This article investigates the Grand Theft Auto videogame series in order to demonstrate the potential of a folkloristic, ethnographic approach for the analysis of digital games. I discuss Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as a story collection, a frame for performance, a virtual museum of vernacular culture, and a widely circulated pop culture artifact whose double-voiced aesthetic has given rise to diverse interpretive communities. This case study suggests that digital gameplay should be regarded as a form of performance practice with the capacity to invoke traditional folkloric genres and engender new traditions. Read more...

The effects of frame rate and resolution on users' perception of digital media are a growing concern. This paper looks at the effects of these two factors on users' performance in movement related tasks in first person shooter games. In a user study, participants played several custom maps in Quake 3 Arena at different frame rates and resolutions and their performance was measured. It was found that lower frame rates and resolutions lowered users' overall performance in the video game. Read more...

Latency determines not only how players experience online gameplay but also howto design the games to mitigate its effects and meet player expectations. Read more...

This study was designed to compare how 5- to 13-year-old children's leisure activity preferences differ with age and gender. Responses from 60 boys and 60 girls about their favorite toys, television shows, computer games, and outdoor activities were compared across leisure categories. The results showed that gender was a significant factor. Overall, boys spent more time in these leisure activities than girls did. They spent the most time engaged in sports, watching television, and playing computer games, whereas girls spent the most time watching television. Results from a gender index for all activities indicated that boys' leisure preferences became slightly more masculine with age. For girls, preferences for television shows became more feminine with age, but preferences for toys, computer games, and sports became less feminine. These self-chosen preferences may provide differential opportunities for the development of visual-spatial skills, achievement, initiative, self-regulation, and social skills. Read more...

While multi-player online games are very successful, their fast deployment suffers from their server-based architecture. Indeed, servers both limit the scalability of the games and increase deployment costs. However, they make it easier to control the game (e.g. by preventing cheating and providing support for billing). Peer-to-peer, i.e. transfer of the game functions on each each player's machine, is an attractive communication model for online gaming. We investigate here the challenges of peer-to-peer gaming, hoping that this discussion will generate a broader interest in the research community. Read more...

While numerous studies have reported learning of perceptual- motor skills by amnesic patients, few if any have documented the eventual acquisition of expertise on a given task. This paper recounts the learning of the computer game Tetris by a hippocampal amnesic,whose acquisition of the task in a formal evaluation was somewhat slower than that of a comparison group, but who after many hours of self-paced practice achieved expert-level play. Read more...

Researchers interested in the associations of gender with spatial experience and spatial ability have not yet focused on several activities that have become common in the modern digital age. In this study, using a new questionnaire called the Survey of Spatial Representation and Activities (SSRA), we examined spatial experiences with computers and videogames in a sample of nearly 1,300 undergraduate students. Large gender differences, which favored men, were found in computer experience. Although men and women also differed on SAT scores, gender differences in computer experience were still apparent with SAT factored out. Furthermore, men and women with high and low levels of computer experience, who were selected for more intensive study, were found to differ significantly on the Mental Rotations Test (MRT). Path analyses showed that computer experience substantially mediates the gender difference in spatial ability observed on the MRT. These results collectively suggest that the "Digital Divide" is an important phenomenon and that encouraging women and girls to gain spatial experiences, such as computer usage, might help to bridge the gap in spatial ability between the sexes. Read more...

Computer games were conceptualized as a potential mode of entry into computer-related employment for women. Computer games contain increasing levels of realism and violence, as well as biased gender portrayals. It has been suggested that aggressive personality characteristics attract people to aggressive video games, and that more women do not play computer games because they are socialized to be non-aggressive. To explore gender identity and aggressive personality in the context of computers, an online survey was conducted on women who played computer games and women who used the computer but did not play computer games. Women who played computer games perceived their online environments as less friendly but experienced less sexual harassment online, were more aggressive themselves, and did not differ in gender identity, degree of sex role stereotyping, or acceptance of sexual violence when compared to women who used the computer but did not play video games. Finally, computer gaming was associated with decreased participation in computer-related employment; however, women with high masculine gender identities were more likely to use computers at work. Read more...

Traditional neuroimaging studies have mainly focused on brain activity derived from a simple stimulus and task. Therefore, little is known about brain activity during daily operations. In this study, we investigated hemodynamic changes in the dorsal prefrontal cortex (DPFC) (luring video games as one of daily amusements, using near infrared spectroscopy technique. It was previously reported that oxygenated hemoglobin (oxyHb) in adults' DPFC decreased during prolonged game playing time. In the present study, we examined whether similar changes were observed in children. Twenty children (7-14 years old) participated in our study, but only 13 of them were eventually subject to analysis. They played one or two commercially available video games; namely a fighting and a puzzle game, for 5 min. We used changes in concentration of oxyHb as an indicator of brain activity and consequently, most of the children exhibited a sustained game-related oxyHb decrease in DPFC. Decrease patterns of oxyHb in children during video game playing time did not differ from those in adults. There was no significant correlation between ages or game performances and changes in oxyHb. These findings suggest that game-related oxyHb decrease in DPFC is a common phenomenon to adults and children at least older than 7 years old, and we suggest that this probably results from attention demand from the video games rather than from subject's age and performance. Read more...

In his paper, Henry Lowood provides an in-depth historical overview of machinima – animated films created using FPS (first person shooter) videogames such as Quake. He traces the evolution of this work from the early 'speedrunning' movies created to document exceptional gameplay through to the first pioneering works of narrative machinima such as Diary of a Camper and others. In parallel with this, he traces the development of the tools to facilitate the making of these works. Author(s): Henry Lowood1, 1 Read more...