Video game

"Computers also appear to have an effect on visual intelligence. For example, playing Marble Madness, a game requiring children to visualize and manipulate objects in their minds, was found to enhance spatial skill (Subrahmanyam & Greenfield, 1994), although playing a game that requires the visual tracking of an object on a screen also improved this type of spatial skill outside of the computer environment (Greenfield, De Winstanley, & Kilpatrick, 1994); playing the computer game Concentration-a learning game-improved iconic representation skills (Greenfield et al., 1996). Therefore, there is some evidence that computers, even computer game play, can improve visual skills outside of the computer environment. However, for long-term positive effects to occur in the classroom, computers must be integrated into the classroom and not simply placed in it. Similarly, much research is needed on the use of computers in the home in terms of their influence on cognitive and academic growth in children."

"Unlike novels or movies, video games are an interactive medium where the player's actions drive the story forward, so I had actually wanted to allow players to manipulate the evidence themselves earlier on in the series."

"It feels like the gamers are finally in charge of our games. I like that. I trust that crowd so much just because of our Kickstarter campaign. We never approached our audience this way. Usually we make a game and it’s like we gift it to the players. But this time the players gifted us with the ability to make the game. And like all of my successes, PencilTest and the Kickstarter backers lifted the ceiling off of me. I hope I’ve done everyone right. I really want to honor the investment people have made in this game. It’s important that it succeed and it’s important that this model work for other games and developers too."

"Work hard. That’s the thing that most people who love games and animation may not realize about what they’re seeing. It requires an ugly amount of work. You have to dedicate your life to it, but I believe almost anyone can learn how to make games and animate at a competent level. I don’t believe in following your dreams and going into too much fairy dust about the arts. Sure, it’s fun, but there are many times it’s not fun and you still have to do it."

"I have very strong opinions on that, and it's kind of my area of expertise. The reason why I got out of video games, or am at least leaning away from video games (I just contract for them,) is really that a video game is a terrible place to tell a story. It's really because the reason we go to a game is different from the reason why we go to a more passive form of entertainment. And really a great story can be there, but it's optional. What must be there is good gameplay. And that's why at its core, I think it's inaccurate to call it some kind of sequential storytelling medium when, at its core, it's not necessary. If you get a guy who just good at drawing wacky cartoons, you've probably got in the wrong guy if your next game is going to see some Gothic horror. Yeah, I think in a way video games have gotten a really bad start with how expensive it became to develop in such a short amount of time. You know if you look at the budgets of what it cost to make a film in the first year that film was invented versus the fifth year or the 10th year the budgets didn’t go up astronomically. But if you look at video games, they went nuts and the original developers were working with this primitive technology and most games were done with under eight people in under a year for three quarters of a million dollars if you were lucky."

"By the ’80s, the early pioneering work done by female programmers had mostly been forgotten. In contrast, Hollywood was putting out precisely the opposite image: Computers were a male domain. In hit movies like “Revenge of the Nerds,” “Weird Science,” “Tron,” “WarGames” and others, the computer nerds were nearly always young white men. Video games, a significant gateway activity that led to an interest in computers, were pitched far more often at boys, as research in 1985 by Sara Kiesler, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, found. “In the culture, it became something that guys do and are good at,” says Kiesler, who is also a program manager at the National Science Foundation. “There were all kinds of things signaling that if you don’t have the right genes, you’re not welcome.”"

"The gaming industry has come under increased scrutiny following the December 2012 shootings in Newtown, Connecticut — a tragedy that has reignited the debate surrounding gun control and violent media. Vice President Joe Biden discussed the issue with game industry leaders earlier this year, while the National Rifle Association has taken a more pointed approach, singling out video games as a driver of violent culture. After the Newtown shooting, NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre described the gaming industry as "a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.""

"The game company claims it has the legal right to depict branded weapons in its products, likening its games to novels and other narrative-based media. "We're telling a story and we have a point of view," Frank Gibeau, EA president of labels, said in an interview with Reuters. "A book doesn't pay for saying the word 'Colt,' for example.""

