Not good News about Gaming Violence

Playing a violent video game can increase aggression, and when a player keeps thinking about the game, the potential for aggression can last for as long as 24 hours, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE).

Violent video game playing has long been known to increase aggression. This study, conducted by Brad Bushman of The Ohio State University and Bryan Gibson of Central Michigan University, shows that at least for men, ruminating about the game can increase the potency of the game's tendency to lead to aggression long after the game has been turned off.

The researchers randomly assigned college students to play one of six different video games for 20 minutes. Half the games were violent (e.g., Mortal Kombat) and half were not (e.g., Guitar Hero). To test if ruminating about the game would extend the games' effect, half of the players were told over "the next 24 hours, think about your play of the game, and try to identify ways your game play could improve when you play again."

Bushman and Gibson had the participants return the next day to test their aggressiveness. For men who didn't think about the game, the violent video game players tested no more aggressive than men who had played non-violent games. But the violent video game playing men who thought about the game in the interim were more aggressive than the other groups. The researchers also found that women who played the violent video games and thought about the games did not experience increased aggression 24 hours later.

This study is the first laboratory experiment to show that violent video games can stimulate aggression for an extended period of time. The authors noted that it is "reasonable to assume that our lab results will generalize to the 'real world.' Violent gamers usually play longer than 20 minutes, and probably ruminate about their game play in a habitual manner.
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Sport Gamers

From Gran Turismo to WWE Smackdown, sports-based video games represent a wide variety of pursuits. When it comes to the people who actually play those games, however, little is known. How do sports video game players fit their games into a larger sports-related context? How does their video game play inform their media usage and general sports fandom?

That's what Concordia University communications professor Mia Consalvo sought to discover when she embarked on a large-scale study of video game players, the results of which were recently published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.

Along with Abe Stein and Konstantin Mitgutsch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Consalvo, who also holds a Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design, conducted an online survey of 1,718 participants to pin down demographics, habits, attitudes and activities of sports video game players.

They found that the majority of those who play sports video games are male (98.4 per cent), white (80 per cent) and in their mid-20s (average of 26 years). In comparison with other representative video game player demographics, the field is less diverse and the average player is younger. Based on the data about the larger game-playing population, it seems that the sports gamers are drawn from a more traditional demographic of game players, at least when it comes to console and certain personal computer-based video games.

"Perhaps one of the biggest findings to emerge from this study is unsurprising, but finally documented," notes Consalvo. "The overwhelming majority of sports gamers' -- 93.3 per cent -- self-identify as sports fans. That identity pushes beyond the playing of sports-themed video games. Attending sporting events, watching them on television, participating in those activities themselves as well as following certain teams or sports were regular parts of their daily lives."

Consalvo says that she still hopes to discover more insights into why there is little diversity in the player demographics, and why female players are in a minority. Says Consalvo, "while this study provides new insights into who sports video game players are and what they play and why, we still lack knowledge on how these players relate their passion for video games to their sports fandom in general." She hopes to address these questions in her forthcoming book, co-authored with Stein and Mitsgutsch, titledSports Videogames.

Schroedinger

Since Erwin Schroedinger's famous 1935 cat thought experiment, physicists around the globe have tried to create large scale systems to test how the rules of quantum mechanics apply to everyday objects.

Researchers at the University of Calgary recently made a significant step forward in this direction by creating a large system that is in two substantially different states at the same time. Until this point, scientists had only managed to recreate quantum effects on much smaller scales.

Professor Alex Lvovsky and associate professor Christoph Simon from the Physics and Astronomy department together with their graduate students revealed their findings in a world leading physics research journal, Nature Physics.

Understanding Schroedinger's cat

In contrast to our everyday experience, quantum physics allows for particles to be in two states at the same time -- so-called quantum superpositions. A radioactive nucleus, for example, can simultaneously be in a decayed and non-decayed state.

Applying these quantum rules to large objects leads to paradoxical and even bizarre consequences. To emphasize this, Erwin Schroedinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, proposed in 1935 a thought experiment involving a cat that could be killed by a mechanism triggered by the decay of a single atomic nucleus. If the nucleus is in a superposition of decayed and non-decayed states, and if quantum physics applies to large objects, the belief is that the cat will be simultaneously dead and alive.

While quantum systems with properties akin to 'Schroedinger's cat' have been achieved at a micro level, the application of this principle to everyday macro objects has proved to be difficult to demonstrate.

"This is because large quantum objects are extremely fragile and tend to disintegrate when subjected to any interaction with the environment," explains Lvovsky.

Photons help to illuminate the paradox

The breakthrough achieved by Calgary quantum physicists is that they were able to contrive a quantum state of light that consists of a hundred million light quanta (photons) and can even be seen by the naked eye. In their state, the "dead" and "alive" components of the "cat" correspond to quantum states that differ by tens of thousands of photons.

"The laws of quantum mechanics which govern the microscopic world are very different from classical physics that rules over large objects such as live beings," explains lead author Lvovsky. "The challenge is to understand where to draw the line and explore whether such a line exists at all. Those are the questions our experiment sheds light on," he states.

While the findings are promising, study co-author Simon admits that many questions remain unanswered.

"We are still very far from being able to do this with a real cat," he says. "But this result suggests there is ample opportunity for progress in that direction.
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Graphics Innovations

Research presented in a paper by Morgan McGuire, assistant professor of computer science at Williams College, and co-author Dr. David Luebke of NVIDIA, introduces a new algorithm to improve computer graphics for video games.

McGuire and Luebke have developed a new method for computerizing lighting and light sources that will allow video game graphics to approach film quality.

Their paper "Hardware-Accelerated Global Illumination by Image Space Photon Mapping" won a Best Paper award at the 2009 Conference on High Performance Graphics.

Because video games must compute images more quickly than movies, video game developers have struggled with maximizing graphic quality.

Producing light effects involves essentially pushing light into the 3D world and pulling it back to the pixels of the final image. The method created by McGuire and Luebke reverses the process so that light is pulled onto the world and pushed into the image, which is a faster process.

As video games continue to increase the degree of interactivity, graphics processors are expected to become 500 times faster than they are now. McGuire and Luebke's algorithm is well suited to the quickened processing speed, and is expected to be featured in video games within the next two years.

McGuire is author of "Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology" and is co-chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering, and previously chaired the ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games.

He has worked on and consulted for commercial video games such as "Marvel Ultimate Alliance" (2009), "Titan Quest" (2006), and "ROBLOX" (2005).

McGuire received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 and his Ph.D. from Brown University in 2006. At Williams since 2006, he teaches courses on computer graphics and game design
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