Not even one week after the Balloon Boy hoax that riveted cable networks and American audiences, two video games have already been rolled out based onb Falcon Heene’s fake-out journey. The first, called the Balloon Boy Game, is distributed by Web start-up Heyzap. The second, Balloon Boy Adventure, is hosted on Newgrounds.com. Here’s a review from the Christian Science Monitor:
Both games are pretty straightforward. In the Balloon Boy Game, seen in the image at right, the user pilots young Falcon Heene across an urban cityscape. Falcon hangs haplessly onto the balloon; there is an option to shoot at seagulls, or grab free power-ups. In Balloon Boy Adventure, neither Falcon nor his father, Richard Heene are present – there’s only that big tinfoil muffin of a balloon.
Anecdotally, the games are enjoying a good deal of success… But for tech junkies, the most interesting part about the Balloon Boy games is that they exist at all.
Yup, it took developers all of half a day to come up with a concept and execute it into a workable game. Even more impressive would be gaming that’s simultaneous with the cable news coverage.
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Image: Courtesy of Heyzap
Offices are notoriously stressful spots these days. And workers are turning to any means necessary to blow off steam. Including engaging in violent attacks on supervisors—in video games, that is. As CNN so subtly reports:
To thank him for letting them spend the last two hours of their workweek playing video games on the company dime, Kevin Grinnell’s employees often single him out and shoot him in the head.
To be fair, the employees at Grinnell Computers aren’t firing real weapons at their boss but are instead releasing the stresses of their week in a multiplayer online game known as Combat Arms.
Most Fridays for the last couple of months, the six employees of the Beaumont, Texas-based company have been encouraged to spend from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m. blasting away at the online first-person shooter from Nexon as a team-building exercise.
It’s about “bonding,” Grinnell said, when asked what the benefit to his company is of paying his team to play games.
The use of video games to encourage fraternizing and build relationships among co-workers and supervisors is apparently being adopted in offices around the country—though having your employees play video games all day puts an interesting twist on measures of “productivity in the workplace.”
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Image: iStockphoto
Doctors in Switzerland have diagnosed a skin disorder that editors at The Onion could very well have created. PlayStation palmar hidradenitis is the name given to a condition that skin specialists have identified as being caused by the use of video game controllers. Swiss doctors have reported their findings, which are based on one patient, a 12-year old girl, in the British Journal of Dermatology.
The girl had recently started to play games on PlayStation for several hours a day, and continued to do so despite the appearance of red, painful sores. Four weeks after the sores developed, she was examined at the Geneva University Hospital and diagnosed with a skin disorder called “‘idiopathic eccrine hidradenitis,” which normally causes red, sore lumps on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. It has been identified before, but rarely on the hands alone and is usually seen on the soles of children’s feet after they have engaged in intense physical activity.
According to Reuters:
The researchers suspected that grasping the console’s hand-grips together with repeated pushing of the buttons produced minor but prolonged injury to the palm of the girl’s hands, which can be made worse by sweating during a tense game. The doctors recommended the girl stop playing and she recovered fully after 10 days, the researchers said.
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Wii rehab might sound like radical intervention for video game addicts, but it’s actually effective physical therapy for patients recovering from strokes, injuries, or surgeries. Otherwise tedious strength and coordination exercises go by a little easier if they involve waving a wireless controller to play virtual bowling, tennis, and golf. But it doesn’t stop there. The next step in video game rehab is “Air Guitar Hero,” which would allow amputees to rock out with the immensely popular Guitar Hero game using a mechanical arm wired to their chest muscles.
As part of a DARPA initiative for prosthetics research, scientists are now able to reroute the nerves that once controlled an amputee’s arm to the chest muscles, where electrodes can then pick up the electromyographic signals to control a mechanical arm. But the process of learning how to accurately control a prosthetic arm, not to mention individual fingers, using only twitches of the chest, can be a slow and discouraging one. So researchers at Johns Hopkins University hacked a Guitar Hero controller so that its color-coded frets could be controlled with signals from the electrodes.
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Games aren’t for the computer geek anymore — as many as 65 percent of American households admit to playing video and computer games , according to the Entertainment Software Association. Recently, serious money has been pumped into scientific studies to see if these games offer any therapeutic benefits (besides entertainment).
The Health Games Research program studies games to see how they can influence players’ health and fitness choices. In one study, college freshman compete Survivor-style in an “interactive fictional story — a mystery that takes eight weeks to solve” to reiterate the importance of getting enough exercise and teach them how to make healthy lifestyle choices. Another study involves feeding virtual characters to teach people how to eat healthy and how to avoid “mindless eating.”
In addition, the game company PopCap Games found in a recent customer survey that one in five of their customers has a physical or mental disability, and that these users play the games for “relief or distraction” from their ailment.
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