Yes, you read the headline right! On October 9th, several leaders from both church and charity groups in England had a round-table discussion with The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association and came away with the conclusion that, in fact, games can have a positive impact on people’s lives, especially children’s.

Several interesting points were brought up in the article (found here):

• That children now see gaming as an everyday life activity, as evidenced by average TV watching going down from 3 hours a day to 2.5 sinced 2001.
• That parents can make their own decisions based off of the ratings given to games by the PEGI rating system.
• That the industry’s job is to make the ratings and inform people, but to still let parents make the decisions.
• Gaming (especially social video games) can be used by teachers and parents to help talk about boundaries and learn what is acceptable socially both in games and in the real world.
• Games can be used to open a dialogue between parents and children (talking about the type of games the children are playing, for example.
• Parents need to be engaged as well to ensure their kids stay safe in the evironment of online gaming.

What I really liked about these points is that it is clear where these groups believe the responsibility of the industry ends and the responsiblity of parents again. Especially in the United States, where game companies and the like are sued time and time again because someone’s thirteen-year-old got a copy of Grand Theft Auto and the parents were shocked by the violent contents, it’s refreshing to see groups outside of the industry saying that parents have a responsibility when it comes to their children’s gaming, too. I believe it’s important to understand that the industry can only do so much to help parents choose the right games for their kids.

That the roundtable legitimately saw games as tools to help children about socially acceptable behaviour was fascinating, as well. I hope in the future that more people will begin to see games for the educational tools that they can easily be, and not just as wastes of time or trivial pursuits.

Lastly, this article gave me hope that with a clear dialogue between the industry and family interest groups, a productive line of discussion can be started that is in everyone’s best interest, thereby benefiting everyone, gamer or not.

Today’s photo is by flickr user gailf548. The original photo can be found here and is used under the Creative Commons License. It should also be noted that I was linked to this story through Kotaku.

An interesting article popped up over at Kotaku today. Now people that are 50 years old and above (well, at least 100,000 of them, some of whom are as old as 75 and all of whom live in Pennsylvania) are receiving computer games specially made to test them for visual alertness, as well as to keep these older folks’ cognitive decline on hold. Posit Science, the developer, will compare the performance of these people to the accident rates of their demographic, as well as track the number of hours each driver plays the games for. The purpose of this is for Allstate to at least try to see exactly why the accident rate among older drivers spikes once they hit their mid-sixties.

And, if all goes well, these drivers may even get a break on their car insurance.

I just want to say that I think this has the potential to be pretty cool. While it’s been reported for quite some time that video games help to train people’s hand-eye coordination, very few commercial companies have made an attempt to do anything with it. In my view, Allstate even trying this out will help to legitimize games as more than just toys to non-gamers across the US. This also opens the door for other companies to experiment with game-based training. Hopefully, this is only an early step to a world where games are used as more than just toys, but as tools for self-improvement that can help build a better tomorrow.

Today’s picture is from the flickr album of user davidden.  The original photo can be found here.  Used under Creative Commons licensing.

Right now I’m just so freaking excited about this game that I could piss my pants.

Ahem.

Sorry about that. I’m just a bit excited because Tad William’s sci-fi book series Otherland has been just begging for a video-game adaptation of some sort ever since it was written. The books mostly take place in a fantastical world of virtual reality, where anyone can build anything, as long as they have the money to do so, and avatars roam freely and play different games and interact in a myriad of ways.

Making a game out of people using the Internet, despite doing so in virtual reality, seems like a difficult task. But as far as I can tell, RealU and dtp entertainment AG (the developer and publisher, respectively) are nailing it. There’s not a ton of detail on the game right now, but we do know that it will run on the Unreal 3 engine, and that they’re aiming for 1080p resolution with a quad core processor for the benchmarks. All of this basically translates to the game looking extremely pretty, as you can tell from the image above.

Players will start out with a relatively featureless avatar, and then, as they learn to “manipulate the code” of the virtual reality their character inhabits, players can improve their avatar’s look, slowly gain more health, and so on. The very nature of the books and the previews released so far also hint at user generated content, although only time will really tell on that front.

So far two locations have been announced: Lambda Mall, which will serve as a social hub for the world, where NPCs and Player Characters alike will be able to hand out quests, and a host of minigames will be available for play at various shops; and Mars, the first of many virtual reality worlds built by characters in the game, which features a tower that looks like it’s a mile high. Both look absolutely incredible, and they’ve obviously been designed with an eye toward the fantastical.

The story gets a special note, as well. Tad Williams himself has been heavily involved in the game since its inception, and is apparently very happy with what’s going on so far, as you can see in his blog post on the subject. The story will not be a retread of the books’ either; players will define their own stories throughtout the game, although characters from the books will show up, although their roles haven’t been made especially clear.

I think this game has a shot. It’s the first really high-quality looking MMO to come along in a long time. It has quite a few really unique gameplay concepts, and, for once, it looks like an MMO developer isn’t just copying WoW.

Good luck to you, RealU and dtp entertainment AG. Keep it up, and I’ll be buying this game on day one.

Today’s picture comes from Tad Williams’ blog post on the game. Information comes from both that blog post and this fabulous preview article by Eurogamer.