Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

90 Percent of Tweens are Playing Games Online

Today's kids are playing games on consoles, computers, portables and online more than ever before. Kids and Games: What Boys and Girls are Playing Today is a new report series launched by M2 Research. Key findings from the report include:

1. Social Networking: Social Networking is increasingly prevalent in children's lives. Facebook is now the favorite website among tween (8-11) boys and teen (12-15) girls.

2. Key Demographic and "Sweet Spot": Online games dominate for boys and girls ages 8-11. 91% of tween boys and 93% of tween girls play games online.

3. Strong Videogame Franchises: Franchises continue to flourish at the top of the "Favorites" list for boys and girls. The videogame franchise girls prefer is the Mario Series, with 20% of girls picking it as their favorite. Boys, prefer Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with 36% of teen boys picking it as their favorite game.

Source: PRWeb
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/08/prweb4392494.htm

Study: Video Games May Affect Attention Span

Parents who believe that playing video games is less harmful to their kids' attention spans than watching TV may want to reconsider -- and unplug the Xbox. Video games can sap a child's attention just as much as the tube, a new study suggests.

Elementary school children who play video games more than two hours a day are 67 percent more likely than their peers who play less to have greater-than-average attention problems, according to the study, which appears in the journal Pediatrics.

Playing video games and watching TV appear to have roughly the same link to attention problems, even though video games are considered a less passive activity, the researchers say.

"Video games aren't less likely than television to be related to attention problems," says the lead author of the study, Edward Swing, a doctoral candidate in the department of psychology at Iowa State University, in Ames. "They were at least as strong as television at predicting attention problems."

The study also suggests that young kids aren't the only ones whose attention spans may be affected by video games.

In addition to surveying the elementary school kids, the researchers asked 210 college students about their TV and video-game use and how they felt it affected their attention. The students who logged more than two hours of TV and video games a day were about twice as likely to have attention problems, the researchers found.

Source: CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/07/05/games.attention/?hpt=C2

Video Games Before Bed May Not Shortchange Slumber

Parents who worry that their teenaged son won't sleep well if he indulges in a violent video game right before bedtime may be fretting needlessly.

A new study found that teens who played the popular video game "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare" took only slightly longer to fall asleep than teens who watched a documentary.

A report on the finding appears in the April 15 issue of theJournal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Australian researchers found that it took teens a median of 7.5 minutes to fall asleep after playing the video game, only slightly longer than the three minutes it took them to nod off after watching the Academy Award-winning March of the Penguins on DVD.

The video gamers were only slightly less sleepy than the documentary watchers following each activity, although they displayed a slight increase in cognitive alertness. The researchers found no significant differences in physiologic arousal between the two groups, and both ended up sleeping normally.

Source: BusinessWeek
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/638097.html

Increasing Game Time Online

The popularity of social network games notwithstanding, the proportion of video game users playing online has remained fairly constant, according to research from The NPD Group.

Slightly more than one-half of all gamers play on the Web, but the time they spend doing so has gone up in the past year by 10%.

“While the percentage of the population that reports playing games has declined slightly, this study details other metrics which point to both stability and growth in both online and offline gaming,” said Anita Frazier, industry analyst at The NPD Group, in a statement.

Source: eMarketer
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007559

Video Games Tied to Aggression

A new review of 130 studies "strongly suggests" playing violent video games increases aggressive thoughts and behavior and decreases empathy.

The results hold "regardless of research design, gender, age or culture," says lead researcher Craig Anderson, who directs the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University in Ames.

His team did a statistical analysis of studies on more than 130,000 gamers from elementary school age to college in the USA, Europe and Japan. It is published today in Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association.

Anderson says his team "never said it's a huge effect. But if you look at known risk factors for the development of aggression and violence, some are bigger than media violence and some are smaller.

"If you have a child with no other risk factors for aggression and violence and if you allow them to suddenly start playing video games five hours to 10 hours a week, they're not going to become a school shooter. One risk factor doesn't do it by itself."

But he notes that video game violence is "the only causal risk factor that is relatively easy for parents to do something about."

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-03-01-1Avideogames01_ST_N.htm

Videogame Sales Dip 8% in '09

The recession has socked the videogame industry, with overall sales in the U.S. falling 8% to come in at nearly $19.7 billion last year.

That's down from $21.4 billion in 2008, according to the NPD Group. The industry was expected to take a hit after only four months last year saw an increase in sales over 2008. One of those months, however, was December. The videogame industry's $5.5 billion haul in December was the biggest sales month ever, besting the previous year by 4% and perhaps presaging better things to come. Nintendo's "New Super Mario Bros. Wii" led the charge for the month, topping 2.8 million units.

