archive

The validity of video games

From TPM, Luciano Floridi finds you only live twice with Second Life. What happened to Second Life? Not long ago it was everywhere — today you'd be forgiven for asking if it's still going. SimCity Baghdad: A new computer game lets army officers practice counterinsurgency off the battlefield. Research suggests video games can help adults process information much faster and improve their abilities to reason and solve problems and that the art of creating computer games can boot student skills. Your brain's got game: Size of brain region predicts videogame performance, and perhaps more. Here are some surprising statistics about video games, and who exactly is playing them. A review of A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players by Jesper Juul. From Prospect, videogames are no longer the preserve of adolescent males in dark bedrooms — their emergence as a social medium is changing the way we work, learn and fight wars; and World of Warcraft has transformed the way we think about videogames and popular culture — but it's also helped to change the way we think about ourselves. The media has labelled them "murder simulators", linked them to depression and held them accountable for childhood obesity — but there's another side to videogames that the mainstream media doesn't seem to want you to know about. Philip K. Dick’s fiction is a defense of the validity of video games because despite the fact that they are not real, his stories argue that there is still something valid in the artificial. A look at 8 horribly misguided "futuristic" video game controllers.