Category Archive: Gaming

Benefits of gaming for children with dyslexia

Peench | March 1, 2013 | COMMENTS:No Comments »

How many times have we heard the battle cry of attorneys, legislators and all-around haters that gaming is bad for you.  We’ know better, right?  We’ve seen gamers do wonderful things for others, give back to their community, support local hospitals and many other things.  Well now a study has shown that gaming actually has a beneficial effect for children with dyslexia.  How awesome is that?

Clearly moderation is key, but it really is nice to see some positive press for gaming for a change!

Allowing dyslexic children to play action video games can dramatically improve their reading skills, a study has shown.

Twelve hours of gaming achieved more than a year of reading development and was as effective as the best remedial treatments, scientists found.

Lessons learned from the research could “drastically” reduce the incidence of reading disorders, they said.

Two groups of 10 young children with dyslexia took part in the research.

Both had their reading, verbal and attention skills tested before and after they played action or non-action video games.

After nine 80-minute sessions, only the action games produced significant benefits. Children playing the games were able to read faster without losing accuracy, and showed gains in tests of visual attention.

The improvements were greater than those normally seen after a year of “spontaneous” reading development without treatment, and equal or better than the results of “highly demanding traditional reading treatments”.

Video games are thought to affect visual attention pathways in the brain which may influence reading ability, said the researchers.

Action games in particular involved rapidly moving objects and transient events that imposed a demanding workload. This in turn could improve the efficiency of certain brain pathways.

The findings are reported in the journal Cell Biology.

Dr Andrea Facoetti, from the University of Padua in Italy, said: “Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment.

“Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly.”

The scientists wrote: “Our findings… pave the way for low-resource-demanding early prevention programmes that could drastically reduce the incidence of reading disorders.”

However, Dr Facoetti stressed that the results “don’t put us in a position to recommend playing video games without any control or supervision”.

Source

Category: Entertainment, Gaming

The PGL Lobbycast: Episode 209

LobbycastGeoff | February 26, 2013 | COMMENTS:No Comments »

Category: Entertainment, Gaming, Movies, Music, Podcast, Television

Halo 4 Majestic Map Pack Now Available!

In case you hadn’t noticed yet, the Halo 4 Majestic Map Pack is now available.

Halo4Majestic

Download it now for your Xbox 360!  Who has it already and who is getting it?

Category: Entertainment, Gaming, Microsoft

Gears of War Judgment – Baird’s Goggles

I’m not sure how many of you are Gears of War fans, but I got a stack of codes for the avatar item Baird’s Goggles.  Here’s what his goggles look like:

baird

They’ll look even more awesome on your Xbox Live Avatar.  Here’s one code to get you all started:

YKGYW-R222J-MV3HK-QF933-J7JJZ

Post a comment if you want me to keep them coming.  Like I said, I’ve got a stack of them so feel free to add them to your Avatar and let your friends know that I have more to share.  Enjoy!!

Category: Entertainment, Gaming, Microsoft TAG: , , ,

Sony PS4 Announcement

So it looks like some of the info we posted previously was correct, including the controller.  Here are some of my notes from the announcement to get the discussion rolling.  What are your thoughts and comments?

Also, you can thank me for watching this press conference for you.  OMG!  Did anyone else think it was incredibly slow and not very moving?

Playstation Promise:  Simple, Personalization, Immediate, Integrated, Social

Focused on gamers but platform for other stuff?

Sharing experiences, connectivity between devices and ease of connection

Expand vita’s stuff

Expand titles and programs, instant game collection and day 1 digital

Living room no longer the center

How does next gen gamer want to play

Want to change gaming landscape – mobility, mobility, mobility…

Access to entertainment, social media and more = new platform?

Accessing content better and most personalized gaming experience

Socially enriched content

Leading authority on play – gamers think playstation is best place to play

Explain how PS3 was connected and changed the type of system gamers used, and then focus back on games?

X86cpu, Enhanced PC GPU, 8 GB Unified memory, local storage HDD, GDDR5 for system memory

Controller looks like the one that was leaked – new features, touch pad for input, share button and headphone jack, light bar as more friendly way to ID players, designed w/ stereo camera to track position of controller via light bar.  Share button on controller is central

Power button enters low power state – no longer booting, etc. – more like hibernation

Digital titles playable even as they are being downloaded

Social play is important, added hardware to support it, always on video compression and decompression systems

Transitioning to friends network based on real world friends, keeping alias and icon for anonymity, but most of new social dimensions will be interacting with friends from existing social networks.  Applications on smart phones, tablets, web platforms and Vita to allow gaming experience to carry beyond living room.

System can get to know you and bring you closer to games you want to play.  System learns your likes and dislikes and discover content PRELOADED on your console (WTF?).  Vision to download titles before you even have a chance to tell them you want the game?

Want to have a connected experience.  Gamer at center of playstation network.  Delivery of what gamers want most from their entertainment experience.  Fastest, most powerful network in the world.

Try it now feature of any game in store.  Instantly experience anything you want?

Buy only what you love?  So you get the game free and only pay if you like the game?

Facebook and UStream are partnering up with them.  Create first social gaming network for gaming.

Spectating on games.  This feature was on OnLive.  Use share button on PS4 controller.  Can broadcast from your game live to your friends.  Friends can post comments to your screen.  Ask your friend to take over your controller and assist.  They’re “building” this into the system – not yet?  New spectating tools for developers.

Enhancing their PS4 games on second screens.  Key feature is remote play.  It has been built into architecture of the hardware.  PS vita is the ultimate companion device for PS4.  Using full graphics of PS4 and taking advantage of PS Vita screen.  Long term goal is to make all titles playable on the PS Vita.

PS3 titles are NOT natively supported on PS4 – exploring vision of making PS3 games (or any other PS games) playable on any device by using some sort of cloud device.  Anything everywhere is the challenge and is vision of Playstation Cloud service.

POSSIBLE TITLES– at release?

Knack

Killzone Shadow Fall?

Drive Club – team based racing

Second Son – Sucker Punch’s exclusive title for PS4 – super powers, similar to infamous?

The Witness – from developer of Braid

 

Self-publishing on Playstation Network – smaller developers can bring breakthrough titles to PS gamers (then they showed The Witness) – how open will it be for other Indie developers?

Can get over 30,000 polygons – first attempt at using advanced stuff to permit real time rendering similar to CG films – quality they will get in future games

How many polygons were there in Halo4?

The Creative Console – Using the Move controller to create stuff in 3D via sculpting or collage and create sets, game levels, stories with the simplest possible interface.  And to have a creepy dream where you control dolls having a rock concert or something.

The panty raid engine from Capcom can bring all sorts of new experiences

Developers think this is an easy platform to program for…

The game Watch Dogs looks pretty freaking awesome

From Bungie – Destiny will be on PS4 and PS3.  Exclusive playable content just for Playstation community

Category: Entertainment, Gaming, Sony TAG: , , ,