Filed under: Games
Which came first, our love of video games -- or ADD?
Here's a meaty issue -- a meaty, contemporary issue. Go back fifty years, before video games, before ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) was 'discovered', and such a story couldn't even exist. But here we are: modern day. Love it or hate it, we inhabit a world where vast and incredible leaps in the realms of technology and science occur on a daily basis. We're now, as a result, one very big international community full of gamers, where the person sitting next to you on the train is more likely to be a fellow gamer than not. And apparently -- and this might not be a shock to some of you -- according to a new report, we're picking up new and freshly-labeled psychoses from our rampant, reckless, just-one-more-hour gaming habits. Apparently.
CNET breaks down the conclusion of the report:
"A new study out of Iowa State University finds that people who play video games for 40-plus hours a week have a harder time focusing on certain tasks than those who play just a few hours a week."
You should probably read the findings of the study yourself and draw your own conclusions, but I do have one thing to add:
Considering the complexity and involvement of video games, maybe gamers just don't find real life quite as interesting by comparison?
If I could choose between going to the office and focusing on a word processor for 8 hours a day, or playing a 32-player video game that involves pixel-perfect hand-eye coordination and one-hundred percent, focused concentration all the time -- well, I think I'd choose the game. Is it any surprise that we gamers find our mind wandering when turned to the menial, humdrum tasks of the real world?
[via CNET]
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
