The Times: Tech column - Gaming and health/biometrics/flashmobs
By David Rowan
COULD PLAYING computer games be good for you? It has always been a first principle in media reporting of gaming that five minutes with a console will turn you into a short tempered, violent misfit. Yet a growing stack of academic research this year suggests that playing Doom or Half-Life can sharpen your physical reactions and improve your social life.
Last week a team at Oxford University published research suggesting that computer games could enhance children's listening skills and improve their language acquisition. A game called Phonomena, devised by David Moore at the university, has, he claims, proved so effective at teaching children the phonemes that make up words that in a few weeks their educational progress was advanced by up to two years.
In a separate paper a few weeks earlier, Daphne Bavelier and Shawn Green, at Rochester University in New York, suggested that games players of all ages also have better visual skills than the rest of us. Students who had played games such as Grand Theft Auto3 and Spider-Man almost every day for six months (tough assignment, this) could locate a target on a busy screen more quickly than non-gamers, and also scored better when identifying objects that flashed up for an instant. When non- gamers took up playing for an hour a day, their sight quickly improved - which Bavelier attributes to the complex demands placed on players' brains and their heightened sensory awareness. As for the stereotype of the sad solo gamer, other research from Talmadge Wright, at Loyola University, Chicago, suggests that fans of first-person shooter games such as Counter-Strike are better than non players at building the trust and co-operation that gives rise to strong communities and good friendships.
Of course, academics will never entirely agree - a couple of more downbeat studies from Japan reinforce the notion of young gamers as more aggressive and less creative than non-players. But since Britain now spends almost £1.1 billion each year on games, compared with £755 million on cinema and £476 million renting videos, this is now such an established branch of the entertainment industry that the old stereotypes really should be blasted out of the sky. You would not know this from the tabloid headlines, but the average age of video- game players is 29, according to new research for the Entertainment Software Association - and almost a fifth of players are aged over 50. And more than a quarter of gamers are now - gasp! - women over 18. Did someone tell them it was healthy or something?
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MEMO to David Blunkett: maybe your plan to introduce biometric identifiers such as fingerprint readers is not as foolproof as you would have us think. Two German hackers, Starbug and Lisa, have just demonstrated in Berlin how they took a digital photo of someone else's fingerprint which they transferred to a latex patch that they wore over a finger. The trick appears to have fooled a fingerprint scanner.
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THREE WEEKS AGO, when the papers were full of mobs bursting into furniture stores in mobile-phone-co-ordinated stunts, this column dismissed "flash-mobbing" as a "silly-season media fad that will disappear once the novelty wears off". The bubble has already burst: parody flash-bobbing is the latest trend. The Antimob Project, for instance, is a web-based phenomenon that "lets you go about your ordinary business and yet know that you are part of a profound cultural event", largely by avoiding crowds. Then there is Flashmugging.com, devoted to joining groups of young, naive, wealthy, bored fashionistas, then mugging them.
(The Times, September 2 2003)
COULD PLAYING computer games be good for you? It has always been a first principle in media reporting of gaming that five minutes with a console will turn you into a short tempered, violent misfit. Yet a growing stack of academic research this year suggests that playing Doom or Half-Life can sharpen your physical reactions and improve your social life.
Last week a team at Oxford University published research suggesting that computer games could enhance children's listening skills and improve their language acquisition. A game called Phonomena, devised by David Moore at the university, has, he claims, proved so effective at teaching children the phonemes that make up words that in a few weeks their educational progress was advanced by up to two years.
In a separate paper a few weeks earlier, Daphne Bavelier and Shawn Green, at Rochester University in New York, suggested that games players of all ages also have better visual skills than the rest of us. Students who had played games such as Grand Theft Auto3 and Spider-Man almost every day for six months (tough assignment, this) could locate a target on a busy screen more quickly than non-gamers, and also scored better when identifying objects that flashed up for an instant. When non- gamers took up playing for an hour a day, their sight quickly improved - which Bavelier attributes to the complex demands placed on players' brains and their heightened sensory awareness. As for the stereotype of the sad solo gamer, other research from Talmadge Wright, at Loyola University, Chicago, suggests that fans of first-person shooter games such as Counter-Strike are better than non players at building the trust and co-operation that gives rise to strong communities and good friendships.
Of course, academics will never entirely agree - a couple of more downbeat studies from Japan reinforce the notion of young gamers as more aggressive and less creative than non-players. But since Britain now spends almost £1.1 billion each year on games, compared with £755 million on cinema and £476 million renting videos, this is now such an established branch of the entertainment industry that the old stereotypes really should be blasted out of the sky. You would not know this from the tabloid headlines, but the average age of video- game players is 29, according to new research for the Entertainment Software Association - and almost a fifth of players are aged over 50. And more than a quarter of gamers are now - gasp! - women over 18. Did someone tell them it was healthy or something?
++++
MEMO to David Blunkett: maybe your plan to introduce biometric identifiers such as fingerprint readers is not as foolproof as you would have us think. Two German hackers, Starbug and Lisa, have just demonstrated in Berlin how they took a digital photo of someone else's fingerprint which they transferred to a latex patch that they wore over a finger. The trick appears to have fooled a fingerprint scanner.
++++
THREE WEEKS AGO, when the papers were full of mobs bursting into furniture stores in mobile-phone-co-ordinated stunts, this column dismissed "flash-mobbing" as a "silly-season media fad that will disappear once the novelty wears off". The bubble has already burst: parody flash-bobbing is the latest trend. The Antimob Project, for instance, is a web-based phenomenon that "lets you go about your ordinary business and yet know that you are part of a profound cultural event", largely by avoiding crowds. Then there is Flashmugging.com, devoted to joining groups of young, naive, wealthy, bored fashionistas, then mugging them.
(The Times, September 2 2003)
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