"Most studies on the impact of playing violent video games on mental health have focused on aggression. Relatively few studies have examined the relationship between playing violent video games and depression, especially among preadolescent youth."

"In the present study, we examined the association between daily violent video game playing over the past year and depression in a large, ethnically diverse preadolescent sample. We found that playing high-violence video games for ≥2 hours per day is significantly associated with having a higher number of depressive symptoms. This association was consistent across all racial/ethnic subgroups and among boys, and more important, it was observed after controlling for aggression and several violence-related variables. The magnitude of these associations was small (Cohen's d values ranged from 0.12 to 0.25). However, these effect sizes are similar to those reported for the association between playing violent video games and aggression. Overall, our findings indicate that playing violent video games for a substantial amount of time each day over an extended period is significantly associated with depression in preadolescent youth. They also suggest that this association is unique, given that the number of depressive symptoms was not associated either with playing low-violence video games or with time spent playing video games in general."

"In conclusion, we found that, compared with playing low-violence video games for <2 hours per day, playing high-violence video games for ≥2 hours per day was significantly associated with a higher number of depressive symptoms among preadolescent youth. However, the magnitude of the association was small and a causal relationship cannot be inferred. Nevertheless, it should be noted that even these small effect sizes can be of practical importance considering the large number of preadolescent and adolescent youth who regularly play violent video games. More studies are needed to examine the association between playing violent video games and depression in general and among boys in particular. If this association were confirmed, longitudinal studies would then be needed to investigate its causality, persistence over time, underlying mechanisms, and clinical implications."

"Games are still considered to be in the sub-culture category, coming under movies, coming under manga or comics or animation, especially in Japan. So, hopefully we'll be able to establish our own position that can be established as a culture."

"Even in Japan, I don't think that the game culture is established. So, probably the users are kids in school, even adults, I'm not sure up to which age they are. For example, my father will watch movies but games don't appear in his life at all, I think that that's sad. Even though we can create something really good, our parents wouldn't be able to understand what we do."

"Video games are taking over the world, and they're doing it in style. We're winning because we offer something better than art. We offer Experience."

"When I write a game, I try to make you feel like you have power. Then I try to make you feel the awesome, terrifying responsibility of having power. When I force you to make a tough decision, for a brief moment, I can reprogram your brain and take your thoughts somewhere they've never been before. This is amazing. That is, at heart, what the games we make are. They are tools we creators use to compel and rewrite your brains. We haven't begun to come to terms with the power we've unleashed with these toys, these addiction machines."

"Video games should not interest or impress you. We should scare you. Video games are taking over the world. You haven't even seen a fraction of what we can do."

"Videogames? In the sixties, that meant To Tell the Truth and What's My Line? Today, a lot of the apparatus we had in Batman - dressed, of course, in less imposing names - is fact. And we're lucky this is so. My present-day fascination with videogames does not derive from personal affection. I prefer working our and skiing to playing videogames. But that's a personal preference, not a value judgement. I happen to think that videogames are an ideal means to help broaden the imaginations of young people."

"Needless to say, adventure characters should be just one facet of videogaming. In the same way a painting allows us to gaze upon the faces and souls of people from another age, or a book permits us to linger on the thoughts of great figures from history and fiction, videogames can expand our awareness of the world as it is, was, or might be. The medium is still in its infancy, but read this again in a few years and see if this prediction hasn't come true: as videogaming grows, we will grow."

"Everything about the games industry sends the signal: ‘this is a space for men’. When players are repeatedly shown that women are sex symbols and damsels in distress, is it any surprise that players go on to treat women poorly in real life?. Gamergate feels like it owns the culture. Women and minorities are only welcomed if they keep their identity silent and don’t try to change the status quo. If I am a feminist, I am an outsider trying to steal their games – even if I am an avid gamer and a developer. I worry about becoming known to people outside the industry. As I gain experience in speaking, writing articles, publicising my game, I am increasing the risk of abuse. I stopped playing online games years ago. I couldn’t see why I was putting myself through the torrent of abuse, and sexual messages. Today, instead of them directing their abuse at a gamer tag, they will be contacting me directly, by email, Twitter, Facebook, and maybe anyone else that associates with me."

