Tag Archives: Video Games

How Much Time Should Kids Spend Playing Video Games

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Peter Gray has a nicely contrarian article at Psychology Today weighing in on the debate over how much “screen time” children should have each week. I’ve talked to about a dozen psychiatrists and psychologists about this over the past few years when it comes to my own kids and it is interesting how diverse the opinions were, from one person who didn’t allow his children any screen time, to another who was more “anything goes.”

Gray comes down closer to the latter view,

I have a very high opinion of children’s abilities to make good choices about how to use their free time, as long as they really have choices. Some kids go through long periods of doing what seems like just one thing, and then some adults think there’s something wrong, because they (the adults) would not make that choice. But in my experience, if kids are really free to play and explore in lots of different ways, and they end up playing or exploring in what seems to be just one way, then they are doing that because they are getting something really meaningful out of it.

In my family, both my wife and I play a lot of video games. And what we emphasize to our kids is the importance of balance. Mom plays World of Warcraft, but she doesn’t say, “I’m not going to make dinner or go to work today because I’d rather play video games.” In fact, although we play a lot of video games, we also do a lot of reading, and other activities in our free time.

We’re more project-oriented than time-oriented at our house. Kids get home at 4 p.m. and bedtime is 9 p.m. Each day there are a certain number of tasks that each child is expected to finish, whether that is homework, helping out with dinner, cleaning, etc. Once our children have finished the tasks we expect them to finish that day, they are free to use their free time as they wish. Sometimes that means my 9 year old whips off a three hour session of World of Warcraft or Skyrim. More often it means they tend to mix up their activities, alternating between watching television, playing video games, reading, or other activities such as playing board games or going swimming.

Which is not to say I wouldn’t step in and place limits on my children’s screen time if they failed to live up to their responsibilities. My son knows the laptop in his room is there because he does such a good job of keeping up with all of the things my wife and I expect him to do, and that it can easily be removed or the password changed if he acts inappropriately (something we’ve only had to do a handful of times).

Gender and Character Creation in Saints Row 2

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Saints Row 2 is essentially the stereotypical video game. By that, I mean that when I talk to non-gamers about video games, they all imagine every video game is essentially one long romp of extreme violence and explicit sex with no discernible plot or mitigating feature. Saints Row 2 is that video game and more.

Anna Anthropy also argues that the game makes some interesting choices in how it handles the gender of the main character the user plays:

There are tons of gendered accessories for the player’s character – she’s surrounded by urban gang culture, or some facsimile thereof – but the game gives the player the choice of how to use those accessories (or not) to present her gender. Play as a burly man in a dress and heels, a woman with a beard, someone totally androgynous – I played through the game as a fat woman, and I can’t remember the last time a game, mainstream or otherwise, gave me that choice. You can present as a wide variety of genders because, for all the game’s scripted scenes and recorded dialogue, no one ever gives you a gender.

 

All of the dialogue has been written to explicitly avoid giving the protagonist a gender, in fact. Your gang minions address you as “Boss,” and refer to you in third person either as “the Boss” or “the leader of the Saints.” No one ever gives you a pronoun. There’s a scene early in the game where one of the Saints’ lieutenants is planning a raid on a casino by moving bobble heads of the gang members through a scale model of the place: the player’s character is represented by a featureless, genderless chess pawn. The player is given the room to internalize her character how she pleases. At the start of Saint’s Row 2, a fellow Saint who knows the protagonist from the first Saint’s Row says, “You look different. You do something with your hair?” That’s the game’s tacit acceptance of however you’ve decided to present your character. And who’s going to question it? Who would fuck with the boss of the Saints?

Couldn’t agree more, and I wish more games would give you this range of choices.

For the life of me, for example, I cannot understand why Madden NFL will not allow me to create a female character for its Superstar mode. The common argument I seen online is that this wouldn’t be “realistic”. Really? Well, it is not very realistic when I run for 1,000 yards in a game on the Rookie setting either.

This is what games do best after all — allow players to make all sorts of different choices in simulated worlds and see what happens. A video game where gang leaders and starting linebackers can only be one gender is beyond dull.

KontrolFreek Accessories for XBOX 360 Controllers

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KontrolFreek makes a variety of accessories for XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 controllers designed to make them work better with different kinds of games.

