So you’re walking around in Skyrim or Magicka or one of these medieval fantasy games, and there are lots of fires, and plenty of wooden furniture around these fires that seems to be perpetually flame retardant. Jeremy Antley at Play the Past reflected on these little inconsistencies, especially the
Many of us believe the rules of regular life apply to our online interactions; a good measure of whether or not a comment is appropriate is if you’d say it face-to-face. This standard does not hold across all cultures. David Herold in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research uses Bakhtin’s carnival as
Children want to be the heroes of the stories they’re playing. But for a five-year-old girl, there aren’t that many female heroes to emulate. One father, Mike Hoye, got tired of switching genders while reading the game’s text out loud and made a mod to change all the pronouns in Windwaker from mascu
Games can put players through an emotional gauntlet. With The Walking Dead especially, players feel empathy for and anxiety about their characters. One aspect of the game that enhances its emotional power is the expressive, realistic character animations. We can recognize by their facial expressions
When I was in college, I was excessively concerned with using my time efficiently. If I took a break from studying to watch a movie or play a videogame, I considered it a waste of time. But as I matured, I learned the value of leisure time in keeping my sanity (and also having something interesting
Kids who play videogames can become overwhelmed with positive feedback loops and can’t stop playing. They’ll risk peeing their pants or making parents angry just for one more minute of game time. But all of the time spent playing games isn’t rotting their brains. For 12-year-olds, the amount of time
Watching a movie in 3D is different from watching it in 2D: it’s more likely to fool part of your brain into believe the situation is real. In a study by Brendan Rooney, 3D viewers had a higher heart rate compared to viewers of a 2D film. Christian Jarrett at BPS Research Digest explains that this m
All too often, videogames accentuate the difference between men and women; women characters wear pink and have long hair while the men have huge muscles and big guns. Real-life genre preferences are often accounted for by the difference between men and women’s spatial reasoning, or ability to visual