"The occasional awful movie can be chalked up to bad directing/acting/writing/etc., but why have traditional screen adaptations of video games been consistently terrible? I suspect a huge part is simply due to the difficulties of translating across mediums; video games are very different from a show or a movie, and turning a good game into a good show is way more difficult than it seems. Shows and movies do not require any input from the watcher outside of pressing the “Play” button, whereas games are very interactive (and a lot of times the story is also integrated into gameplay). So to turn a video game into a movie or a show requires removing essentially its core element, the “game” part, so everything else needs to be really good to make up for it, especially the writing, as there is no longer gameplay to carry the experience."

"I shrink it down by myself, actually. It's up to the schedule, so... If the artists or programmers say "no", then that's the answer. So it's kind of a mix. I always try to push a can-do attitude with them, you know?"

"Medal of Honors "authentic action" is a selling point for Electronic Arts. (Electronic Arts and the other companies in this story did not agree to be interviewed on tape.) To get a military man's take on the authenticity of these games, NPR spoke with Navy veteran, gun owner and war gamer Nathan Zelk. "Games today are very, very real," Zelk says. "It's the weapons; it's the story lines, you know, that people get caught up in — even the optics that are used on the guns, it says L-3 EOTech. It actually has the name of the brand on the side of it so you know which optic, you know, you could go out and buy." But Zelk says not everything in the games is based in reality. "When you get trained in the military, you're taught about [the] use of lethal force. It's a very big deal in the military — you don't draw your weapon on anybody unless there's [an] imminent threat to you, your crew, your ship that you're on, those type of things.""

"Several theoretical perspectives explain how exposure to computer games, especially violent games, can lead to imitative behavior. It is clear why these theories of TV violence might easily be applied in a gaming environment. Perhaps the most comprehensive theory to date is the general aggression model (GAM), which comprehensively integrates central elements from several earlier aggression theories. Included in the model are elements of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1994), which focuses on the audience member's attention to the modeled behavior, retention of that behavior, ability to imitate, and motivation to imitate the behavior. Furthermore, social cognitive theory concentrates on the model, noting that admired and rewarded models are more likely to be imitated. As such, the theory focuses on both the contextual cues (e.g., whether violence is rewarded) and the cognitive structures that lead to imitation. Script theory (Huesmann, 1986) is also integrated into the general aggression model. Script theory focuses on learned and activated scripts, arguing that we might learn to respond to situations in particular ways based on situations that have been repeatedly modeled for us. Therefore, in a new situation (e.g., a conflict), we might draw on scripts observed in the media, such as those containing violence. Also included in the general aggression model is cognitive-neoassociative priming theory (Berkowitz, 1993; Berkowitz & Heimer, 1989), which draws largely on network models of memory. Given that memory is organized through a network, ideas can prime or active related thoughts. Berkowitz argued that exposure to media violence, especially over long periods of time, could serve to create a rich, intricate memory network of hostility and violence for heavy viewers. The result, according to priming theory, is that exposure to media violence could then readily activate hostility and aggressive thoughts. In addition to cognitive-neoassociative priming theory, Green's affective aggression model (1990 explains that increased in aggression after exposure to media violence could result in hostility and negative affect. Furthermore, Zillmann's (1983) excitation transfer model focuses on the mechanism of physiological arousal as the cause of increases in aggression after exposure to violence."

"The general aggression model also explains that exposure to videogame violence can increase aggressive behavior both in the short and long term by noting that aggression is largely based on existing knowledge structures or existing mental scripts that are created by the process of social learning (Anderson et al., 2004). That is, individuals can learn new skills and information by watching the behaviors of others, especially if those behaviors are rewarded, performed by attractive actors, or do not cause pain or suffering fort the victim of aggression (i.e., sanitized violence). In the short term, both personological and situational input variables can lead to aggressive behavior. Personological variables include personality variables such as aggressive disposition, current states, beliefs, attitudes, and so on. Situational variables are found in the environment surrounding the person and include factors such as aggressive cues (e.g., playing a violent videogame), being provoked, or feeling pain. Both of these inputs can impact the present internal state of the person. For example, aggression may become more likely if an individual has an aggressive disposition and also plays an aggressive videogame. This may lead to feelings of hostility. Then, given the opportunity to retaliate against someone who has insulted the person, for example, that individual may behave more aggressively than someone without those personological or situational factors in place."

