Zyked Mixes Video Game Incentives with Physical Fitness

Tom Söderlund, CEO of Zyked, sent me a note about his new startup merging physical fitness and videogames. Currently the company is on the ground floor of testing, with 100 users in alpha, offering “points systems, skill levels, achievement badges and highscore lists” combined with users’ exercise. An open beta is scheduled in coming months.

One exciting aspect of Zyked is its mobile capabilities, allowing a jogger, for example, to enter and receive data through her cell phone while out and about. Advancements in RL physical activities merit advancements in Zyked, resulting in the merging of incentives commonly found in MMOs with activities in meatspace. This is a hot idea, as seen with Weight Watchers Online and the Wii Fit.

R4 Revolution Majicon May Provide Homebrew Educational Games Solution for the DS

Here’s an intriguing story about the R4 Revolution, nicknamed the Majicon in Japan. The device provides an interface for micro SD cards to be read by the Nintendo DS. Consequently, they provide an avenue for piracy since game cartridges could be copied and shared without paying. In light of that, Nintendo has sued manufacturers, and retailers in Japan have become reticent about current inventories.

However, from an altruistic, educational gaming viewpoint, such devices may make it easier for aspiring programmers to share their creations with others. Previous efforts to create educational cartridges outside of traditional game companies were possible but rather difficult, requiring emulators and the purchase of dedicated hardware and cartridges if one wished to actually play the games on the devices.

With the R4, no fancy hardware is necessary. Programmers can save their code on micro SD cards and easily distribute and play the games. That would be a revolution indeed.

One (Ten Dollar) Laptop Per Child? Repurposed NES System Holds the Key

I’m a big fan of the late great Indiana University business professor Richard Farmer. His signature book, Farmer’s Law: Junk In a World of Affluence, should be required reading in business and education schools. Check out one of my articles for Converge Magazine a few years back for more details.

Farmer noted a society’s influence could be gauged by what was thrown away. The more affluent a society, the more valuable its junk. He was an advocate of repurposing equipment and technologies, sending “old” materials to developing countries to help them speed development. This has in fact been occurring for some time to one extent or another. Americans old enough to remember soda pop in returnable bottles might be surprised to find them still in use when visiting third world countries. When a factory in the West modernizes, its obsolete equipment often goes overseas.

Back in the 1970s, when Farmer wrote his book, he suggested a good way to repurpose old vehicles would be to unload them on beaches off India. He speculated the cars would soon be repaired and placed back in good service. Now, it’s hardly fair to call India a third world country anymore. But there are some older technologies still in service there, and this includes gaming consoles once dominant in our marketplace 20 or 30 years ago.

Eric Lai over at PCWorld reports on Derek Lomas, a grad student who stumbled across the old style consoles while on an internship in Bangalore. The system Lomas discovered in the marketplace there is a knock-off of the old Nintendo NES system, an 8 bit console. The system takes NES cartridges and hooks up to television sets. Lomas had the brainy idea of adapting the unit for an über-cheap computer.

This idea makes a lot of sense for developing markets. Most households in developing countries, regardless of socioeconomic status, already have television sets. The monitor in any portable computer system can be the single most expensive component. Therefore, providing just the guts of a computer and using a television as the monitor is simply brilliant, especially for homes with very low incomes.

Lomas documents the discovery in his blog here. Jerry Kronenberg at the Boston Herald reports Lomas participated in the International Design Summit at MIT this month, birthplace of the One Laptop Per Child idea, otherwise known as the “$100 laptop.” Lomas’ team hopes to add memory to the device, a keyboard, and cell phone access for Internet browsing.

Nicholas Negroponte, who spearheaded OLPC at MIT, is another professor who has put big ideas for developing countries into action, like Richard Farmer back in the day. If Lomas is successful, he’ll be following in good footsteps.

References:
Kronenberg, J. (2008, August 4). Designers on quest to build $12 computer. [Online]. Retrieved August 9, 2008 from http://news.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/
view/2008_08_04_Designers_on_quest_to_build__12_computer/

Study: Roommates with Consoles May Cause Lower GPAs

One of those lovable academic rapscallions at The Irascible Professor, namely Dr. Sanford Pinsker, recently discussed a paper by Ralph Stinebrickner, over at Berea College, and Todd Stinebrickner, over at Western Ontario.

