Just a few weeks after a child psychiatrist called for games to feature exercise ratings, a non-profit health advocacy group affiliated with Games for Health has released its own exergame rating system.

The Exergame Network (TEN) came up with its Exergaming Experience Rating System (EERS), which scores games first on their game play, interface and energy expended, and then grades on an additional seven criteria, including customization, accessibility, biometric feedback, intervention capability, socialization, sustainability and safety.
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Researchers from the University of Barcelona have created a way to transfer actual human physiological telemetry from an active participant to an on-screen avatar.

Using a variety of sensors and wireless devices, parameters such as heart rate, respiration and “the galvanic (electric) skin response” are transferred immediately to a virtual character, which, in the case of the researcher’s demo, is sitting in a virtual waiting room (pictured).

It was described further that, “The heart rate is reflected in the movement of the character's feet; respiration in the rising of their chest (exaggerated movements so that it can be noticed); and the galvanic skin response in the more or less reddish colour of the face.”
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In order to make its safety training more appealing to workers, the Louisiana Transportation Research Center’s (LTRC) Transportation Training and Education Center (TTEC) is trying out a pilot program that involves videogame-based teaching.

The center is now testing a simulator that allows participants to man an on-screen avatar as they run though required procedures in simulated work zones. Activities center on properly flagging equipment, operating flags correctly and following other correct safety actions.

TTEC Associate Director Glynn Cavin told 2TheAdvocate that the new training may eventually replace the currently employed conventional classroom method, which some highway workers find “unappealing,” to which he added, “It just doesn’t work well.”
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Stephen Yang, a SUNY Cortland Professor and Games for Health advocate, appeared on Good Morning America earlier this month to discuss the impact games are having on the health field.

Yang demonstrated games such as the Wii-based Just Dance, billing it as chance to “imitate and have fun,” adding, “It’s for exercise, enjoyment, socialization… that’s the whole point of games, it brings us all together.”

Yang then showed off a prototype game from Red Hill Studios that's designed to (hopefully) improve the balance of Parkinson's sufferers.

Nothing really new, but always nice to see games championed in the media and the spotlight put on great initiatives like Games for Health.

Founded by people behind the Sarcastic Gamer website, the Extra Life charity drive encourages teams of gamers, or sole participants, to play games for a 24-hour stretch in order to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network.

The 2008 and 2009 events raised a total of $302,000, all of which went directly to the charity. The best part: anyone can join in and raise funds simply by registering, creating a personal fundraising page and then hitting up friends and relatives as sponsors.

Extra Life 2010 kicks off on Saturday, October 16 at 8:00 AM in participant’s local time zone. This year’s event also boasts involvement by a team of editors from IGN, which is sure to raise awareness of the event, and hopefully donations as well.

Entrants in this year’s challenge can also choose to contribute proceeds to the Children’s Miracle Network hospital of their choice.

While videogame addiction still isn’t recognized by the American Medical Association, an article on the subject in the Dayton Daily News features quotes from Iowa State researcher Douglas Gentile in which he continues to make the push that videogame addiction is real.

The article begins with a mention of Quinn Pitcock, the ex-NFL player attempting a comeback with the Seattle Seahawks following a bout with depression, which, he claims, led to excessive videogame play. From there the article evolves into a discussion on the subject of game addiction itself.

Sarah Greenwell, a Pediatric Psychologist from the Children’s Medic l Center of Dayton, kicks off the piece by stating that, throughout her years of service, she has come across only two kids that were genuinely addicted to videogames.
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A study undertaken by researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong indicates that near-sightedness (myopia) has increased significantly over a 10-year period in the youth of that region, and handheld videogames were given most of the blame.

The study was actually carried out between 2006 and 2007 and involved over 800 kids between the ages of two and six. Results were then compared to a similar study undertaken in 1996. It was reported that the number of cases of near-sightedness rose from 157 kids to 222, and that the number of children wearing glasses rose from 2.3 percent in the older study to 6.3 percent in the newer one.

