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Category Archives: Gaming Research

Are you racist? You might want to change your avatar

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Are you racist? You might want to change your avatar Is racism a matter of perspective gone wrong? And, if so, how can we fix it? A new study in Consciousness and Cognition demonstrates technology may be able to offer part of the solution: donning the skin of a dark-skinned avatar significantly decreased an individual’s [...]


Scientific proof that gamers are ridiculously sexist

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Unfortunately, sexism is common place in much of society. From wage equality to health coverage for birth control, women seem to have to justify to men why they are deserving of all these things. Given this uphill battle women have, you would think that we could all just play games together in peace. Unfortunately, it [...]


Cheating, stealing and why guys play video games

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Questions of what why individuals play violent video games are currently at the forefront of psychological research. Most studies, however, examine video game choices through self-reported surveys. Although interesting, there is a limit to the inferences and understanding one can gain from such studies, and more importantly, it doesn’t answer what specifically drives game choice. [...]


Gaming till the day I die

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Studies of video games often focus on the effect they have on children. But given that the majority of gamers are adults and that we have a growing ageing population, it’s as important to understand the role games play in the lives of older adults. In this study, Allaire and colleagues explored the role digital [...]


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Video games and our brains on winning

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The pleasure centers in our brain respond to positive outcomes and winning is no different. Yet, beating different opponents may have different values to a player. Apart from examining the brains responses to winning or losing in a video game, Kätsyri and colleagues examined whether these differences are further exaggerated by the type of opponent: human [...]


Why kids play video games

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“…there maybe great value in understanding video games as something children choose to do rather than something done to them.” This idea, grounded in self-determination theory, is how Chris Ferguson and Cheryl Olsen (co-writer of Grand Theft Childhood) decided to explore why children play video games in general, and why some decide to play violent video [...]


Action video games improve reading ability in dyslexic children

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New research headed by Sandro Franceschini and Andrea Facoetti examines whether the focus employed while playing action video games can improve the focus and reading ability of dyslexic children. To test this, they took 40 children that never played video games and had them play 12 hours of Rayman Raving Rabbids over two weeks. Half [...]