Study Links Violent Video Games To Anti-Social Behavior - Health News. February 6, 2009 A new study suggests the frequency and type of video games played among young college students appears to parallel risky drug and alcohol use, poorer personal relationships, and low levels of self-esteem. Laura M. Padilla-Walker, an associate professor at the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University, told Reuters Health the findings do not necessarily mean that every person who plays video games has low self-worth, or that playing video games will lead to drug use. “The findings simply indicate video gaming may cluster with a number of negative outcomes, at least for some segment of the population,” she said. The study looked at the previous 12-months’ frequency and type of video game and Internet use reported by 500 female and 313 male U.S. undergraduate college students.
Padilla-Walker said the findings showed stark gender differences in video game and Internet use. “These findings as a starting point for future research,” Padilla-Walker said. On the Net: Society's Perception of Gamers and Games STILL has not changed. | IGN Boards. The Influence of Gamers - Research from IGN. The gaming industry is one that is ever evolving. Consumers’ gaming activities today are not the same as ten, five or even two years ago. When IGN released its last gaming segmentation study, Are You Game? Back in 2008, the gaming world was a much different place. The iPhone was less than one-year old, social gaming was still in its infancy and the Nintendo Wii was the only motion-sensing device on the market. Today, we live in a world where the iPhone is 3 generations old and well on its way to world domination alongside the Android platform which has emerged as a dominant player in the space.
Sony and Microsoft have both released motion sensing controllers and Nintendo, not to be outdone, is releasing the worlds first 3D gaming device. Gaming continues to penetrate the mainstream with the average gaming consumer now spending 4 hours more each week playing games as compared to 2008, a growth rate of 40%. Turning Things Around: Growth in the Face of Trauma. Experiencing a traumatic event, such as a molestation, cancer diagnosis, or witnessing others being hurt can be emotionally devastating. For some people, who do not have proper emotional support at the time of the trauma, the event can get “stuck: in their nervous systems leading to long-lasting distress, relationship problems, or addictive tendencies. There can be another side to stressful life experiences, however. Research shows that many people report psychological growth and positive psychological changes resulting from highly stressful events. This growth does not “undo” the negative effects, but may co-exist with them, or may be the result of therapeutic or spiritual work.
Below are some ways in which experiencing a painful events can help you grow as a person. Relating to Others New Possibilities Personal Strength Traumas can destroy self-esteem either because of the injury they cause, or because survivors may feel they did something wrong to deserve such victimization. The Science of Ambition: How Genes, Family Affect Success. You don't get as successful as Gregg and Drew Shipp by accident. Shake hands with the 36-year-old fraternal twins who co-own the sprawling Hi Fi Personal Fitness club in Chicago, and it's clear you're in the presence of people who thrive on their drive. But that wasn't always the case. The twins' father founded the Jovan perfume company, a glamorous business that spun off the kinds of glamorous profits that made it possible for the Shipps to amble through high school, coast into college and never much worry about getting the rent paid or keeping the fridge filled.
But before they graduated, their sense of drift began to trouble them. At about the same time, their father sold off the company, and with it went the cozy billets in adult life that had always served as an emotional backstop for the boys. That did it. It shows. Why is that? And yet it's not. The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games. Along with “OMGDUDESOAWESOME” one of the words that gamers like to toss around when describing their favorite titles is “immersive.”
But what exactly does that mean? And what makes a game immersive? Ask 5 people and you’ll probably get 10 opinions, but psychologists have been studying immersion in various kinds of media for decades so they could probably shed some light on those questions. Except they don’t call it “immersion.” Instead, they call it “presence,” which, admittedly, isn’t as cool.
Briefly, spatial presence is often defined as existing when “media contents are perceived as ‘real’ in the sense that media users experience a sensation of being spatially located in the mediated environment.” A Theory of Spatial Presence (aka, Immersion) But how does this happen? Figure 1: It's just that simple... Woah, woah, woah. Basically, Wirth et al.’s theory says that spatial presence happens in three steps: Let’s take the concept of richness, first. So there you have it. What about you? 1. Why We Play: How Our Desire For Games Shapes Our World - Features. Gamers have spent countless hours saving princesses, dodging bullets, and dismembering Grecian monsters. What drives us to keep coming back to these experiences? Researchers around the world have spent decades measuring the effects games have on our society: how they encourage or discourage violence, inspire creativity, or nurture laziness.