For example, the FPS Freek lengthens the thumbsticks,

By increasing the length of the thumbsticks slightly, precision while aiming is improved dramatically.  Your range of motion is increased by 40%, giving you the opportunity to make smaller adjustments and “snap” to targets much faster in first-person shooters.  This affords you the luxury of turning up sensitivities to get the closest feel to a mouse possible on a console without an internal controller mod or cheat.

These have gotten pretty good reviews, and for $9.99-$13.99/pair are fairly cheap to give a try.

What Are Video Game Studies Really Measuring?

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Christopher Ferguson wrote a pithy analysis of yet another study claiming that playing (and, in this case, even thinking about) violent video games increases aggression, at least in males. Ferguson does an excellent job of highlighting many of the methodological issues with many such studies, but its an interesting finding about the amount of time spent playing video games in these sorts of studies that I wanted to draw attention to.

In the study Ferguson criticizes, study participants were divided into two groups. One group played either a violent or non-violent video game for 20 minutes. Near the end of his essay, Ferguson notes that in studies of aggression after playing violent video games there is an odd trend — the longer the study participants play the violent video games, the smaller the affect on aggression tends to be. Why could this possibly be?

Ferguson writes,

More recently Przybylski, Rigby and Ryan (2010) seem to have figured out why.  It turns out violent video games often have more difficult controls than non-violent games.  When exposure times are short, violent game players are cut off before they’ve even figured out the controls.  Imagine trying to master Modern Warfare 2 while people randomized to the non-violent condition are humming away at Tetris (and I’ve seen just those kinds of parings in research more than once, I wish I were exaggerating).  Any “aggression” appears to be due to being frustrated at being cut off at such a short interval.  At longer intervals players have mastered the controls and fewer differences between randomized groups are seen.

Apparently we should go ahead and play violent video games, as long as its not for only 20 minutes at a time…

Interesting.

Charlie Stross on the Future of Video Games

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I happen to be a complete Charles Stross fanboy so your mileage may vary on this one, but his speech at LOGIN 2009 on  the state of gaming in 2030 is Stross at his best in extrapolating current trends to the near future.

Much of what Stross talks about is already starting to happen — the smartphone is starting to become ubiquitous as it becomes more powerful and has access to faster and faster bandwidth. Stross envisions a future where this leads to augmented reality so we no longer play games so much as we are constantly surrounded by the Internet and games everywhere we go.

For example: if you point your phone at a shop front tagged with an equivalent location in the information space, you can squint at it through the phone’s screen and see … whatever the cyberspace equivalent of the shop is. If the person you’re pointing it at is another player in a live-action game you’re in (that is: if their phone is logged in at the same time, so the game server knows you’re both in proximity), you’ll see their avatar. And so on.

Using these gizmos, we won’t need to spend all our time pounding keys and clicking mice inside our web browsers. Instead, we’re going to end up with the internet smearing itself all over the world around us, visible at first in glimpses through enchanted windows, and then possibly through glasses, or contact lenses, with embedded projection displays.

God, I want to live in that world. Except once we get there, as Edward Castronova has argued, how do we make the “real world” compelling enough to get people to stick around and do the not-so-fun things that keep civilization going?

What Are Game Achievements For?

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Whether you love them, can’t stand them, or could care less, achievement systems within games are clearly here to stay. Personally, I’m a big fan of achievements, both to track my progress in a game  in general as well as in relation to other people  as well as to give an excuse to do goofy things that I might not otherwise think to try out. And, of course, they’re yet another form of the constant reward/reinforcement  system that most good video games have really nailed down (usually complete with visual effect and even music to further reinforce the reward).

But as one young woman profiled by Kotaku demonstrates, once you start adding achievements with assigned points to games, some people will start playing the achievements themselves as a sort of meta-game. The games themselves are simply something to grind through on the way to an achievement score. In the case of the Kotaku profile, Kristen has amassed an XBOX gamerscore of 165,000 and is grinding her way to 200,000, frequently playing games she could care less about except for the achievement points she can gain from them.

Quite a few people in the comments don’t see the point of playing the achievement system as a game, but that seems just as legitimate a way to approach video games as any other.