In a segment that aired during Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto's show this week, Daniel Greenberg joined in to discuss Senator Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) bill to study the effects of violent video games on children. Greenberg is the IGDA Anti-Censorship Committee Chairman and game developer at Washington D.C.-based Media Rez.

Game developer Brenda Romero has been named the first "game designer in residence" at UC Santa Cruz. Mrs. Romero joins the UCSC's Center for Games and Playable Media to teach courses and work with students, faculty, and researchers on all things related to video game design. Mrs.

While there is much discussion and hand wringing in Washington on cable news networks about the cause of the recent school shooting in Newton, Connecticut, this Washington Post report actually looks at some data. WaPo compares data from 10 countries related to video game spending versus gun-related homicides. The conclusion?

A recent study (dated Dec. 12) from researchers at the Ohio State University (link), equates prolonged exposure to violent games with an addiction to smoking tobacco. Research conducted at the Université Pierre-Mendès-France, and carried out by analysts at Ohio State University and the University of Hohenheim, comes to the conclusion that prolonged exposure to videogames increases aggression or aggressive behavior in players and causes them to view the world in a more violent light.

Concordia University communications professor Mia Consalvo conducted a study to find the correlation between sports video game fans and their media consumption. The results of that study were recently published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.

The Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE published a new report today containing detailed consumer information about gaming habits, broader media interests, online gameplay, gaming in a family context and the PEGI age rating system in Europe. The data comes from an online survey of around 15,000 respondents from 16 European countries including Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

A new report from GameTrack shows that America is a gaming super power, with American gamers outnumbering the rest of the world when it comes to playing games online and across a wide variety of platforms. The data finds that 48 percent of the American gaming audience play online games, compared 42 percent who play packaged games. Around 27 percent of that online gaming in America is done through browsers. Around 31 percent of American gamers enjoy playing through apps on their phones and tablets.

A new report from research firm Newzoo, the "2012 US Country Report," comes to the conclusion that the U.S video games market spending grew one percent, or $21.9 Billion, in 2012. The report also notes that, of the 157 million gamers in the U.S., 86 million spend money on games. Time spent on games in the US is also up significantly: 26 percent versus 18 percent for Europe.

Longtime readers will recognize Re-Mission.  It's that Games for Health game in which you play a microscopic nanobot who cruises the innards of fictional cancer patients in search of nasty old cancer cells to battle.  It was created by Hope Lab to be played by young cancer patients and studies have shown positive effects such as helping them adhere to medication.

What you may not realize is Re-Mission was released in 2005.  That's right.  This game almost eight-years-old and still in use today.

Children that have anger issues can be helped by using video games and biofeedback to regulate their out-of-control emotions, according to research conducted by Boston Children’s Hospital. That research has been published in the journal Adolescent Psychiatry. Jason Kahn, PhD, and Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich, MD at Boston Children’s Hospital developed a game called "RAGE Control" because they saw that children were eager to play video games.

Researchers in Canada say that children and teens who have electronic devices in their bedrooms are far more likely to be overweight because they are not getting enough sleep every night. The research is based on a survey of almost 3,400 fifth grade students in the province of Alberta, Canada. Researchers were trying to find out if there was a relationship between a child’s sleeping habits, the number of electronic devices in their bedroom, and their weight.

A new research paper from Google reveals what most gamers already know: the majority of tablet users spend more time playing games than anything else on their device of choice - whether it be Android, Windows, or iOS-based. In fact, Google's research found that gaming is the most popular activity on tablets right behind checking email.

It looks like Sony has decided that it will no longer support Stanford University's Folding@home distributed computing project via PlayStation 3. According to a post in the European PlayStation Blog, Sony will kill the ability for current and future PS3 owners to contribute part of the CPU power to the project with the next firmware update scheduled to go live sometime later this month. Sony didn't really give a reason why they have decided to do this...

A new study by the Sleep Laboratory at Flinders University (a public university in Adelaide, South Australia) finds that teens who play video games for long periods of time have trouble getting a good night's sleep. The study conducted by masters student Daniel King (supervised by child sleep psychologist Dr.

An editorial in the UK edition of Huffington Post penned by Andrew Cole-Bulgin, Joint-CEO of Komixx claims that video games are "stunting children's imagination and inhibiting their ability to play together." The head of the children's television company says that he comes to this conclusion based on research the company conducted related to Toby's Travelling Circus, a new television program for children under the age of five.

New research sponsored by the Centre for Ageing Research and Development in Ireland (also known as CARDI) suggest that using video games can help the elderly improve their balance and avoid falls that are often devastating and debilitating.

