The Register reports,
"West Ham shot-stopper Robert Green has blamed England's pitiful failure in qualifying for the Euro 2008 finals on the increasing popularity of video games among English boys."
My current project is to do with audio games, and I thought you might be interested to hear about them.
Essentially they're games which use audio instead of visual feedback, and they come in many different genres, including FPS, RTS and driving.
These games are mostly made by visually impaired hobby developers for other players, but some players can even play regular visual games simply due to the amount of audio cues they provide.
I find this an extremely interesting culture, the way these games reference other existing styles, how they remediate from visual media to aural, the enabling qualities of hobby programming, and the communication and organisational possibilities of the internet.
It's refreshing to consider non-mainstream cultures of gaming such as women, the elderly and now visually impaired players.
Fascinating stuff!
Dr. Elizabeth Zelinski, Professor of Gerontology and Psychology at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California recently presented a report at The Gerontological Society of America into the effects of memory in aging players of an audio game.
The Posit Science Brain Fitness Program was played by elderly users and compared to a control group who watched educational videos. It was found that concentrating on the auditory stimulation in the game enhanced the player's memory.
Nothing to do with FlashMobs, this is an Augmented Reality game.
It doesn't strike me as a very good idea to run around a crowded room without looking where you're going, though.