The Stinebrickners published their paper in the Berkeley Electronic Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy. At first glance, the study would not attract the attention of researchers interested in videogames. The title and abstract do not hint at videogames, but rather the mundane effect studying has on college student grades.

Subjects were recruited from Berea, where roommates are randomly assigned. Students assigned to roommates who brought a videogame console system to college with them spent less time studying than those whose roommates did not bring a videogame system. To wit: if you go to college without a gaming system, and your roommate brings one (Playstation, Xbox, or Wii), your grades will suffer. Dr. Pinsker summarizes:

At Berea, those students whose (randomly selected) roommates had video games earned significantly lower first-semester GPAs: for males, 2.74 vs. 2.98; for females, 3.03 vs. 3.16. Students with a roommate who brought a video game to college report playing video games 4.06 hours per week; students with roommates who did not bring a video game report spending 0.79 hours per week. The first group spent 2.9 hours a day studying; the second group reports spending 3.6 hours a day studying.

I’ve discussed this paper before, back when it was a work in progress. As I pointed out then, the effects gaming consoles have on GPAs as shown in the paper, while statistically significant, remain negligible in practical terms.

Study: Active Videogames Make Kids Break a Sweat

The Wii makes things easy to measure for researchers, as noted here many moons ago. The Wii Fit has spawned research linking active video games with increased health benefits. This seems to be a developing trend, as more research along these lines has been presented recently.

Charlene Laino over at WebMD reports that Gregory Brown, over at University of Nebraska, presented a study at the 55th Annual Meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine.

Brown and colleagues studied 25 youngsters whose average age was 11. The kids burned two to three times as many calories when playing Wii Boxing and Wii Tennis than when engaging in traditional handheld video games.

Their average heart rate shot up from 80 to 120 beats per minute — “about what you’d expect when walking or doing a slow dance,” Brown says.

Brown thought the kids would burn even more calories when playing Dance Dance Revolution, where participants stand in front of the television and boogie in step to instructions and graphics on the screen. But that didn’t prove to be the case; all three games proved equally beneficial.

Also presented at the conference was a study comparing Dance Mat Mania and Eye Toy Boxing, games which require physical activity, with a handheld game and watching a DVD. The less physical activities produced caloric consumption on par with reading; the active games produced heart rates equivalent to jogging. This second study was presented by Viki Penpraze, a doc candidate over at U. Glasgow in Scotland.

Meanwhile, Erica Hendry at USA Today reports all public schools in West Virginia will use Dance Dance Revolution next year, and North Carolina schools will introduce, “the HOPSports Training System into schools through a partnership with Be Active North Carolina, a non-profit group.” It offers simulated basketball dribbling and other sports related skills.

References:
Hendry, E. R. (2008, July 31). Exercise video games get kids off the couch. USA Today. [Online]. Retrieved August 1, 2008 from http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/
2008-07-30-exercise-games_N.htm

Laino, C. (2008, May 30). Kids feel the burn with virtual exercise. [Online]. Available: http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20080530/
kids-feel-the-burn-with-virtual-exercise

Guitar Hero Helps Burn Victims

Here’s another Wii-hab story, this one out of William Randolph Hearst Burn Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center where therapists are adapting the Wii for burn victim rehabilitation. Burned skin and grafts require movement and stretching, although this is painful. Therapists have found using motion sensitive games for the Wii help patients to move more. Guitar Hero III is used to get patients to move their arms and upper torso.

Wii-hab Rising: NIH Joins Research Push

David Twitty of the Associated Press writes of an increase in interest and research surrounding the use of videogames for medicinal purposes. Twitty brings up the following points:

- The National Institute of Health has joined research efforts. Carmen Russoniello over at East Carolina University is studying the use of videogames as therapy for sickle cell anemia at a clinical center run by the NIH

- The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced a $2 million grant program earmarked for Wii-hab research

- The annual Games for Health conference saw a continued spike in attendance this year, including reps from Humana, Cigna, and Kaiser Permanente who have all backed medical games lately

- HopeLab’s ReMission has been a particular success story, helping young cancer patients understand and deal with the disease

- A survey by PopCap games found a fifth of those surveyed considered themselves disabled somehow, and that casual games helped treat the disability, particularly depression and other mental disorders

References:
Twitty, D. (2008, July 15). Medicinal use of video games growing. Associated Press. [Online]. Retrieved July 16, 2008 from http://www.kansascity.com/382/story/705991.html

Wii Go to School: Academic Uses for the Popular Console

The latest issue of Edutopia has an article by Laila Weir on Wii-learning: teachers finding academic uses for the Wii in their classrooms. Rather than using a game designed purely for educational purposes, these teachers are adapting existing games for the classroom.

