A very good question in light of this latest survey.
While the benefits of playing video games should be nothing new to astute gamers, surveys and studies are still being conducted seemingly all the time on this subject.
The latest report on the benefits of gaming comes from Sony Online Entertainment (which, I mean come on, how is this impartial?). The results, published in the latest issue of Family Circle magazine, suggests parents are seeing improvements in hand/eye coordination, problem solving, and typing skills since their children have started playing video games.
In addition, games are apparently creating little Enders, by teaching children to think strategically. The report states that the majority of video games require players to follow rules, think tactically, make fast decisions and fulfill numerous objectives to win. This resonates with the 70 percent of the parents surveyed who have seen their children's problem-solving skills improve since they started playing video games.
Other key survey findings from the survey:
- Most (75 percent) of respondents have attributed educational value and improved hand/eye coordination to video game usage.
- 84 percent of respondents reported an increase in their child's typing skills from playing PC/online games.
- 72 percent of respondents say their kids play games online with other people sometimes or all the time.
- 87 percent of parents who participated in the survey are spending time playing video games with their children.
- More than 80 percent of respondents say their children play video games in a common area of the house (i.e. family/living room or computer room).
Yahoo's Web site, Shine, which purportedly reaches 10 million women each month, hosted the survey throughout June 2008.
Like I said, this is nothing new. Many studies have been promoting the benefits of gaming for years. I'm just waiting for the day it's no longer an issue. Speaking of education value, I was practically raised by video games, and look at me. I wrote good, don't me?
Julia Brasil, a game art and design student at The Art Institute of California-San Francisco, is generally unimpressed with the lack of women in the gaming industry and female game characters who lack depth. Brasil hopes to do her part change that as the first-ever winner of Sony Online Entertainment's SOE Gamers in Real Life, or G.I.R.L., competition.
Brasil's concept art for SOE's Everquest II.
(Credit: Sony Online Entertainment\Julia Brasil)Earlier this month, Brasil, 20, beat out nearly 100 competitors to win a video gamer's dream package. Not only did she get a $10,000 scholarship toward her education, but she also landed a 10-week internship at the Sony Online Entertainment studio of her choice in Denver, San Diego, Seattle, or Austin, Texas.
The Brazilian-born student hopes her internship will help her narrow her career choices and bring to Sony the knowledge of a young, international woman gamer.
"Right now, according to, I think it was (International Game Developers Association), only 20 percent of everyone working in the game industry are women," Brasil said. "Which is a lot better than previous years, but they still have a long way to go." The numbers may be even smaller, with some citing them at just under 12 percent.
That statistic was the main drive behind the contest, which was created by Torrie Dorrell, senior vice president of global sales and marketing for SOE, and her colleagues. SOE said in a statement that while many women play games, it wants women to create games as well.
In April, Sony invited students at Art Institutes around the country to apply for the inaugural G.I.R.L. competition. Contestants were asked to submit an in-game design, concept art, and two essays.
Brasil's design was a humorous and "somewhat crazy" take on a "low-level newbie zone" for SOE's EverQuest II. Brasil said some of her favorite game genres include role-playing games and survivor horror titles, and she named Shadow of the Colossus and Fatal Frame II as two of her top titles.
Julia Brasil won Sony's first G.I.R.L. competition. Here she poses with her check.
(Credit: Sony Online Entertainment)Although she's loved playing games since she was a child, Brasil said she's found few female characters who are easy to connect with.
"There quite a few games nowadays that have a female protagonist, like Tomb Raider's Lara Croft or Heavenly Sword recently. But they just seem like eye candy to me," she said. "They just don't seem very feminine or that attractive to other women. You play them and they are pretty and smart but they don't seem to have a lot of depth to them."
Her winning essay touched on her belief that many games are masculine, with women, like Princess Peach of the Mario franchise, serving as motivators.
"If we're going to start to have more women playing games," Brasil said, "we should do games that involve women in something other than a motivator or a sidekick character."
AUDIO
Contest winner on girls and gaming
CNET News intern Holly Jackson talks to Julia Brasil, winner of Sony Online Entertainment's first Gamers in Real Life, or G.I.R.L., competition.
Download mp3 (1.78MB)
After three years of running its own system to let some players of EverQuest II conduct trades of in-game assets for real money, Sony Online Entertainment is turning it over to a new partner, Live Gamer.
In 2005, SOE, the publisher of the groundbreaking online game, EverQuest, as well as EverQuest II, Star Wars Galaxies, and other titles, decided to try an experiment that took its industry's traditional approach to players buying and selling in-game assets for real money and turned it on its ears.
Previously, the industry standard was to scream loudly that such activity was illegitimate and prohibited and that players caught doing so would be banned. Of course, thousands of players ignored the warnings and conducted such trades on sites like eBay, IGE.com, and elsewhere, usually with little or no repercussions.
But with the launch of its Station Exchange service that year, SOE decided to embrace the so-called "real money trade," at least provisionally, and see where it might lead. The company allowed such trades to take place on two EverQuest II servers, and gave players the choice of being on those servers or not.
Over the first year of the service, SOE said it made about $250,000--with almost no costs--and reduced the kinds of customer service complaints that it said came regularly from players claiming they'd been defrauded in under-the-table transactions outside the company's auspices.
Since then, Station Exchange has hummed along, neither making big waves nor disappearing. And for the most part, the online game industry has stayed away. No other big publisher of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) has gotten onboard, though Linden Lab's Second Life--a very different kind of virtual world from, say, EverQuest II--has long allowed real-money trades.
Now, SOE is turning the operation of Station Exchange over to Live Gamer, a start-up that launched in 2007. The move is expected to be complete by the end of March and should mean that the resulting service, to be called Live Gamer Exchange, will be entirely Web-based.
What this means for players is unclear. It also doesn't appear that the move means SOE is abandoning the experiment, though it does mean the company will not have to expend as many resources on Station Exchange going forward.
What isn't clear is where the revenue generated by commissions on trades will go. But one can assume that by taking over the service, Live Gamer will probably be getting a big piece of the pie.
Is this a good thing? A bad thing? I'd say neither. I'd say it's an interesting move on SOE's part. It's probably about them deciding they don't need to run it anymore, but that they liked the experiment enough to continue allowing their players to engage in real-money trading.
As before, the big question is whether any other publishers, most notably Blizzard Entertainment, which makes World of Warcraft, will ever follow suit. And so it will be interesting to see how Live Gamer runs with this. It may set a precedent that would be hard to avoid following.
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