New research from Duke University published in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics finds that first-person shooters (or action games) help gamers to develop increased visual sensitivity that can be used to react quickly to stimuli in their field of vision. Games mentioned include Call of Duty and BioShock. The more immersed they are in the self-contained world of a video game, the better gamers become at quickly making "probabilistic inferences" about what certain visual indicators might lead to, even with limited information.

Monash University researcher Dr. Andy Ruddock from the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies and Brendan Keogh from the School of Media and Communication at RMIT (both in Australia, in case you didn't know) will host a seminar to discuss how better collaboration between media effects researchers and games studies researchers can find common ground and work together to improve understanding on the effects of violent video games on real world behavior.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) this week asked the Institute of Medicine in conjunction with the National Research Council to form a committee that will look at the influence of video games and other media on real-life violence. The IOM is part of the federally funded National Academy of Sciences. It will also focus on gun violence - something it has not been allowed to do since Congress put a stop to such research from being allowed way back in 1993.

Video games can make teens better citizens, according to Kathy Sanford, an education professor at the University of Victoria, (British Columbia, Canada) She comes to this conclusion after a five year research project that followed a group of teens between the ages of 13-17 years old. Sanford sat down with The Globe and Mail earlier this week to talk about her findings before presenting them at a UVic conference of humanities and social sciences.

According to a new study by marketing professors Masakazu Ishihara of the New York University Stern School of Business and Andrew Ching of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, if the used games market were to completely disappear it would cause a decline in profits for publishers. The only way that publishers could gain momentum in such a situation would be to lower retail prices on games, the study said.

A man who murdered an entire family with a tire iron in 2009 in their Beason, Ill. home tried to use video games as part of his defense earlier this week. After one day of deliberations a jury delivered a stinging verdict.

An interesting editorial penned by Barbara Jones, the director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom for the American Library Association, puts the brakes on all the talk about banning video games from public libraries.

A recent study by Texas A&M International University chair and associate professor, psychology Dr. Christopher J. Ferguson shows that childhood media consumption is not a predictor for future adult criminal behavior. The long-held (and as of yet unproven) argument has been that violent video games or other violent media have a direct causation to violent crimes like school shootings.

In a "Friday Follow-Up" segment that aired on her show, Katie Couric admitted that her recent show on video game violence that featured a "who's who" of anti-video game voices was one-sided. The show, "Are Video Games Ruining Your Life?" aired on April 29 and featured Daniel Petric, who cited video games as being a "catalyst" for shooting and killing his mother on October 20, 2007. It also featured Dr.

Researchers at the University of Connecticut and Wake Forest University claim that when players fight against human-looking opponents, those players become more aggressive. They even go so far as to say that games with these types of opponents in them may be more likely to provoke violent thoughts and words than games where monsters are the enemy.

New Jersey Senators Raymond Lesniak and M. Teresa Ruiz - both Democrats - have managed to push a proposal (bill S-2715) through the Senate. The bill commissions the New Jersey Department of Education to create a pamphlet that would provide information for parents about violent media. The proposal was part of Senate Democrats' gun safety plan. According to PolitikerNJ, the proposal has passed the Senate by a vote of 36-0 and is heading to the Assembly.

In Episode 51 hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight talk about the possible name of the next Xbox console from Microsoft, two studies about violent video games, Iron Man 3, the Diablo III gold duping exploit introduced in the last update to the game, and some other equally delightful topics related to video games. Download Episode 51 now: SuperPAC Episode 51 (1 hour, 15 minutes) 68.7 MB.

Some research has come to the conclusion that playing violent games makes people more aggressive in the short term, but new research (as highlighted by Forbes) shows that the competition found in many video games may be at the root of that aggression and not necessarily the violent content.

A recent episode of Katie Couric's syndicated talk show offers a pretty one-sided look at video game addiction, asking the question in the title: "Are Video Games to Blame for Violent Crimes?" Couric does mention that she asked the Entertainment Software Association to participate in the show or comment on its contents, but they did not respond to the request...

According to data collected from a consumer survey conducted by research firm NPD Group, 72 percent of those who play games say that they do so online. The data comes from NPD Group's Online Gaming 2013 report, which surveyed 8,800 self-described gamers earlier in the year about their preferences and gaming habits.

