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Google asks academia to help advance Cardboard VR research
Google announced its Cardboard VR headset basically as an afterthought at the end of its 2014 I/O conference, but since then the platform's grown into a viable means of experiencing virtual reality. Much like its peers have done in the past, Mountain View is reaching out to academia to submit research proposals that'll hopefully advance the medium. According to the project's Google+ page (naturally) the team's looking for research in areas including immersive audio; optics and displays; computer graphics and rendering and user input technology. Interested? You've got until October 15th to make your submission.
Claims that MMOs are a 'threat to public health' are 'exaggerated' says new study
Dr. Rachel Kowert, lead author on the relationship between shyness and online gaming paper that we covered back in October, has just released another study relating to MMOs, this one investigating the psychosocial causes and consequences of online video gameplay. Due to be published in the science journal Computers in Human Behavior in April 2015, the paper seeks to improve on past research that links online video gaming to loneliness, depression, social anxiety, poor self-esteem, and social incompetence. Kowert and her colleagues from the Universities of Muenster and Hohenheim studied 4500 gamers over 1- and 2-year periods to determine whether negative psychological traits are a consequence of engaging in online games like MMOs or simply act to draw people to online games that help them compensate for those negative traits (the "social compensation hypothesis"). MMORPG gamers will be happy to know that the findings suggest that the latter is true; no, your MMOs won't make you depressed or suddenly unable to manage interpersonal communications: The results uncovered here do not support the claims that exposure to, or prolonged engagement within, OVG [online video game] spaces negatively impacts players' psychosocial well-being. In that respect, concerns regarding OVGs being a threat to public health seem to be exaggerated. These findings do, however, provide the empirical evidence for a social compensation model among young adult participants, indicating that OVGs have likely become alternative social outlets for young adult players with [low] social and psychosocial resources, as reflected by lower reported life satisfaction and social competence. In fact, the effect was strongest for young gamers: "For adolescent players, being a member of the online game playing community was found to bolster their reported life-satisfaction." Stay tuned later this month for a full Massively report on Kowert's MMO-related research.
Stanford acquires MUD1 source
MUD1, the first online virtual world, was originally released in 1978. Thirty-six years later, Stanford University Libraries has acquired the project's source code and has plans to provide public online access. Details are forthcoming, according to a university blog. MUD1 is a text-based multi-user environment inspired by Zork and The Colossal Cave Adventure. It was created by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw.
Study shows intense gaming can cause changes in real-life perception
A new study published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction has linked changes in visual perception and "pseudo-hallucinatory experiences" with intense video gaming. According to the study, intensive playing can cause the player's mind to perceive real-life objects through a gaming lens and can also create a situation in which the mind generates visual distortions based on gameplay. Examples offered in the study, which was done by gathering 656 posts from 54 different forums, include a subject seeing the Mass Effect dialogue wheel in his or her mind during conversations and another mistaking in-flight airplanes for Modern Warfare 2 UAVs. Mentioned as a basis for the study are the visual "waviness" some gamers experience after long sessions with Guitar Hero, the "Tetris effect" that involves seeing how real-life items could stack after playing the famous puzzler, and "Minecraft sickness" in which gamers see square-shaped themes in everyday objects. The full study breaks down a number of different types of gaming after-effects as reported by participants and proposes that the effects can be caused by "the interplay of physiological, perceptual, and cognitive mechanisms."
The Daily Grind: Does your MMO character reflect you or the other way around?
