At first glance, it seems like every young Boy Scout’s dream come true: a merit badge for video games.
The Boy Scouts of America have finally recognized the vital importance of the pastime that occupies so much of modern children’s attention with the creation of a “video games” belt loop and pin, writes Engadget.
But before anyone goes scurrying off to embark on a marathon gaming session, here’s the rub. The awards aren’t earned by beating a high score or rescuing the princess. Instead Boy Scouts have to fulfill several dull requirements in order to get the belt loop, including:
Explain why it is important to have a rating system for video games. Check your video games to be sure they are right for your age.
With an adult, create a schedule for you to do things that includes your chores, homework, and video gaming. Do your best to follow this schedule.
Learn to play a new video game that is approved by your parent, guardian, or teacher.
To get the pin, the scout also needs to create a plan with his parents to buy a video game that is right for his age group, play the game with a family member, and play a video game that will help practice his math, spelling, or another skill that will help with his schoolwork.
Wow, with all that family time, we wonder if this is a ploy by the Scouts to drive the kids to earn other badges for outdoorsy activities (read: fleeing family, climbing tree badge).
New York City has been attacked by all manner of monsters and alien invaders, but never before have its assailants been so, well, low-res.
A magnificent new video from Patrick Jean and One More Production shows an assault on the city that begins when a stream of pixels explode out of TV screen. Soon, the unwary streets of Manhattan are under attack from pixellated Space Invaders. Pac-Man runs amok in the subway stations, Tetris blocks slam down on skyscrapers, and Donkey Kong stands atop the Empire State Building.
For anyone whose childhood dreams were invaded by these crude villains, the video is pure nostalgic delight. Watch and enjoy.
The South by Southwest Interactive festival is about to roar into gear down in Austin, and DISCOVER just couldn’t miss out on the chance to mix and mingle with the leet ranks of hackers, gamers, geeks, and entrepreneurs.
Video games are more popular than ever, and new games are delivering all kinds of social benefits, from video-game therapy for treating PTSD, to sims for train surgeons, to alternate-reality games that actually bring people together in real life. Will video games be a positive force for people and society in the future?
A new game may help soldiers in that problematic campaign–winning the hearts and minds of people in occupied countries. The game, developed by the University of Texas and backed by the U.S. Army, gives American soldiers deployed abroad some lessons in foreign customs and cultures. This is the opposite of a first-person shooter game; the Pentagon calls it a “first-person cultural trainer” game.
Air-dropped into foreign lands, soldiers often find themselves at a loss, knowing neither the local language nor the cultural conventions. The new 3D simulation game is intended for soldiers to learn the niceties in Iraq and Afghanistan, where a friendly relations with locals could make the difference between life and death.
It’s a project that’s been in the works for three years, and uses cultural data provided by the military. The goal of the game is to enter a village, learn about the social structures and relevant issues, and then “work with the community” to successfully finish assigned missions.
Is your child practically a vampire? Avoiding the sun, holed up at home, and playing video games non-stop? Two scientists in Britain now suggest there might be link between such inactivity and rickets–a painful bone condition caused by lack of vitamin D, and which is much more common in malnourished children of the developing world.
Researchers Simon Pearce and Tim Cheetham of Newcastle University have published a clinical review in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal blaming the rickets resurgence on our more interior lifestyle. According to The Guardian, Pearce said:
“Vitamin D levels in parts of the population are precarious. The average worker nowadays is in a call center, not out in the field. People tend to stay at home rather than going outside to kick a ball around. They stay at home on computer games.”
What with crooks who post status updates while on the lam and snap self-portraits with stolen iPhones, it seems incompetent criminals find technology irresistible. Our latest tale of blundering criminality involves a Bronx man who is quite adept at stealing electronics, but a bit confused about how they work, according to the New York Post:
Jeremiah Gilliam, 22, was caught after playing a stolen game console online — allowing cops in Pelham, where it was stolen, to trace the IP address to his grandmother’s address, cops said.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
At first glance, it seems like every young Boy Scout’s dream come true: a merit badge for video games.
The South by Southwest Interactive festival is about to roar into gear down in Austin, and DISCOVER just couldn’t miss out on the chance to mix and mingle with the leet ranks of hackers, gamers, geeks, and entrepreneurs.
A new 
Is your child practically a vampire? Avoiding the sun, holed up at home, and playing video games non-stop? Two scientists in Britain now suggest there might be link between such inactivity and rickets–a painful bone condition caused by lack of vitamin D, and which is much more common in malnourished children of the developing world.
What with crooks who 
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 
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 
Doctors in Switzerland have diagnosed a skin disorder that editors at The Onion could very well have created. 
Wii rehab might sound like radical intervention for video game addicts, but it’s actually 