Three editorials offer just about every side of the New Jersey Governor's push to study and then regulate the sale of violent video games in the State. The first two are two different sides from a special dueling editorial in The Star-Ledger called "Do violent video games breed violent behavior?". The first one, "Do violent video games breed violent behavior? Yes " was written by Paul Boxer of Rutgers-Newark.

Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands have come to the conclusion that first-person shooter games can games enhance the brain's working memory, according to a report by the BBC (by way of GameSpot).

Dr. Patrick Markey pens an editorial for US News & World Report called "In Defense of Violent Video Games" in which he explains that, despite research showing aggression after playing video games, there has been absolutely no research that violent videogames actually cause violent shootings.

A new study published in the scientific journal Obesity finds that active games or exergaming are a good way for children to lose weight. The goal of the study, "Adolescent Exergame Play for Weight Loss and Psychosocial Improvement: A Controlled Physical Activity Intervention," was to find effective ways to encourage youngsters to be more physically active through video gaming. Researchers Sandra Calvert, Ph.D.

Researchers at McGill University and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) have found that the popular puzzle game Tetris can be used to treat adult amblyopia, commonly known as "lazy eye." The method of treatment is drastically different because normally treatments involve patching one eye to make the uncovered eye work harder. Using Tetris, researchers found that both are used to work together to keep up with the fast-paced puzzle game.

Dr. Daniel King, from the University of Adelaide's (Adelaide, South Australia) psychology department says that the definition of video game addiction has yet to be defined because of the model that most researchers have used - namely borrowing from the framework of gambling addiction. He believes that treatments of the addiction to games could be improved if a "standard definition of video game addiction was adopted."

Children and teens with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) use screen-based media, such as television and video games, more often than their typically developing peers and are more likely to develop problematic video game habits, according to research conducted by Micah Mazurek, an assistant professor of health psychology and a clinical child psychologist at the University of Missouri.

If you weren't able to attend the Curry College event a few weeks ago (it took place a day before PAX East in Cambridge Mass.) called "Video Gaming Panel Discusses Violence, Sexism and the Future of Gaming" then you can check out the video to your left or by visiting this link.

A new study by Iowa State researchers claims that (wait for it) there is a "strong connection" between playing violent video games and youth violence and delinquency. Backed by the usual suspects at the university that continues to publish studies saying that video games are basically responsible for everything wrong with children today, this particular study was conducted by Matt DeLisi, a professor of sociology at the university.

The BBC offers an interesting report on a new study that puts research claiming that too much "screen time" creates attention deficit disorders in young children on its ear, though researchers still say that screen time for children should be limited. The Medical Research Council (MRC) team, headed by Dr. Alison Parkes and Jane Gentle from Mumsnet England, studied more than 11,000 primary school students to determine a link between bad behavior to TV viewing and video game playing.

New research coming out of the University of Toronto shows that playing shooters and driving games for even a short amount of time seems to improve the ability to search for a target hidden among distractions in complex scenes. The study was conducted by psychology professor Ian Spence and PhD candidate Sijing Wu, who compared action videogame players and non-players on three visual search tasks. They found that the experienced players were better at it.

According to new research from Adam Chie-Ming Oei and Michael Donald Patterson (from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) published this week in the open access journal PLOS ONE, playing video games a little bit every day can improve cognitive performance. The research is based on a study conducted by Oei and Patterson that directed participants identified as "non-gamers" to play five different games on their smart phones for one hour a day, five days a week, for one month.

Flagler College (St. Augustine, Florida) assistant professor of communication Matthew Wysocki helped make a new book about control in video games a reality. Besides co-authoring a chapter on the subject and writing the introduction in "Ctrl-Alt-Play: Essays on Control in Video Gaming," Wysocki edited the 16 essays that make of the body of the work. More importantly the book was basically his idea. The book came about because he saw that many of his colleagues were working on similar projects concerning video game control.

A new study from Brad Bushman of Ohio State University comes to the conclusion that some players of violent video games are led there out of a sense of frustration because they cannot engage in taboo behaviors in the real world such as stealing or cheating. Don't worry, the latest Bushman study will connect this to aggression, violent video games, and a negative effect of some kind... The temptation to steal or cheat is sometimes great — especially when the risk of being caught is low.