Social sites, videogames can up IQs: UK researchers

Well, it depends on the social-networking service, actually. Psychologist Tracy Alloway at the University of Stirling in Scotland "told the British Research Association that Facebook brings about educational benefits because it requires users to exercise their working memory – their ability, in other words, to store and manipulate information," the Education Week blog reports and, according to The Telegraph, "playing video war games [strategy games, in other words] and solving Sudoku may have the same effect as keeping up to date with Facebook." Dr. Alloway's research team developed a "working memory training program" called "JungleMemory." After two months in the program, a group of "slow-learning" students aged 11-14 in the Durham area "saw 10 point improvements in IQ, literacy, and numeracy tests," and some who were at the bottom of their class at the beginning finished the program near the top, according to The Telegraph. Twitter, text messaging, YouTube, and TV don't produce the same results because they're mostly about short bursts of info that recipients don't have to store, process, and repackage, apparently. It isn't black and white, though, I think it's important to point out. It's not about specific sites or technologies so much as the brain activity involved in using them. Collaboratively producing and sharing a video on YouTube or writing a cellphone novel with text messages as writers do in Japan, would have entirely different effects from passively watching a video or quickly exchanging burst of info on a mobile phone. Here's coverage in the UK's IBTimes, and here's the last story on Facebook & grades that got a lot of coverage.

Games' popularity: Computer-security tipping point?

Online games and virtual worlds - more than social networking or any technology before it - could be where computer-security ed really hits home with users. Why? Because online games and worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life have whole economies in which users buy and sell virtual goods "to the tune of $1 billion a year" industry-wide, CNET reports, citing game security experts speaking at the RSA 2009 security conference in San Francisco recently. So it just may be true that money talks. Two examples they gave occurred in Second Life and WoW. In one hack created just to prove it could be done, a security expert figured out how to "filch Second Life users' virtual currency - which is directly convertible to US dollars - [and] ... credit card information and then use it to buy more of the currency to trade in." In WoW, a security expert wrote a bot (software code that automates certain actions and that's "almost universally prohibited" in games and worlds), which "allowed his character to stay safe from attack from the rear, while also luring in loot-bearing enemies to kill. Once killed, the enemies would be regenerated by the bot, allowing Hoglund's character to kill them and pick off all their loot over and over again, a process that netted him significant profit," according to CNET.

New Halo game: Focus on strategy

Remember the board game "Risk"? Real-time strategy (RTS) videogames - played from a top-down perspective - are its descendents. Now, with the just-released "Halo Wars," Microsoft has folded RTS into its popular Halo series, USATODAY reports. This is good news for parents in two ways. Not only is strategy more the focus than shooting, it's rated "T" for Teen because it "transports the hit sci-fi game franchise from a first-person shooting style to a more cerebral, real-time strategy mode," according to USATODAY, and this could boost sales for other strategy games. The article mentions several of them.

2008 videogame 'Report Card'

The National Institute on Media & the Family (NIMF) released its 13th-annual videogame report card this week , and the "grades" are better, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. "In the past, the report has criticized video-gamemakers and given grades - often low - on how their products affect children. But this year, the grades are up and the tone is conciliatory." The reason, says the Institute, is that most of its past policy recommendations have been implemented by the gaming industry - for example, parental controls for the three main consoles and more accurate game ratings. The NIMF also warns parents against game addiction in this year's report, Gamasutra reports (see also "Don't just take away the Xbox: Psychiatrist's view"). Further NIMF coverage in the Washington Post leads with the year's worst game content.

Videogamers and/or future composers?

The latest edition of Guitar Hero, "World Tour," is not more of the same, Mike Musgrove at the Washington Post reports. In it, you can go into "studio" mode, lay down your own tracks, then "click a button and 'publish' the song online so that any other player with a Web-connected game console can download and play your song, just as they would play any other song in the game. If other players like your creation, they can vote for it and you can get the satisfaction of watching your song climb the online charts at the game's online service, called 'GH Tunes'." Even more cool than this, though, is that it's part of a trend. "Many of the hottest new titles appearing this holiday season include software tools that allow users to express themselves and share their work with an online audience." Examples: create your own characters in Spore, design and share your own games in Xbox Live's "community games" (coming soon); write and share your own adventure story in LittleBigPlanet on PlayStation 3; and compose tracks based on your movements with Wii Music.

