To test her theory, she created a game based on scenes from Duke Nukem. In it, players were to navigate through a virtual town, which they were already familiar with, and find various landmarks.

Players who weren’t depressed found an average of 3.8 locations while depressed people only found an average of 2.4 locations. And the more depressed a person was, the lower their score was.

In another interesting study last month, researchers at the University of Rochester found that people who pay action video games (specifically Unreal Tournament) for a few hours each day for a month can improve how they do on eye examinations by about 20%! Sadly, those playing Tetris didn’t see any improvement.

“Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information,” says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences.

“These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it,” Bavelier adds. “That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life.”

But - is the PS3 really worth $2000? I mean, yeah, I want one, but $2000??? And I thought $599 was high. The BusinessWeek article mentions rave reviews, but 3x the retail price? I’m just not that obsessed.

Anyway, the article makes a good point about Sony and Microsoft vying for the personal entertainment space while Nintendo remains content to just be a console. I think Sony has more at stake than Microsoft, given their latest battery replacement fiasco with Dell notebooks that could cost the company $431M. Add that to the fact that their video game division is reporting $1.71 billion in loses for the PS3. Sony just seems to be bleeding money at this point.

Microsoft’s entertainment division recently posted a $96 million loss despite having sold 6 million Xbox 360s so far and forecasting they’ll sell 10 million by the end of the year.

The PS3 has a long way to go to catch up. They’re planning to have 400,000 by the launch Nov 17, 600,000 on the market by the end of the year and 2 million by March 2007. It remains to be seen if they’ll all sell out. And if they’ll ever turn a profit on the machine.

At least the analysts are predicting it will finally beat Xbox come 2011.

The suit was filed by Marc Bragg, a Pennsylvania attorney and apparently, avid Second Life player. The suit claims that Linden Labs deactivated Bragg’s account after he discovered a way to purchase virtual land cheaply though the game’s auction system. Specifically, Braggs was able to prevent other players from bidding on land by modifying the auction’s URL. Bragg claims he invested $32,000 in virtual land and is suing for financial restitution.

“This is probably the first dispute of its kind,” Bragg says in a statement posted online. “This suit challenges the legitimacy of a virtual intangible purchase of an asset.”

Bragg adds that the dispute could test the relevance to virtual worlds of existing laws. “Linden Lab is still obligated to honour real-world contract law and consumer law, even if their world doesn’t really exist,” he says.

Linden Lab, however, asserts that Bragg’s suit is unfounded. “We intend to contest this in the appropriate forum,” general counsel Ginsu Yoon told Wired News. “We believe the suit to be without merit.”

Source: NewScientist: Game company sued over virtual land squabble

The question it explores is how far will and should governments go to impose laws on the virtual world. For instance, last year in China, the government tried to limit the number of hours gamers could spend playing games online. Gamers protested online - with a mass suicide of virtual characters in World of Warcraft.

Other governments are taking an interest in MMORPGs as well. Players in South Korea have been prosecuted for stealing virtual property. More than half of the 40,000 computer crimes investigated by South Korea’s National Police Agency in 2003 involved online games.

American gamers aren’t likely to face dictatorial decrees to limit their play time but within the next few years the courts will begin to examine how laws relating to taxes, copyright, and speech will apply in virtual worlds. In the near future, the IRS could require game developers to keep records of all the transactions that take place in virtual economies and tax players on their gains before any game currency is converted into dollars. ‘It’s utterly implausible that it won’t happen,’ says Dan Hunter, who has coauthored law review articles like ‘The Laws of the Virtual Worlds.’ A trickier issue is whether an avatar can be defamed: Will we see potion merchants suing for in-game slander, much like eBay sellers have litigated over negative feedback?

The taxing issue doesn’t much surprise me now that states are beginning to tax digital downloads like music and ebooks. Still, I suspect that given how difficult it is to tax online transactions now, taxing transactions in the virtual world will be monsterously complex.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the Wired article (Global Gaming Crackdown by Chris Suellentrop) on their website anywhere so I can’t link to it.

For most sites, it’s pretty easy to change that picture (called an Avatar) - you just select which picture you want to represent you, upload it to the server with the click of a button, and presto - you’re someone completely different.

A recent study by Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University looked at how the avatars we choose affect our online behavior.

They assigned an avatar to two groups of students using a virtual reality headset. The students then had less than a minute to see what their new selves looked like before stepping into a virtual room with another avatar. The avatars differed in height or attractiveness.

The results?

Those in the first group were told to negotiate with the other avatar in the room to split a pile of money between them. The researchers found that people given a taller virtual persona were more aggressive negotiators, while those assigned shorter characters were more likely to acquiesce to a deal that was not in their interest. They also found that people with less attractive avatars stood, on average, 1 metre further away while talking to the other character than those assigned attractive ones.

It’s interesting how quickly we can adapt based on how we think others perceive us, isn’t it?

Source: New Scientist (subscription required)