Cody Taylor

They’re completely different mediums – lovely on their own – but they’re used for different things and that often makes translation difficult or impossible. Games are about playing. Movies are passive. And the makers of these games have room temperature I.Q.s.

Ryan Tyack, 17, took up archery in 2001 at the urging of his mother, when she despaired at his obsession with computer games. He has since become a world junior champion. “I just sat around playing Age of Empires all the time and my mum wanted me to do a sport and meet some kids,” Tyack said. “So I chose either fencing or archery.”

One of the great arguments of the digital age has been over the effects of video games on aggression — especially if you have ever heard the name Jack Thompson. A recent study suggest the counterpoint once again, that violent video games really don’t have that much impact. “The authors performed six studies in total, but they were in broad agreement, so we’ll only discuss the more compelling ones here. For the experimental portion, these involved playing an essentially identical game with different degrees of violent content. One group of participants was randomly assigned to play the game House of the Dead 3 on the different extremes of its gore settings, while a second was split between those who played the normal version of Half-Life 2, and a those who played a modified version that turned the adventure into an elaborate game of tag. In both cases, the primary influences on enjoyment were the sense of competence and satisfaction, along with the immersive nature of the game. Generally, females rated immersion as more important, while males went for competence (and consistently rated their own expertise very highly). Violence didn’t register when it came to enjoyment, even for those with pre-existing violent tendencies.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Research to be published online January 16 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin shows that, contrary to popular belief, violence does not make video games more enjoyable. The study by investigators at the University of Rochester and Immersyve Inc. found that for many people, gore actually detracts from a game’s “fun factor,”…]

A ton of great games are coming to the Ninendo DS this year that you just can’t wait to get your hands on!

For a medium that lets us chainsaw faces off, punch presidents in their plums and slaughter endangered species; it’s amazing how sensitive some of us get when developers do things we don’t agree with.