Videogames & aggression: New study

A just-published article in Pediatrics looked at three studies - one in the US and two in Japan - which found that "playing violent videogames is a significant risk factor for later physically aggressive behavior and that this violent videogame effect on youth generalizes across very different cultures." The authors added that the research "strongly suggests reducing the exposure of youth to this risk factor." But context is important. The study's lead author Craig Anderson, a psychology professor at Iowa State University, told the Washington Post that the findings "should be understood in the larger context of a child's life." Playing 5-10 hours of a violent videogame isn't going to change a "healthy, normal, nonviolent child" into a violent one, Anderson said, adding that extreme aggression usually results from an array of "risk factors." The Post points out some such risk factors identified by the US surgeon general in 2001: "gang involvement, antisocial parents and peers, substance abuse, poverty and media violence." The study in Pediatrics reported that videogames are played in 90% of US homes with children 8-16 and "US average playing time of four hours a week in the late 1980s is now up to 13 hours a week, with boys averaging 16 to 18 hours a week," according to the Post. Here's coverage at Wired's geekdad blog and Health magazine. See also "US teens' gaming highly social."

Hateful game gets global press

From the news coverage I've seen, it's not worth the media attention it has gotten (and here I am giving it some, tho' hopefully with a little perspective). I'm referring to an extremely offensive downloadable arcade-style game called "Muslim Massacre," reportedly created by a 22-year-old Australian man, Eric Vaughn, "known online as 'Sigvatr'" (see News.com.au in Oz). "The game begins with audio from George Bush speeches, edited together to sound like a condemnation of Muslims." This story, which may say more about how Americans are viewed from other countries, has been picked up worldwide - probably Vaughn's marketing plan. The Guardian's headline in the UK is, "More evidence that satire doesn't transmit over the interwebs," and the subhead: "A game in which your 'task' is to 'wipe the Muslim race from the face of the Earth' has, predictably, got people wound up" (interesting use of the word "race"). On this side of the Pond, FoxNews.com reports that the game "has caused international outrage." PC World's "Game On" columnist Matt Peckham says it's not worthy of the label "parody" which some online commenters are giving it; "it's just tasteless," probably also not worth being dignified by a ban.

Videogames: 'Hotbeds of scientific thinking for kids'

They may be "tuning out of science in the classroom," as a Wired News commentary puts it, but gamers are still learning and (avidly) practicing science, Prof. Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found in a soon-to-be-published study, "Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds." She and her co-author, Sean Duncan, "downloaded the content of 1,984 posts in 85 threads in a discussion board for players of World of Warcraft. What did they find? Only a minority of the postings were 'banter' or idle chat. In contrast, a majority - 86% - were aimed specifically at analyzing the hidden ruleset of games. More than half the gamers used 'systems-based reasoning - analyzing the game as a complex, dynamic system. And one-tenth actually constructed specific models to explain the behavior of a monster or situation; they would often use their model to generate predictions. Meanwhile, one-quarter of the commentors would build on someone else's previous argument, and another quarter would issue rebuttals of previous arguments and models. These are all hallmarks of scientific thought," according to commentator Clive Thompson. The study will appear in the Journal of Science Education & Technology next spring. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that, for the first time in two years, game sales growth has slowed to single-digit.

West slow to take on Net addiction: Psychiatrist

Nine computer games are purchased every second in the US; two-thirds of Americans, or around 200 million people, play videogames; 2% of US gamers, or about 4 million people, "are heavy users" averaging around 40 hours of play a week; and 66 million (a third) play around 20 hours/week. That's data cited by Jerald Block, an Oregon-based psychiatrist, in British cultural and political magazine The Standpoint. He's writing about Internet addiction, "or the more accurate and general term Pathological Computer Use (PCU)," which he says is "not an established diagnosis but one that might be included in the next version of the mental-health diagnostic guidebook, the DSM-V," which will be out in 2012. A doctor in the US or Europe would probably not know what to do with the information that you're spending 40+ hours a week playing videogames. "Dealing with such matters is not part of our training," Dr. Block writes. "In Asia, however, you would probably get a psychiatric diagnosis. Because doctors in Asia … recognise excessive computer use as a serious issue." Block goes on to describe what PCU patients' symptoms and behaviors are like from a physician's perspective, including a description of what virtual-reality "cybering" can now be like and addicts' unsettlingly, progressively blurry distinction between reality and virtual reality.

But all that's about diagnosis, he writes in his conclusion. Treatment is an entirely different, very difficult proposition. "The uncomfortable truth is that our treatment strategies [worldwide] for this malady are inadequate and often fail. Until we learn more or have better clinical tools, our best approach may be to work on prevention." [See also "'SIGNS' of Net addiction: Interview."]