Dennis Lam Shun-chiu, Chairman of the school’s Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences pinned the blame on “playing video games - especially in moving vehicles - and watching television or using a computer for a long time and sitting too close to screens…” according to The Standard.
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A Nintendo DS helped one eight-year old boy cope with the hospital stays and treatments resulting from a diagnosis that he had acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).

Now nine-years old, the plight of Genre Baker of North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania inspired the formation of the Genre’s Kids with Cancer Fund, which has the goal of outfitting similarly affected sick children at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh with their own handheld game systems to help them pass the time.

Genre, in a Pittsburgh Live story on his travails, said, “Whenever I was in the hospital, I had to stay there for hours and there was nothing to do but play my (Nintendo) DS. I wanted other kids to be able to have one, too, if they didn't.”

Neighboring Irwin, Pennsylvania will be the scene of a fund raising race/walk, called Footsteps in Faith, for the charity on August 28. Entrants can choose to participate in a 5k run or a one mile walk.
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Citing its affordability and simplicity, researchers from Maryland and Ohio State University are trying out Nintendo’s Wii as a means to evaluate the severity and lingering effects of concussions.

A Washington Post article on the subject indicates that taking tabs on an athlete’s balance is one way to measure recovery from a blow to the head, but researchers are split on the effectiveness of using the videogame device.

Experts at Maryland have athletes get on board a Wii Fit and attempt to mimic three different yoga poses, once with their eyes open and once with them closed. They also play a weight-shifting game and, eventually, all data recovered from the activities is tabulated and stored. If a player receives a concussion, the thought is that team doctors would now posses “a frame of reference to measure how far an athlete's ability to function is from its starting point.”

Once athletes met their pre-concussion scores, in theory, they could return to the field.
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As the gaming world continues to evolve further into the era of true interactive gaming, one child psychiatrist thinks it’s time for a new ratings system that informs consumers about a game’s ability to contribute to exercise.

Paul Ballas guest-authored a Wired article on the subject following an introduction to, among other things, Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Kinect technology at this year’s E3 Expo. Ballas thinks that if videogame developers focused their efforts on creating games that also provided a cardiovascular workout, “there is a real chance of striking a blow against childhood obesity.”

To that end Ballas outlined the type of content descriptors he would like to see:

Similar to Food and Drug Administration-mandated labels on food, an exercise rating system could estimate the calories burned by the average person in an hour of gameplay. The label could range from Sedentary for lean-back, button-intensive shooting games to Active for games with a calorie-expenditure rate comparable to playing basketball. Read More

If you are concerned that 3D movies and games are bad for your eyes, then the words of Dr. Mark Borchert, an L.A.-based ophthalmologist, will make you feel good. Speaking to Gamasutra, Borchert says that 3D entertainment is generally harmless to most people, and that there's no need to be concerned about long term damage to your eyes.

Borchert, who also works at The Vision Center at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, didn't have a definitive answer on how 3D content can affect children's vision, saying that ophthalmologists just "don't have an answer" to what the negative effects of 3D effect viewing are on young children.

"It's not likely to cause any permanent harm to vision," Borchert told Gamasutra. "There are people who get uncomfortable with it, and get eye strain or headaches, or on much rarer occasions, a sense of imbalance or nausea, but there's no evidence it can cause permanent harm to your vision or use of both eyes together or anything like that." Read More

Earlier this week Game Politics reported that Microsoft's Kinect would be able to recognize sign language - at least according to some patents that were unearthed. Today a spokesperson for Microsoft denied the story, or at least support for sign language in its motion sensing technology for Xbox 360 coming out this fall.

So why would a patent point to such technology if it didn't exist? Because it does exist, but support for it was apparently dropped to keep the cost of Kinect low. A source with understanding of Kinect's development told Kotaku that it was dumped "because the version of the hardware that'll be available later this year isn't as capable as was originally intended."