Here’s a thought: Why not take a tech platform that kids are already nuts about and put it to use? That was the thought at Cumberland Elementary School, in West Lafayette, Indiana, where first-grade teacher David Brantley used a parent donation to buy three Wii consoles. Brantley integrated some of the Wii’s games and online channels into lessons on weather and geography. The result: “A great virtual map and globe activity,” he says.

Justifying its use by citing research showing benefits to learning in multiple modalities, the teachers often use the Wii for games with math, language, and logic exercises.

- Sports games provide opportunities for score keeping and math

- Bowling in particular provides several opportunities for number crunching

- Wii’s Big Brain Academy helps with reasoning and logic, but flashes loser and winner signs which may hurt self esteem; teachers combat this by prepping students on being gracious winners and losers

- Using the Wii has helped motivate “reluctant” students

My take: teachers have been adapting technology for classroom use since time immemorial, and this is just the latest example. It’s heartening to see a positive attitude toward gaming in the classroom. I suspect the family-friendly and easy-to-engage approach the Wii has taken helps ease it into the classroom over more “serious” consoles like the Playstation 3 and Xbox. Who can deny the Wii a role in the classroom when it’s being used in the gym and in nursing homes?

References:
Weir, L. (2008, June). Wii love learning: Using gaming technology to engage students. Edutopia. [Online]. Available: http://www.edutopia.org/ikid-wii-gaming-technology-classroom

Nintendo DS Helps Teach English in Japan

The DS continues to garner media attention for its role in Japanese public schools. Here’s a brief article by Gary Schmidt detailing its use at the Junior High level for teaching English.

Motoko Okubo, a junior high school teacher, has used the handheld DS and textbook software since May in weekly sessions focusing on vocabulary, penmanship and audio comprehension for teaching english.

“They’ve been using it at home playing games, so at first they were surprised they can use it at school,” Okubo said.

Vice principal Junko Tatsumi says results so far have been encouraging in Japan’s long struggle with English language education … Japan has around 15,000 middle and high schools and in 2000 launched reforms to create a more “relaxed” environment aimed at fostering creativity and reducing rote learning.

The educational outlook for the Nintendo DS continues to look promising.

References:
Schmidt, G. (2008, June 30). The Nintendo DS is becoming more popular than just a portable videogame device. [Online]. Retrieved July 7, 2008 from http://www.halflifesource.com/story/japan_uses_nintendo_ds_in_schools/
article2533.htm

Resistance is Futile … All Will Become Gamers

Here’s a nice article from Rob Fahey, former editor of GamesIndustry.biz, over at Times Online. Fahey makes several interesting points, including many factoids that would fit nicely in research articles on videogames.

- Nintendo is now the second most valuable company (by market cap) in Japan, after Toyota

- Consequently, the market believes the industry as a whole has enormous growth potential

- Game Group is Britain’s largest videogame retailer. Profits for the first half of 2008 will top £33 million, beating analyst estimates by 33%

- Consequently, Game Group’s market cap now tops the country’s largest construction firm by three times

- The current focus on all age groups by videogame companies is the natural outcome of marketing efforts beginning in the 1990s, when Sony began branching out from children’s television advertisements for the PlayStation to nightclubs

- The market for videogames continues to expand into all segments of the population, from teenage boys to older men; to girls and women; to senior citizens; to families as a whole

- The advanced graphics and capabilities of videogames have created a dynamic platform for storytelling that rivals moviemaking in scope

Finally, Fahey sums up with this statement, showing that eventually gaming will engulf everyone:

As video games continue to break new creative and commercial ground, the conclusion the markets have reached is simple – and inevitable. Being a stranger to interactive entertainment will be seen as eccentric as watching TV on a black and white set. Soon, we will all be gamers.

References:
Fahey, R. (2008, July 7). It’s inevitable: Soon we will all be gamers. The Times. [Online]. Retrieved July 6, 2008 from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/
guest_contributors/article4281768.ece