"Cantor (1994) has used Piagetian developmental theory in order to explain and predict what images frighten children at different stages of cognitive developmental progress. Wilson and Weiss (1991) have also used Piagetian developmental theory in order to understand children's responses to news media. Kremar and colleagues (Kremar & Cooke, 2001; Kremar & Valkenburg, 1999) have utilized Kohlberg's theories of moral development in order to understand how children of different ages respond to depictions of interpersonal violence in the media. Because Kohlberg argues that judgments about right and wrong are based on a different decision matrix for children of different ages, it makes sense that how children interpret violence, a potentially immoral act, may differ for younger versus older children. For example, children younger than age 5 tend to use the guidance of an authority figure in order to determine between right and wrong or may simply consider the outcome of an action in making such a judgement. Older children, in contrast, may consider the motive of the actor in order to decide whether an act was wrong (Kohlberg, 1984). In summary, child development, whether studied in the context of cognitive development, moral development, or emotional or social development, has provided a solid framework-one that focused on the child more than on the medium-to understand the responses of a group that is qualitatively different from its adult counterparts."

"The research on computer and videogames and children has received considerable research attention in recent years. The earliest work examined the simple relationship between computer game play and aggression, whereas more recent research has utilized an experimental approach in order to test issues of causality between the two. For example, early research found a correlation between overall videogame exposure and real-world aggressive behavior in children from 4th to 12th grade (Dominick, 1984; Fling et al., 1992; Lin & Lepper, 1987). Early experimental work (Cooper & Mackie, 1986; Irwin & Gross, 1995; Schutte, Malouff, Post-Gorden, & Rodasta, 1988; Silvern & Williamson, 1987) also found some support for the notion that violent videogame content can increase aggression; however, technological advances in the field of electronic gaming have rendered much of the very early research in this area all but obsolete. What does more recent research tell us? Violent videogames can influence aggressive cognitions (Anderson et al., 2004; Anderson & Dill, 2000; Kirsh, 1998; Tamborini et al., 2001), as well as aggressive affect, leading to feelings of hostility (Anderson & Dill, 2000; Tamborini et al., 2001), and have been found in survey research to be associated with aggressive delinquent behavior, even after controlling for aggressive behavior (Anderson & Dill, 2000; Anderson & Murphy, 2003; Anderson et al., 2004)."

"In their narrative review of the empirical literature, Dill and Dill (1998) concluded that short-term exposure to violent videogames increases aggression. Similarly, Bensley and Van Eenwyk (2001) conclude there is evidence that playing violent videogames can increase short-term aggression in young children. Meta-analyses conducted on the research on violent videogames have also supported an effect of game play on aggression. The first such comprehensive study was conducted by Anderson and Bushman (2001). Across all studies included in their meta-analysis, the authors found that exposure to violent videogames was positively associated with increased levels of aggression. Anderson (2004) recently updated with original meta-analysis and concluded that when only those studies with the soundest methodological approaches were used, results showed even stronger effect sizes, suggesting that methodologically weaker studies actually underestimate the true effects of exposure to volent videogames. Another meta-analysis by Sherry (2001) using 25 studies found evidence for a small effect of videogame play on aggression. However, Sherry also found that effect sizes have increased over time, with more current studies producing stronger effects, presumably due to the greater realism of today's games. Game type was also important, as games classified as human violence or fantasy violence were found to be more strongly related to aggression than sports games."

"Today, the global video game industry is one of the world’s largest culture industries. According to market research firm IDC, the global video game market topped $179 billion in revenue in 2020, making it larger than the global film industry ($100 billion) and North American professional sports (around $75 billion) combined. Video games’ cultural impact skews young: According to the Entertainment Software Association, 70% of people under the age of 18 regularly play video games. Younger players also tend to be male: According to a Pew survey, almost twice as many young men regularly play games as young women. That doesn’t mean all players are young; 64% of players are between 18 and 54 years old—prime voting age."