In other words, the technology isn't as powerful as it used to be because Microsoft decided to use cheaper components- Specifically, the camera which now has a lower resolution. Read More

All My Children actor J.R. Martinez (pictured) is the new spokesperson for Rehabbing with the Troops, a virtual rehabilitation program that links wounded U.S. military personnel with professional athletes via webcam as they work out using a Nintendo Wii.

Martinez himself is an ex-infantryman who suffered burns to more than 40 percent of his body in 2003 while serving in Iraq. He will work out with wounded warriors from Season One of Rehabbing with the Troops, which kicked off in June and wraps up on August 21 in New Orleans. Members of the Super Bowl champions Saints acted as this year’s pro trainers.

Martinez said about his new role, “This program is so important—it raises awareness of the challenges facing wounded warriors while giving each participant a source of motivation and a goal to work toward.”

Participants in the virtual rehab document their workouts on the Wounded Warrior Arena website. More on what a season consists of: Read More

Good news for the hearing-impaired—Microsoft’s new controller-free technology appears like it will support the use of American Sign Language (ASL).

In a U.S. patent application, as noticed by SlashGear, Microsoft lays out the basic framework behind Kinect.

One section, illustrated in an image on SlashGear, shows a person making sign language gestures that Kinect can understand.

More: Read More

The University of Washington has created a wonderful new game similar to Sony's Folding@Home project (part of the SETI@home project) on the PS3. The freely available game matches against automated computer routines that "ascertain how amino acids twist into their ideal shapes." The game is called Foldit (or Fold.it if you want to get technical) and is the result of two-years of biochemistry and computer science work at the University of Washington. The goal of the game is to come up with a better and more expedient way to fold proteins by harnessing the creativity and mental acumen of videogame players.

"People in the scientific community have known about Foldit for a while, and everybody thought it was a great idea," wrote UW associate computer science and engineer professor Zoran Popovic in a press statement. "But the really fundamental question in most scientists' minds was 'What can it produce in terms of results? Is there any evidence that it's doing something useful? I hope this paper will convince a lot of those people who were sitting on the sidelines, and the whole genre of scientific discovery games will really take off." Read More

Do you live in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia or Mississippi? If you do, odds are you need to go on a diet and, according to one “expert,” cut back on playing videogames.

The population of the states listed above had obesity rates in excess of 30 percent, according to statistics released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An article on Florida’s TCPalm.com, where the obesity rate clocked in at 25.2 percent, discussed the fattening trend with Dr. Jefferson Vaughan, a surgeon based in Jupiter, Florida. Vaughan on the obesity epidemic:

There has been a generational change. When I was a kid, there were three TV channels and they all played Watergate tapes.

Today it's much more convenient to go through the drive-through while your kid plays his Game Boy in the back seat. Read More

The University of Central Florida is developing a game designed to teach pre-teen girls how to fend off peer pressure-driven sex.

A report on the game by an Orlando Fox affiliate bills the title as promoting abstinence among kids and works by using “simulation and digital puppetry.” Charles Hughes, a UCF Computer Science Professor described it by saying, “…one person controls many characters by jumping into the skin.”

The price tag of the game was put at around $434,000, which seems exorbitant until you consider that the game makes use of motion-capture suits and infra-red lights which enable users to control the on-screen avatars. The game is expected to be completed next year.

A Fox anchor introduced the story by noting that “It is your money and the University of Central Florida is using it for a surprising project.”

A proposed bill currently sitting in front of France’s Parliament seeks government assistance in promoting the risks that the overuse of videogames might have on that country's youth.

GP Reader Soldat_Louis pointed us towards the possible legislation (translated) and also broke down for us exactly how the bill made it from the country’s “Children’s Parliament” all the way to the real one: Read More

If you haven't been living under a rock, you've probably heard about "Jessi Slaughter", a.k.a. "Kerligirl13", and her controversial attention-seeking videos on Youtube and other video sharing sites. Now, it's nothing new for kids to act like fools on Youtube. But Jessie took her videos just a bit too far, and the Internet struck back.