UK papers The Telegraph and the Daily Mail seem to be delighted with a new study from researchers at Brock University in Canada published in the journal Developmental Psychology. The study, which bases its findings on 1,492 adolescents surveyed from eight high schools in Ontario over a four year period. Researchers say that 51 percent of those surveyed were female, while 49 percent were male. Participants were ages 14- to 15-years-old at the start of the study and 17- or 18-years-old at its conclusion.

As is usually the case with UK paper The Daily Mail, they have taken a new study from the University of Pittsburgh about the relationship between sleep and insulin production and turned it into a commentary on how games are bad. In their headline they proclaim "Staying up all night playing video games 'puts teenagers at greater risk of diabetes.'" The horror.

New research from the University of Crete comes to the conclusion that all those hours playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games can have positive real-world effects on behavior at work. The research is discussed at length by Dr. Savvas Papagiannidis, Senior Lecturer and Head of the Innovation, Entrepreneurship and E-business Subject Group in this Huffington Post UK story.

New research from Ohio State finds that players who engage in cooperative play in games like Call of Duty and Halo show increased cooperative behavior later - as opposed to aggressive behavior. The research was co-authored by OSU Professor of communication David Ewoldsen and was comprised of several studies.

A new research paper from University of Utah Professor Carol Bruggers comes to the conclusion that video games can be therapeutic to patients suffering from a variety of illnesses including cancer, diabetes, asthma, depression, autism and Parkinson's disease. The new research paper, "Patient-Empowerment Interactive Technologies," has been published within the pages of the September 19 issue of the Science Translational Medicine journal.

Rutgers–Camden law professor Greg Lastowka is conducting research on the intersection of copyright law and user-generated content and the legal perils that might be involved. His research is being funded by the National Science Foundation. But as games like LittleBigPlanet and Minecraft expand the levels of creativity that players can partake of, an old problem arises: some users will create content that infringes on copyrights. While fans see this as homage to worlds, characters, and storylines they love, the companies that hold those copyrights see it only as infringement.

A new report from government associations Creative Scotland and Scottish Enterprises has Scottish developers very upset. The report contends that the Scottish games industry has no students studying game related subjects, a value of £0, and employs just 200 people. The report also claims that the industry only contributes 0.1 percent to the Scottish economy. Because that percentage was recorded as less than £10 million, it was rounded down to zero. The report used information from 2010.

Update: We have added a brief statement from Professor Douglas Gentile below.

Next week Iowa State University psychology professor Douglas Gentile will be at the White House to discuss how video games can be used to enhance and improve education. He will lead the discussion on a special policy conference to be held at the White House on Wednesday, August 22. The policy conference will examine how games can be used effectively in the broadest sense to improve health, education, civic engagement and the environment.

According to new research from NPD Group, hand-held consoles are still more popular than the iPad, despite Apple's popular tablet device making in-roads with children because of its ease-of-use and large library of games and apps. According to the data released by the retail research firm, children ages 4 - 14 still spend most of their gaming time with dedicated gaming machines. Tablet devices did have gains from 2012 usage though: according to NPD tablet usage was up 10 percent of 2011 numbers.

According to internal data released by Facebook, the number of Facebook subscribers who play games has increased by more than 15 percent over last year. According to the largest social network in the world, 235 million people play games on Facebook, up from 205 million. Facebook claims that this growth has mostly been driven by its new App Center feature, which has helped in driving install and return play rates upwards.

Researchers at Yale are developing a video game for the iPad that hopes to prevent HIV infection among ethnic minority adolescents through the use of interactive entertainment. Their research is based on the entire process appears in Games for Health, a new journal focused on using game technology as a tool for improving health and well-being.

A Health Canal report details the concern of a critic of the UK's new video game ratings system saying that it will fail because it doesn't deal with "irresponsible parenting." Yesterday the new PEGI ratings system went into effect in the UK. The new system includes penalties for retailers that sell age inappropriate games to children that do not meet the ratings guidelines.

Realizing that the current generation has been raised on video games and technology that is constantly evolving, University of California, Davis Professor Colin Milburn has found a novel way of reaching students: getting them to use creativity and technology to bring poetry and literature to life in 3D. Milburn, who is an associate professor of English, was recently appointed to the inaugural Gary Snyder Endowed Chair in Science and the Humanities at UC Davis. In this new position Davis is developing research and teaching techniques that are geared towards tech savvy youngsters.

Spatial skills, or the skills needed to perform complex mental actions such as reading a map or assembling something, can be improved with hard work and the right tools, according to new research. Improving spatial skills is important because children who do particularly well in spatial tasks are more likely to excel in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. The research analyzed "217 research studies on educational interventions to improve spatial thinking."