Last summer, we reported on research that suggested people's behavior changes because of the proportions of the characters they were assigned to play. This week, we saw related results from a Stanford/OSU team that posed a similar question in relation to sexualized avatars in online settings like MMOs. The researchers tested the "Proteus effect," finding that subjects who were assigned hyper-sexualized avatars in a virtual setting "internalized" their avatars' appearance, focusing more on body image and expressing more "rape myth acceptance" than the control group. Setting aside the obvious implication that playing a sexed-up toon in an MMO might temporarily darken our mental health, I have to wonder what other bad habits we might be learning from our characters. How much control do we really have when we roll up a new avatar in an MMO? Did I choose to roleplay a snarky pirate in that last game because it would be fun or because I have a problem with authority and a rude attitude I needed a way to express? Worse, did her negative traits and wardrobe rub off on or change me? Do you think your MMO character reflects you, or do you think you subconsciously reflect your MMO character? Have you ever found yourself picking up or dwelling on the attributes of your characters? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Rez creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi joins Keio University
Tetsuya Mizuguchi, former head of Q? Entertainment and creator of games like Rez, Lumines, Space Channel 5 and Child of Eden, has taken a position at Keio University as a "project professor." He remains at Q as a "spokesperson."Keio's announcement notes that his position in the Graduate School of Media Design will allow him to "continue to produce games and further expand his expertise in the field of media design and innovative content production." So he's still working on games, but no longer in a commercial environment.Considering he's best known for games about shooting corrupted files out of the computerized memory of a virtual teenager, and using your dancing-slash-journalism skills to defeat TV-faced aliens, we're intensely curious about what Mizuguchi does when freed from commercial concerns.
Midwestern Conference on Health Games to feature MMO presentation
Academic conferences aren't normally hotspots for MMO players, but you may find a few at this year's Midwestern Conference on Health Games in Indianapolis. One of the talks scheduled for October 28th is called Benefits of Massive[ly] Multiplayer Online Games for Gifted Students, and Steven Moore, husband of presenter Dr. Beth Moore, wrote in to give us the skinny on his wife's research. "Benefits of MMO games will be presented with a focus on the social/emotional health of gifted students. Gifted students need opportunities to build social skills and collaborate with others, enhance leadership abilities, roleplay, and problem solve --all of which MMOs provide the framework [for]," Moore says.
Papers 2 and Papers for the iPad: the ultimate journal reading combination
It's that time of year again: time to head back to college, grab those books and kickstart the academic term. This year, why not cut out paper from your scientific journal research workflow with the ultimate in journal management and reading for the Mac and iPad? Management Papers 2 takes journal management to the max on your Mac. Across academia and industry, Endnote is pretty much the gold standard as far as referencing goes. Yes, there are apps like Bookends, Refworks and BibTex, as well as a plethora of others including the new cross-platform offering from Mendeley, but none of them, including Thomson Reuters' offering, come close to Papers 2 when it comes to actually managing those hundreds of PDF files, importing them, sorting them, reading them, and most importantly, searching them. Papers 2 creates a database of references, grabbing their metadata from Pubmed, Google Scholar and directly from science repositories like Science Direct, and attaching the PDF files. If you have a PDF, but no citation to import, you can just import the PDF into Papers 2 by simple drag and drop. From there Papers 2 can scan your file for a match, but if it can't find it automatically, it's just a case of manually editing the reference and hitting "Match." That'll kick you into a search form where you can just drag to select text and search for the reference with it, whether it's the title, author or journal, it'll scan the science directories for the matching reference and bind all the metadata accordingly.
Piracy is a problem of 'global pricing,' not enforcement, claims new report
The smart cookies at the Social Science Research Council have spent three years researching media and software piracy in so-called emerging economies -- countries like Brazil, Russia, India and Mexico -- which has this past week resulted in a comprehensive report aimed at establishing the trends and causes of the unauthorized consumption of intellectual property. The major theme of the report is that ever more stringent enforcement of IP rights has proven ineffective in countering the growing tide of content piracy, and it is instead a problem of "global pricing" that needs to be tackled first. Content distributors' primary concern is argued to be the protection of existing pricing structures in the honeypot nations of Western Europe and North America, which has resulted in prices in locales like Eastern Europe and South America being artificially inflated relative to the purchasing power of their population. Consequently, squeezed out of buying media the legal way, consumers have found themselves drawn to the, erm, grayer end of the market to sate their entertainment needs. There's plenty more to this report, including a proposed solution to fixing these broken economics, but you'll have to check out the links below for the full scoop.