After becoming something of an internet meme for posting threats like "I'll pop a glock in your mouth and make a brain slushie" she aroused the unstoppable ire of /b/, which began a campaign of trolling her videos. And so it began, with /b/ posting her personal information, and bombing search engine results to make things like "Did Jessi Slaughter's dad give her PCP?" a trending topic. You know, the usual stuff.
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Insurance company The Hartford is promoting a game called DriveSharp and offering its elderly policy holders a $50 rebate for those that complete 10 hours of play in the title.

DriveSharp is built around three separate exercises—Jewel Diver, Sweeper Seeker and Road Tour—which may “feel like games but are serious science.” It was claimed that a study published in the Journal of American Medical Association reported that users of DriveSharp reduced car crashes, increased useful field of view, reacted faster to dangers and drove with greater confidence at night.

The game costs $79, which might lead you to ask what a user would get out of their $19 investment (after a rebate). A rep from The Hartford answered that question for the Hartford Courant, stating, “Peace of mind and maintaining independence by continuing to drive.”

A breakthrough in CT (Cat) scan reconstruction technology that utilizes graphic processing (GPU) units could lead to lower amounts of radiation being absorbed by patients undergoing cone beam CT scans.

Previous attempts at (essentially) turning down the radiation emitted during a CT scan (by “reducing the total number of X-ray projections and the mAs level per projection“) resulted in “mathematically incomplete data” that took hours to process. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, however, have developed a CT reconstruction algorithm that processes data in parallel, turning the process into a two-minute task.

Lead Author Xun Jia reported that reconstruction time ranged from 77 to 130 seconds when using an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU card, which he estimated was 100 times faster than similar reconstruction approaches.
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Voting is now open in the Apps for Healthy Kids competition, a part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign designed to motivate kids to become more physically active and eat healthier.

After registering with the website, users can vote for their favorite apps across a variety of categories—Calorie Content, Menu Planner, My Pyramid, Nutrition Facts and Physical Activity.

In addition to public votes, a panel of luminaries, including ESA President Michael Gallagher, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, LucasArts Software Engineer Eric Johnston, thatgamecompany Producer Robin Hunicke and Google Game Advocate Mark DeLoura, will weigh in with their favorite selections.

The Grand Prize Winner receives a $10,000 prize, with $4,500 going to the runner up. Voting ends around August 14.

A couple days ago we detailed problems kids might have with 3D imagery, whether in TV or videogame form. Now a new report that emerged from the UK reports that 12 percent of the population may have visual impairments that make their brains “unable to correctly process the individual images that are transmitted to it via our [their] left and right eyes.”

The Eyecare Trust story, as pointed out by Edge (Thanks IndustryGamers), claims that such a malady would lead to “inconsistency in viewing the three spatial dimensions (height, width and depth) required to enjoy 3-D films in all their glory.”
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When not deflating the findings of game-hating researchers, Texas A&M International University Associate Professor Christopher Ferguson often conducts his own studies, including a recent example which indicates that violent videogame players handle stress better than non-players and can actually feel less depressed and stressful following a session with aggressive games.

The Hitman Study: Violent Video Game Exposure Effects on Aggressive Behavior, Hostile Feeling and Depression (press release) was authored by Ferguson and his fellow TAMIU colleague Stephanie Rueda. The study included 103 students from a “Hispanic-serving public university” in the Southern U.S. 62 were male and 41 were female, with 98 Hispanics, three Caucasian and two who declined to answer.
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Has the consumer electronics industry been downplaying the negative effects 3D technology might have on a viewer’s health?

This is the angle a column on Audioholics takes, insinuating that Sega specifically buried a report by the Stanford Research Lab on its VR Headset. The story claims that the lab came back with “dire warnings about the hazards of prolonged use” and warned Sega specifically that “you cannot give this to kids!” The product never did make it to market.