Source: Variety
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118013945.html?

Modern Warfare 2 Sets Sales Record

According to internal figures released by Activision, opening day sales for its heavily-anticipated game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 smashed records, generating $310 million in 24 hours in North America and the U.K. to become the "the biggest launch in history across all forms of entertainment."

The game shipped worldwide on Tuesday, although Activision has not released sales data from regions other than the U.S. and U.K. The company estimates that roughly 4.7 million copies of the game were sold in the first day of availability in just those two territories.

The previous record-holder, Grand Theft Auto IV, sold 3.6 million copies and generated $310 million worldwide in its first day. If Activision's numbers are correct, Modern Warfare managed to eclipse those figures in only two regions, meaning the game's final worldwide tally is likely to be significantly higher.

And that's simply staggering, as the U.S. and U.K. figures alone dwarf both the record-setting $150 million opening weekend of last year's "The Dark Knight" and the $300 million earned by fellow first-person shooter, Halo 3, in its first week.

Source: Yahoo Plugged In
http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/-modern-warfare-2-breaks-day-one-entertainment-sales-record/1372471

Almost 1 in 10 Young Video Game Users 'Addicted'

What if your child is one of the almost 10% of kids addicted to video games? There are steps you can take. See Jim Burns' article, Help for a Child Who's Addicted to Video Games on HomeWord.com.

A sizable number of young video game players -- fully 8.5 percent -- exhibit signs of addiction to gaming, a new study has found.

These kids aren't just playing a lot. Their gaming interferes with school performance, disrupts interaction with family and friends and poses health problems, the study reveals.

Douglas A. Gentile, a developmental psychologist and an assistant professor at Iowa State University in Ames, said the study is the first to document the prevalence of video game addiction using a nationally representative sample of children and adolescents.

"What's most concerning to me is really the total percentage, just the vast number of kids that are having real problems in their lives because they play games, and they may not know how to stop it," said Gentile, whose study appears in the May edition of Psychological Science.

Pathological gamers played more frequently and for more time, received worse grades and were more likely to report having trouble paying attention in school than non-pathological players. They also reported more health problems associated with playing video games, such as hand and wrist pain.

They were more than twice as likely to have been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder -- 25 percent of pathological gamers versus 11 percent of non-pathological players. And they were more likely (24 percent vs. 12 percent) to report having been involved in physical fights in the past year.

"I think it does highlight that parents and kids do need to talk about game play and they do need to talk about rules," said Cheryl K. Olson, co-director and co-founder of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Source: Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/hscout/2009/04/20/hscout626221.html

Economy (Finally) Hits Video Gaming Industry

I've been wondering when (or if) the video gaming industry would ever see a downturn in sales during these tough economic times, and the time has arrived. At least for a short time, anyway. Sales were down in March of 2009, compared to March of 2008. Industry leaders, however, are hesitant to pin the decline in sales to the economic downturn. Rather, they site very strong sales in March of 2008 due to the introduction of popular new games, as well as the Easter holiday having been in March of last year.

Overall U.S. video game sales fell 17 percent in March to $1.43 billion, research group NPD said recently, a revealing figure for an industry that had so far shown resilience in the economic downturn.

Video game software sales dropped 17 percent to $792.8 million in the month, while hardware sales fell 18 percent to $455.6 million.

NPD attributed some of the decline to the fact that Easter fell in March last year, boosting purchases for gifts.

For the first quarter of 2009 as a whole, video game sales were flat at $4.25 billion.

Source: Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE53F7JH20090417

Guitar Hero III First Ever Game to Sell $1 Billion

Guitar Hero has reached another important milestone, as Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock has become the first ever game to generate $1 billion in sales.

The news came from Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith during his keynote address at CES. Griffith also noted how the video game industry has had a profound effect on other entertainment sectors, and that Guitar Hero in particular has been hugely important to the music industry. For example, in its first week, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith sold over three times as many units as Aerosmith's last studio album. Furthermore, he cited Nielsen SoundScan data, which showed that artists whose music was playable in Guitar Hero had seen download sales increase 15-843%.

"Music has a history of evolving through technology and we are at the beginning of the latest chapter in that story," he said, as quoted by the BBC.

As for the newest Guitar Hero, Griffith said he's quite pleased with World Tour's user-generated aspect. 25,000 songs were created in the first 10 days and 141,000 songs have been posted so far. The Guitar Hero community site now has more than 600,000 members. To date, there have been 21 million user-song downloads.

Source: GameDaily
http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/guitar-hero-iii-first-ever-game-to-sell-1-billion/?biz=1