"Obviously not all video game players are misogynist harassers, just as not all games are funded by the Pentagon to present tailored narratives about a controversial war. But all video games do present a worldview to the player, whether it is explicit or not, and understanding that world view can help us understand what the players themselves believe. As an inescapable part of public discourse and an enormous media market we ignore at our peril, video games are not just video games: They are the site of political contention, of negotiation over social boundaries, and of free speech itself."

"So when creating a character in the fore front of my mind is that this character is linked to the game design. So, you know, unlike the character design for an anime or a film or something – when we create a character it has to tie in with the game-play. So for example, Sonic is invincible while he is jumping. He turns into a ball and has all the spikes around him. So this is a visual representation of what is happening in the game."

"And another thing that has influence while creating a character is when I’m creating that character – what I think is cool at the time, of you know, is going around at the time around me in my environment or the industry would have an influence on me and what I think is cool. The overall output of the character design."

"In the old days, there wasn’t really like a formal process, but these days when we create a character we ensure to get input from for example SEGA Europe or from the marketing department. We get input from input from various parts of the SEGA business to ensure that this character that we create is something that will be loved by many people."

"But having said that, you know, the premise is this character that we come up with – that we are getting input on – there is what I want to achieve with that character and there is that at the forefront. There is this sort of core thing that we are working towards – that I am driving but I get feedback from the various parts of the business to ensure that it is something that will be done by many."

"Initially, the work centers on the vision of the game, both in terms of the story and the artistic style. Lots of story development meetings take place, and concept artists work to flesh out the designs and environments that will become a living world by the end of development. At the same time, the engine and technology is planned, and early work on the technical design is done."

"Once the technical and artistic vision of the game is planned, people can be brought onboard to start the main production work on the game. Artists build the environments, characters, and objects for the game world, and designers write the dialog and start making things function story-wise. The most difficult part of this stage is that everyone is working with partially complete technology, since the game programmers are also working to create the functionality of the engine and game systems. It's a careful sequencing of work that allows us to complete this stage, similar to trying to film a movie while technicians are still building your lights and cameras. Once the bulk of the work on the game is complete, the bug database starts to take over as the driving force in development. The list of remaining tasks starts to dwindle, and the team works through the enormous task of perfecting the millions of details that will make it a solid game. Quality assurance testers also take center stage, providing valuable feedback about what's fun and what's not, in addition to spotting bugs. Designers work throughout this phase to improve the balancing of the game, making it more fun and exciting with every day."

"Once all the bugs have been squashed and the testers are having lots of fun playing the game from beginning to end, the process of submission begins. A strict process of certification must be passed, and when complete, the game is ready for duplication and distribution, on its way to a store near you!"

"What you have to keep in mind as a collaborator — that’s why we get very uncomfortable when it seems like we’re getting singled out. We as game developers. It seems trite to say so, but it’s a group effort, a team effort. So much of it is being in the right place at the right time with the right people and the right ideas. It seems wrong for any person to be elevated like you’re the author of this thing. You can’t even remember sometimes whose ideas were what, because it’s this big messy wonderful process."

"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games."

"I think one of the most important attributes a designer can have is…not only the ability, but almost the unconscious constant experience of putting yourself in other people’s heads and watching them as they have an experience. Building an experience through the eyes of someone else is incredibly challenging. I think that’s what makes great designers. A bunch of my meta-points that I’ve drawn out over the last 20 years are about that, how you put yourself in other people’s shoes."

"There seems to be a lot of retro-game nostalgia in recent years. Perhaps it’s because so many gamers have reached that age where they want to look back, or maybe it’s because of how easy it is to tweet out ‘Hey, remember this!?'"

"I played the Mortal Kombat arcade game in their office for half an hour. I turned to [former Midway Games chief] Neil D. Nicastro and I said, “This is Star Wars meets Enter the Dragon. This is not just an arcade game. This is a whole phenomenon.” I said, “If you give me the rights to this, I promise you I will produce this, not just in movies, but in every medium in the world.” He looked at me and said, “You’re full of crap! It’s just an arcade game!” That began a three-month process of me trying to convince them that it was more than just an arcade game. They didn’t believe it… I finally just wore them down and they optioned the rights to me for an insanely short amount of time, which now I would never do, but it was my first deal at my company."