Storyboard: Archetype discussion - the Scholar
It's time for our third archetype discussion, with the previous two being the Soldier and the Rogue. I've been pleased with the positive response I've seen so far, especially since the archetypes seem to help highlight the difference between a class and the character. There are classes that suggest a more roguelike approach (not a Roguelike approach; that's different), but people play them as soldiers, undertaking missions and killing based on exterior orders rather than any sort of malice or desire. And that's great -- the power of archetypes is that you can have almost any class or combination of abilities backing them up. Such is the case with today's archetype, one that is often seen as being limited to spellcasters but which can really cover almost any set of skills. James Joyce wrote that when you think about things, you can understand them, and that's the bread and butter of the scholar. Queue up some appropriate music, and let's take a look at someone who just wants to know more.
Intel's 48-core processor destined for science, ships to universities soon
If you've been hankering to get your hands on that stamp-sized 48-core processor Intel introduced last year, you'd better brush off your doctorate -- the chipmaker says it will send samples of the CPU to researchers and academic institutions by the end of Q2. Clocked between 1.66GHz and 1.83GHz like Intel's Atom netbook chips, the 48 cores won't boost your framerates in Crysis -- rather, they're intended for linear algebra, fluid dynamics and server work -- but what we wouldn't give to try. Oh well -- suppose we'll just have to make do with puny 8- and 12-core chips for now.
"My Life as a Night Elf Priest"
A University of California Irvine anthropologist named Bonnie Nardi has been studying one of the strangest cultures known to man lately, and she's going to be presenting her findings in a book called "My life as a Night Elf Priest" -- that's right, she's been taking notes on the weird sociological experiment known as Azeroth. It sounds pretty interesting -- she's been examining the way Chinese and American players play the game (and of course the differences between them), and she's also looking into how games like WoW can bring us closer together rather than isolating us socially. It's funny -- as a genre and a technology, MMO games are actually in the absolute earliest phases of their history. Socoiologists and psychologists have been studying real humans for thousands of years, and yet it's only in the past few decades that they've gotten access to MMO games, like little petri dishes of condensed human behavior. Nardi may be one of the first to try and scientifically examine how players use (and are affected by) this technology, but she'll definitely be far from the last.
Academic research into EverQuest II already proving fruitful
Massively recently mentioned that Sony Online Entertainment and academia are teaming up to plumb the depths of EverQuest II's server logs, with benefits for both the researchers and SOE. (For the record, private subscriber info hasn't been made available to the academic community, according to an SOE statement on the matter.) The data logs and opt-in survey results are already proving fruitful, according to a piece run today on MSNBC by Games editor Kristin Kalning. Her piece raises the point that EverQuest II's gamers, despite being a global community, spend far more time socializing with friends, family, and acquaintances than with the wider playerbase. This isn't to say that EQII players are insular, but it does emphasize the fact that games aren't simply a hobby or an escape for those surveyed, and are very much a way to keep in touch with family and friends. In other words, they tend to take their offline relationships online, Kalning writes.
The gold standard: A WoW economics course proposal
If you're like me, you're ... well, you're probably incredibly handsome and charming. But you're also probably interested in WoW's economy, given that it's the biggest and most involved metagame in WoW and a fascinating microcosm of a free-market economy.I personally think that the how and why of WoW's economy is worth a deep look, and it appears there are a lot of people who agree with me--even some academics. It might even be worth just as much as any other book-learnin'.At least, that's the basis of David Friedman's World of Warcraft economics course proposal. Friedman is an academic economist from San Jose, CA who's assembled this article as a think-tank for what a WoW economics course would entail if you had to fill it with a semester's worth of content. There's a lot of neat stuff in here, talking about relative prices of ore based on character level and rarity of ore and supply/demand, but he also asks for your input as to possible course material, which I'm sure you could gladly provide in the comments section of his page.Good idea with sound academic basis, or another in the long list of high falootin' academia's attempts to justify playing WoW on the government's dime? WE REPORT. YOU DECIDE.