The column also states that “Children under seven are at risk of strabismus – period.” Strabismus, also called “lazy-eye,” is described as “an abnormal alignment of the eyes in which the eyes don’t focus on the same object and depth perception is compromised.” While the condition can be treated, the author wonders if “it’s also never too late to learn bad habits that could create visual problems.”

The following conclusion was offered: Read More

UK game industry group TIGA was more than happy to share research which indicated that children who play sports-themed videogames were likely to participate in real sporting activities as well.

French business school ESSEC had students in its International Sports Marketing Chair conduct the study and found that 38 percent of boys, under the age of 21, who played sport videogames practiced their favorite virtual sport in real life. Additionally, the study claimed that 75 percent of gamers (presumably from the same age group) actively took part in some kind of real sport.

“Video games are frequently demonized,” said ESSEC’s Thierry Lardinoit adding, “We now know that these fears are unfounded.”

Lardinoit continued, “There is a strong correlation between playing video games and participating in real sports. Watching television is a threat to physical activity.  Video games are not, however.”
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A wilderness-based addiction and substance abuse treatment center in Utah has added a rehabilitation track for young men addicted to the Internet and videogames.

Passages to Recovery begins treatment with a 40-day wilderness experience, which is then followed by on-site treatment. The center announced that its Clinical Director, Lucy Taylor, LPC, recently completed certifications in online gaming, anonymity in online relationships, pornography and infidelity, and the psychology of Internet misuse. Taylor was tutored by Kimberly Young, PsyD, from the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery.

Videogame addiction treatment will begin with “an assessment of the client’s patterns of use and the needs that are being met by gaming.” As Taylor explained, “Most people abuse the Internet or video games to meet an underlying need. Our goal is to help our clients decrease stress and increase pleasure without numbing themselves or trying to fill a void through video games or the Internet.”
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The Indie Game Magazine (IGM) has launched a summer promotion that will serve to benefit the gaming charity Get-Well Gamers.

Through August 15, IGM will donate 20 percent of its revenue to Get-Well Gamers. The magazine is also running a Name Your Price promotion in which those who donate $20 or more will receive a one-year subscription to IGM, while donations less than $20 will see users receive an instantly downloadable issue. Extra revenue from the Name Your Price promotion will also be directed to the charity. Donators will also be entered into drawings for videogame swag.

Get-Well Gamers outfits children’s hosipitals with electronic entertainment and recently outfitted its 100th facility.

Get-Well Gamers President Ryan Sharpe stated, “We are always surprised and grateful to those who step forward to help the foundation.” Read More

Results of a recent study appear to show that one in four children exceed the recommended time spent in front of a screen (watching TV and movies or playing videogames) per day.

Influence of Limit-Setting and Participation in Physical Activity on Youth Screen Time (PDF) appears in this month’s issue of Pediatrics and was authored by Susan Carlson, Janet Fulton, Sarah Lee, John Foley, Carrie Heitzler and Marian Huhman. The study was based around a recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) which advised that children over two years of age should be limited to “no more” than one or two hours of “quality programming” per day.

The survey polled 7,415 youth between the ages of nine and fifteen years old and found that “Odds that children would exceed recommended screen-time limits were positively associated with age and black race/ethnicity and negatively associated with income level.”
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As one Guardian author wondered what happened to the ambition of boys, citing videogames as at least a contributing factor, another Guardian columnist fired back, defending games as part of the solution.

Will Hutton’s Sunday column examined the possible reasons why society is churning out “so many disaffected, troubled and disengaged young men.” Hutton argued that “the great male demotivator is the risk of loss of face.” He continued:

One of the reasons that boys do not try harder is that the penalties for disengagement are so low – indeed, there are even rewards, at least in the sense that if you don't try, you can't fail. Much better to smoke dope, hang out and obsessively play computer games all day. Read More