Interesting Things about Games

From EQUIS Lab Wiki

This page collects pointers to interesting things that other people are up to.

Contents 1 Open Source Game Projects 2 Gaming Demographics, Surveys and Experiments 3 How Many People Play Online Games? 4 Games that do More than Entertain 5 Gaming Sales 6 Games and Real Life 7 History of Games

Open Source Game Projects

• Solipsis is an open-source multi-user world developed by France Telecom's research division. Solipsis is peer-to-peer, using no central servers for the massive world.
• FreeCiv is an open-source civilization game.
• Flight Gear is an open-source flight simulator.
• ORTS is an open-source Real-Time Strategy Engine from the University of Alberta.
• Jake2 is a Java-based open-source remake of Quake 2.

Gaming Demographics, Surveys and Experiments

• Gamasutra reviews the top ten video game research findings (registration might be required)
• Nick Yee's Daedalus Project is devoted to the gathering of empirical data about the players of massively multiplayer online games. For example, Yee tells us that the average age of MMOG players is 26, and players spend on average 22 hours per week in their game worlds.
• Project Massive at Carnegie Mellon University has been carrying out a series of surveys on players in MMOGs and how they communicate.
• A group at the University of Iowa has been studying Internet Addiction amongst online game players. Preliminary results indicate that 10-15% of players are "addicted".
• According to the New York Times, "The average age of game-console users is 24; the average age is 29 if people playing on computers are included."
• The Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society has published the results of a 2004 study on how Americans use the Internet. Among the many interesting results were that people spend approximately 40% of their Internet time on communications tasks, and approximately 8% playing online games.
• The Kaiser Family Foundation has released a 2005 study on young peoples' media use. From the study: "On average, young people spend 3:51 a day watching TV and videos (3:04 watching TV, 0:14 watching prerecorded TV, and 0:32 watching videos/DVDs), 1:44 listening to music, 1:02 using computers (0:48 online, 0:14 offline), 0:49 playing video games, 0:43 reading, and 0:25 watching movies." Much of this time is overlapped (e.g., watching TV while on-line), leading to about 6.5 hours a day engaged in using media.
• The Entertainment Software Association has a wealth of interesting statistics on the US gaming market. Among their claims: the average age of gamers was 30 in 2004; 43% of game players are women; the average time playing games per week is 7.4 hours (women) and 7.6 hours (men.)
• The UK Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) has a November 2004 white paper entitled Chicks and Joysticks: An Exploration of Women in Gaming. The BBC provides a summary.
• Rhianna Pratchett has performed a study of gamers in the United Kingdom, released in December 2005. The study was sponsored by the BBC, and surveyed 3,500 people between the ages of 6 and 65.

How Many People Play Online Games?

• Microsoft's XBox Live service passed the million subscriber level in July, 2004.
• MMOGChart.com maintains a list of subscriber numbers to massively multiplayer online games.
• Nintendo plans to offer free online play in 2005 for the Nintendo DS handheld gaming platform. Nintendo aims for 90% of delivered systems to go online. Wireless online connectivity will also be a standard feature of the upcoming Nintendo Revolution. Sales of the Nintendo DS surpassed 5 million units in March 2005, and 10 million units in January 2006.
• Blizzard Corporation announced in December 2005 that subscriptions to World of Warcraft have exceeded the 5 million mark. This appears to include past subscriptions that have since been cancelled.
• Developer CCP announced that on December 11, 2005, Eve Online exceeded 19,000 concurrent subscribers. They claim this to be the most concurrent players ever in a single instance of an online game. (Most online games split their players into separate instances of the game world, sometimes called shards, servers or galaxies.)

Games that do More than Entertain

• Bonk and Dennen have performed a series of experiments in massively multiplayer online games for the US DOD, particularly geared at the use of MMOGs for military training.
• JoAnn Difede has been using a virtual reality system to treat post-traumatic stress disorder amongst 9/11 survivors.
• Mark Baldwin's lab at McGill University has developed a set of games designed to raise players' self-esteem.
• Surgeons who play video games are 27 percent faster and make 37 percent fewer errors than those who do not.
• The New Zealand government agency responsible for sexual health has released the online No Rubber, No Hubba Hubba sexual education game.
• Food force is a game developed by the United Nations World Food Program to teach players about the problems of world hunger. The Globe and Mail provides an overview of the game.
• Tammy McGraw has been researching the use of Dance Dance Revolution to help children in reading.
• Researchers at the Appalachian Educational Laboratory have found that Dance Dance Revolution may help children suffering from Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. A summary is available from Game Daily.
• The Globe and Mail reports that according to a study at York University, "action video games can lead to mental gains involving visual skills and short-term memory." The study's author, Ellen Bialystok, nonetheless said "I really would prefer my child read a book."

Gaming Sales

• The Entertainment Software Association reported that sales of game software were $7.3 Billion in 2004.
• Business Week Online reports that world-wide sales of video games were $24.5 billion in 2004, exceeding Hollywood's box-office take.

Games and Real Life

• Shanghai resident Zhu Caoyuan was murdered over disputed ownership of a virtual sword. The sword was part of the game Legend of Mir 3, and had a value of 7,200 Yuan (C$1,000). This represents about two months salary for the average Beijing worker.
• A new and rather bizarre form of game is Computer-Assisted Hunting. Services like Live-Shot allow players to tele-operate real guns, shooting at live animals. Now instead of killing virtual monsters, you get to kill live ones. Not surprisingly, the Humane Society is unimpressed. Several US states have already banned the practice.
• The Wall Street Journal published an article recently pointing out that "it’s inevitable that as such games’ use of VR gets less V and more R, those with R-type skills will increasingly dominate". This is an interesting trend, especially when one considers sports games. Perhaps some day soon one might actually have to be good at golf to succeed at EA's notoriously easy Tiger Woods PGA Tour franchise!
• The game Need for Speed has been linked to an accident in Toronto. Two cars, racing at over 130 km/h in a 50 km/h city street, crashed into a taxi cab, causing the death of its driver. A copy of the game was found in the front seat of one of the cars, raising questions of whether the game inspired the racers' behaviour.

History of Games

• William Higinbotham invented what was possibly the first video game in 1956.