However, people rarely ask why we play games in the first place. What drives us to collect coins, snipe aliens, or scale the walls of ancient tombs until three in the morning? Psychologists and sociologists are only now beginning to understand why the human ability to play is so powerful. Three invisible needsGamers often throw around the term “escapism” when talking about their hobby, but this is a hollow explanation for what actually motivates us to play games.
“We all have basic psychological needs,” explains Rigby, who detailed gaming’s intrinsic allure in his book Glued to Games: How Videogames Draw Us In and Hold Us Spellbound. Failure Is the New Success. For me, one of the very best things about blogging has been the opportunity to connect with people I've long admired from afar. One of these is writer Laura Zigman, author of several books including the darkly hilarious bestseller Animal Husbandry. Like practically every writer I know, Laura has been riding out the ups and downs of a publishing world changing so fast that it seems in perpetual free fall. But unlike most writers, she's managed to turn setbacks into material, most recently in a series of brilliantly witty Xtranormal videos, including "Failure Is the New Success," which she graciously agreed to share here. (She has a lot more to say about the Xtranormal series -- and the creative process -- in this terrific interview.)
The ability to make creative use of setbacks — to incorporate them into our larger story — is perhaps the most useful of all Plan B Nation talents (with added points for black humor). Laura Zigman By Laura Zigman And guess what? It failed to sell to a publisher! 48 Psychological Facts You Should Know About Yourself. The Consumer Appeal of Underdog Branding. Picture the Jamaican bobsled team going for the gold at the Winter Olympics. Or competitors in what seem fundamentally unbalanced battles: the Chicago Cubs versus the New York Yankees, Apple versus Microsoft, and Southwest Airlines versus United. In the public eye, the weaker party is often more attractive. Why? The reason might be an increasing willingness on the part of consumers to identify with the underdog.
In today's economically difficult times, it appears, underdog brands are gaining psychological, and real, power in the marketplace. “In today’s world, underdog narratives address real-world challenges and anxieties faced by increasing numbers of Americans.” As HBS professor Anat Keinan explains, "Today, underdog brand biographies are being used by both large and small companies and across categories, including food and beverages, technology, airlines, and automobiles. Keinan recently participated in an e-mail interview about the research and its importance for marketing strategies. Consumers love underdogs. Consumers strongly relate to brands that they perceive as underdogs, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
"Across contexts, cultures, and time periods, underdog narratives have inspired people. Stories about underdogs are pervasive in sports, politics, religion, literature, and film," write authors Neeru Paharia, Anat Keinan (both Harvard University), Jill Avery (Simmons School of Management), and Juliet B. Schor (Boston College). The authors examined the ways many contemporary brand narratives highlight companies' humble beginnings and struggles against powerful adversaries.
For example, Nantucket Nectars' label says the company started "with only a blender and a dream," while Google, Clif Bar, HP, and Apple emphasize that they started in garages. "Underdog brand biographies contain two important narrative components: a disadvantaged position versus an adversary and passion and determination to beat the odds," the authors write.
Comeback stories: understanding human resilience | Research Matters: stories of scholarship and creative activity. The Two Ways You Become Immersed in Video Games. I think that this is really interesting. To respond to the material in one of the other posts, I think that there's value in both kinds of immersion. Personal immersion is not better than impersonal immersion.
They are two different modes of immersion, each with their own qualities of engagement, play, and fun. As other examples of impersonal immersion besides Sonic, Mario, or similar games, I would add RPGs. These games work with a complex form of impersonal immersion, but the effect is the same: one is taken along with the story of a group of characters, taken along for a ride which allows very limited degrees of player choice in order to provide very developed forms to pursue in a game. Immersion is inflexible - the more common responses are sympathy or engagement - but it nonetheless exists as a complex quality which only video games can bring about by virtue of participation. 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted. So, the headlines say somebody else has died due to video game addiction. Yes, it's Korea again. What the hell? Look, I'm not saying video games are heroin. I totally get that the victims had other shit going on in their lives.