"We producers don't think that FFVIII is much harder than FFVII! However with FFVIII, we have tried to bring in a mode of play which requires more active thinking from the players. Yes, you can play it all the way through without thinking much about strategy or combination of energies but you have to move very, very slowly. However, if you become more involved with the game and think more 'actively', it's much more fun. The harder you think, the better you play. It's wrong to say simply 'easier' or 'harder'..."

"I think girls tend to like RPGs, like Final Fantasy. Girls who play games like that seem to get more of a desire to work in this field. I usually don't think to make games strictly for a female audience, myself, but I think my RPGs attract a larger female audience. Violent, war-themed titles seem to attract an overwhelmingly male audience. I think if companies want to get more girls to play their games, they should keep this in mind."

"As I'm a woman myself, when I make games, I try not to just have them be male fantasy figures, as people needing to be rescued. I like to make female characters people of both genders can relate to. But we are seeing more strong-willed women in games geared towards female audiences."

"Back in the day, Sega said we couldn't show our real names, thus everyone went under nicknames in the game credits."

"The concern that violent video games may promote aggression or reduce empathy in its players is pervasive and given the popularity of these games their psychological impact is an urgent issue for society at large. Contrary to the custom, this topic has also been passionately debated in the scientific literature. One research camp has strongly argued that violent video games increase aggression in its players , whereas the other camp repeatedly concluded that the effects are minimal at best, if not absent. Importantly, it appears that these fundamental inconsistencies cannot be attributed to differences in research methodology since even meta-analyses, with the goal to integrate the results of all prior studies on the topic of aggression caused by video games led to disparate conclusions. These meta-analyses had a strong focus on children, and one of them reported a marginal age effect suggesting that children might be even more susceptible to violent video game effects. At present, almost all experimental studies targeting the effects of violent video games on aggression and/or empathy focussed on the effects of short-term video gameplay. In these studies the duration for which participants were instructed to play the games ranged from 4 min to maximally 2 h (mean = 22 min, median = 15 min, when considering all experimental studies reviewed in two of the recent major meta-analyses in the field) and most frequently the effects of video gaming have been tested directly after gameplay."

"Taken together, the findings of the present study show that an extensive game intervention over the course of 2 months did not reveal any specific changes in aggression, empathy, interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs, depressivity, anxiety or executive control functions; neither in comparison to an active control group that played a non-violent video game nor to a passive control group. We observed no effects when comparing a baseline and a post-training assessment, nor when focussing on more long-term effects between baseline and a follow-up interval 2 months after the participants stopped training. To our knowledge, the present study employed the most comprehensive test battery spanning a multitude of domains in which changes due to violent video games may have been expected. Therefore the present results provide strong evidence against the frequently debated negative effects of playing violent video games. This debate has mostly been informed by studies showing short-term effects of violent video games when tests were administered immediately after a short playtime of a few minutes; effects that may in large be caused by short-lived priming effects that vanish after minutes. The presented results will therefore help to communicate a more realistic scientific perspective of the real-life effects of violent video gaming. However, future research is needed to demonstrate the absence of effects of violent video gameplay in children."

"We always think of the road not taken, of something in the past. 'Wow, what would have happened if I married so and so, or took that job in San Diego…' But you rarely think that each and every second that goes by is one of those moments. Like this second that just happened. And that one. And the one that's going to happen in a second." Potentially, each of these seconds could alter a game in a profound way. Just as they can in life. The easiest thing for us to imagine is that our lives, and the story we are playing, are pre-designed, solid. But neither gaming nor life has to be like that. In both, we can alter and decide in a way that is surprising, ultimately freeing."

"Video games are meant for you to be immersed in an exciting and creative alternative reality and have fun with friends. Adding present-day political bullshit kills the vibe."

"Isn't it scary to think about the impact a game can have on people's lives? That said, I really admire them for the time, energy and money that they spend on their costumes..."