Richard Bartle laments poor state of game education in the UK
Richard Bartle -- the man who co-invented MUDs at the University of Essex in 1978 -- described the poor state of game-related academic study and education when speaking at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival a few days ago.Bartle made a distinction between games-focused training (the acquisition of skills by instruction) and games-focused education (the development of understanding through learning). He said that the United Kingdom's colleges are short on education, even though training is available at some universities.He noted that symptoms of this problem are already apparent: the academic community, such as it is, has been unable to agree (or even engage in cohesive discourse) about the reasons men and women often play as characters of a different sex than their own in MMOs.
Sony offers PS2/PSP dev kits for education
College game design courses are great for learning how to program games on a PC, but for the most part, getting access to console development tools has meant going to work for a licensed console developer. Sony is looking to change that with it's new PlayStation-edu program, which provides PS2 and PSP development kits for"computer science and engineering students who want to understand how the hardware works in the PlayStation consoles."The program isn't a charity -- schools will have to purchase the dev kits from Sony -- but the package comes with demo code, samples, documentation, and access to a support web site and forums. Seems like a good way for Sony to divert student developers' attentions towards their products and away from Nintendo-affiliated Digipen or Microsoft's XNA development tools.
More academic discussion of Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing is more interesting than we thought, it seems! Whereas we (read: I) found the improvements in Wild World a poor trade for NES games, and not enough to hold our interest after a year or so of Gamecube Crossing, academics are speaking out in appreciation of Nintendo's pointless-by-design communication game.The latest essay on Henry Jenkins' blog, is an excerpt from a thesis by Kristina Drzaic, about "secrets" in Animal Crossing. The idea is that other games feature glitches that allow the player to redesign the game in small ways and alter the basic experience, whereas Animal Crossing features such "glitch-like" abilities as part of the natural design of the game, and allows even more customization than the engine was designed for. One example showed a player creating a narrative conflict between herself and Tom Nook just by trying and failing to buy some candy. We were just wondering aloud why customizable content was so compelling! Good thing there are people smarter than us out there.[Via GameSetWatch]
Meet BluScreen, another Bluetooth-based advertising system
While this isn't the first time that we've heard of Bluetooth-enabled advertising, we still think it's an intriguing idea. Researchers at the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in the UK have come up with their own way to connect this nearly-ubiquitous cellphone technology with dynamic advertising in the department hallway, calling it BluScreen. The 22-inch hall-mounted screen is a working prototype that detects Bluetooth devices nearby and displays advertising and announcements once detected -- making sure to use each unique Bluetooth identifier to log what advertisements are displayed so that none are repeated. We wonder though, how this announcement will play out in Paris once the French get wind of it. They hate it when the English start competing with them.[Via NewScientistTech]
Harvard class invades Second Life
A new Harvard class entitled CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion will be jointly held in the real Harvard Law School and in the virtual world of Second Life. The course, which starts this week, deals with making persuasive arguments in virtual spaces such as web sites, wikis, and, of course, virtual online universes. While registration for the course is currently full, the virtual classroom and lecture materials will be available to Second Life users at-large during non-class hours.While this isn't the first time a college course has been held in-game, this offering from a school as prestigious as Harvard shows that this trend may be growing. Would you attend a class in a virtual world?[Thanks nsomneia]
Henry Jenkins has a blog (and a new book)
Erudite academic and advocate for all things gaming, MIT Professor Henry Jenkins has started a blog titled "Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins." Now you can finally trash all those unofficial Henry Jenkins fansites from your RSS feed, cause this one's official. With only a couple gaming posts -- like this one on games as branded entertainment -- there's still plenty for the interested nerd to uncover and look forward to.But the blog isn't supposed to be all about games, it's about his new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. We could try to condense what Prof. Jenkins is gonna be writing on his blog, but we'd only be doing a disservice to you, reader. So we'll just tease you into it: "Reduced to its most core elements, this book is about the relationship between three concepts - media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence ...."