But, half of you reading this know a World of Warcraft addict and experts say video game addiction is a thing. So here's the big question: Are some games intentionally designed to keep you compulsively playing, even when you're not enjoying it? Oh, hell yes. . #5. If you've ever been addicted to a game or known someone who was, this article is really freaking disturbing. "Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity you want from your players. " Notice his article does not contain the words "fun" or "enjoyment. " "...at this point, younger gamers will raise their arms above their head, leaving them vulnerable. " So What's The Problem?
#4. . #3. Video games activate reward regions of brain in men more than women, Stanford study finds. STANFORD, Calif. - Allan Reiss, MD, and his colleagues have a pretty good idea why your husband or boyfriend can't put down the Halo 3. In a first-of-its-kind imaging study, the Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play.
"These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become ‘hooked' on video games than females," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was recently published online in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. More than 230 million video and computer games were sold in 2005, and polls show that 40 percent of Americans play games on a computer or a console. According to a 2007 Harris Interactive survey, young males are two to three times more likely than females to feel addicted to video games, such as the Halo series so popular in recent years. The Transformation of the Video Game Industry. In the 1970s, individual gamers pecked at keyboards or manipulated a dial to move black-and-white dots across the screen. Forty years later, games are an experience for groups of family and friends to send their cartoon avatars soaring through multi-dimensional virtual cities.
The gamer audience expanded, matured and diversified with the evolution of video games. A solitary pastime played on a box in the corner of a basement recreation room or bar barely resembles the collaborative educational, artistic and serious games simultaneously played on several continents by millions of contestants today. Devices for the young have become devices that keep senior citizens active, bring families together and train corporate professionals. In barely more than a generation, video games transformed from a diversion for the few into a mass medium, helping people live, learn, work and of course, play.
The Evolution of Games Today’s Gamer Industry Growth Go Figure Back to Top. Why We Play: How Our Desire For Games Shapes Our World - Features. Gamers have spent countless hours saving princesses, dodging bullets, and dismembering Grecian monsters. What drives us to keep coming back to these experiences? Researchers around the world have spent decades measuring the effects games have on our society: how they encourage or discourage violence, inspire creativity, or nurture laziness. However, people rarely ask why we play games in the first place. What drives us to collect coins, snipe aliens, or scale the walls of ancient tombs until three in the morning? Psychologists and sociologists are only now beginning to understand why the human ability to play is so powerful.
Three invisible needsGamers often throw around the term “escapism” when talking about their hobby, but this is a hollow explanation for what actually motivates us to play games. “We all have basic psychological needs,” explains Rigby, who detailed gaming’s intrinsic allure in his book Glued to Games: How Videogames Draw Us In and Hold Us Spellbound. Storytelling in video games - why it may never reach the level of books/movies - hist Blog. Whenever the topic of "video games as art" comes up (and don't worry, I'm not really going there, as I hate that discussion), one of the aspects used to prove how games have become art is the expanded storytelling that many modern games have.
Games these days can tell some wonderful stories. Just take Mass Effect, for instance. That being said, there is one aspect of video game stories that, I believe, will forever keep video games on a lesser level compared to books/movies, at least as far as storytelling goes. That is the ability of the player to choose in what order the story unfolds. What's that? Don't get me wrong. But too often there are huge logic gaps in the story that are caused by giving the gamer a lot of stuff to do, and the choice of what order to do them in. A perfect example is in Dragon Age 2. Another instance. Other open-world games and RPGs have similar issues. But as far as pure storytelling goes, that's pretty much BS, isn't it? Another Dragon Age 2 example.
Prometheus, Dark Souls, And Storytelling In Video Games Vs. Film. Emotional Themes | The Elements of Storytelling for Games. Storytelling in Games: Part 1 - The Past and Present. Adventure Time: The Comeback of a Great Gaming Genre. The 10 Biggest Themes in Gaming for 2012. Do reviews influence you? The state of games: State of gamers. The state of games: State of the current generation. Forums : Gaming Discussion : "Gamer Entitlement": Current state of gaming journalism and industry. The Current State of the Gaming Industry, in my Honest Opinion.