iPad Fever

Apple has just launched their new platform the iPad tablet computer. Steve Jobs presented his new baby from the Apple farm to an expectant and excited gathering of industry geeks and media at the Apple offices in San Francisco yesterday.

You can watch the presentation at Apple.com or watch embedded version here.




This sleek addition to the Apple range neatly fits between the iPhone and the iMac. It works like a large iPhone or iPod except it doesn’t have a camera but luckily it does play the over 140,000 apps available through the Apple App store.

At least 25,000 of those apps are devoted to gaming but most of those games are designed and built for the smaller and highly portable iPhones and iPods. They are great for playing while waiting at the dentist, but the big question is, can these app games available for a handheld really scale up to a bigger platform?

Well, Apple certainly think so, apparently there were at least two members of the game development and publishing industry there, Gameloft and EA, to help out during the presentation and a whole raft of games industry media. Which means that if the iPad becomes as ubiquitous as Apple hope it could mean a whole new era of portable and easy access gaming.

According to the promotional iPad video the whole experience of playing a game on an iPad is different from more traditional gaming platforms. The multi–touch sensitivity built in with over 1000 sensors give gamers a touchy feely experience and the accelerators used within the device mean that 360 degree movement of the tablet could change game design and user experience for ever. The design and development of new games is already in hand as Apple’s army of game developers gear up with the iPad SDK, (Software Development Kit), making game development relatively inexpensive. That of course means that the concept of low priced games from the App store will make gamer access even easier.

But are we ready for this? Don’t we need to have a physical and mental break from gaming when we leave the house and the desk top pc behind and actually go out into the sun?

Having a device that is so potable and ubiquitous could have our children locked into their own virtual worlds all the time even when parents are desperately trying to get them into the real one.

But Apple wants nothing less than world domination, and if not them Google are already waiting in the wings with their offering.

Well I can always look on the bright side and accept the fact that exciting and absorbing portable game play is inevitable and even though we will lose the power of speech completely we will at least be able to manipulate our fingers and thumbs around a glass screen.

References

Apple Inc. (2010). iPad. Retrieved Jan 28, 2010, from Apple: http://www.apple.com/ipad/ipad-video/

Does video game playing really make us smarter?

In the 2009 Entertainment Software Association ‘Essential Facts about The Video Game Industry’: it showed that 68% of American Households play video games, adult gamers have been playing for an average of 12 years, 25% of all gamers are under the age of 18, 63% of parents think that playing video games is a positive part of their child’s life, in 2008 video games sales went up from 8.7 billion to 11 billion dollars and 43% of Americans plan to buy more video games in 2009.

With that sort of data it is clear to see that video game playing is now a major part of how we spend our leisure time and according to the figures it’s not going to go away any time soon. If anything gaming will become the pastime of choice for many more people.

If that is the case then it would be nice to know that all that time couch surfing and flicking a game controller is actually good for us in some way.

We constantly hear about all the negative stuff, you know, it’s bad for your eyes, it’s bad for your physical health, violent game playing makes people more aggressive, it makes kids fat, it stops people from socializing, too much game playing is bad for your posture.

This is potentially very alarming and as a parent and player myself I would actually quite like to get some real facts. Some hard core research about how playing video games really does affect us.

Ferguson, C. J., Cruz, A. M., & Rueda co-authored a research paper Gender, Video Game Playing Habits and Visual Memory Tasks that showed playing violent video games or first person shooter games actually helped develop visual memory recall and in the paper by MacKenzie, A. H. (2005) The Brain, The Biology Classroom & Kids with Video Games, the American Biology Teachers , show that during the period that people have been playing violent video games U.S. crime rates have actually gone down.

At Cognitivefun.net there is a group of free online games that can definiteley help your brain improve. Brain training activities have been around for a while but these online and free games actually help overall cognition. Rather than just training the brain to be better at the particular game you’ve been practising these games develop overall cognitive improvement and thay have the added bonus of being designed by neuroscientists so that has to be good. Careful they’re addictive!

References

Cognitivefun.net. (2008-2009). Retrieved Jan 2, 2010, from Cognitive Fun: http://cognitivefun.net/

Entertainment Software Association. (2008). 2009 Essential Facts about the Video Games Industry. Retrieved Jan 15, 2010, from Entertainment Software Association: http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2009.pdf

Ferguson, C. J., Cruz, A. M., & Rueda, S. M. (2007). Gender, Video Game Playing Habits and Visual Memory Tasks. Laredo, Tx: Springer Science + Business Media.

MacKenzie, A. H. (2005). The Brain, The Biology Classroom & Kids with Video Games. The American Biology Teacher , Vol.67, No.9, pp.517-518.