known company based in Scotland contacted Kotaku to let us know that he was going to be making things right..."

Friday factoid II: 45 PS3 titles for 2006
by vladimir Cole Joystiq 2/3/06
"...the list of 45 titles that are expected to be released for the PS3 this year..."

InfoWorld
1/27/06
"...One device in Google's crosshairs is Sony's PSP game platform. "There's like five million of those in the U.S. now, they've all got Wi-Fi in them. We're trying to do what we can to make those devices able to log on to this network," Sacca said..."

James Cameron's Game Theory
Business Week Online 2/13/06
"Get kids hooked on a multiplayer game, then show them the movie..."