First the percussive sounds of sniper fire and the thrill of the kill. Then the gospel of peace.

Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo.

The latest iteration of the immensely popular space epic, Halo 3, was released nearly two weeks ago by Microsoft and has already passed $300 million in sales.

Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.

The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.

Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo — despite its “thou shalt kill” credo — celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.

But the question arises: What price to appear relevant? Some parents, religious ethicists and pastors say that Halo may succeed at attracting youths, but that it could have a corroding influence. In providing Halo, churches are permitting access to adult-themed material that young people cannot buy on their own.

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

Daniel R. Heimbach, a professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, believes that churches should reject Halo, in part because it associates thrill and arousal with killing.

“To justify whatever killing is involved by saying that it’s just pixels involved is an illusion,” he said.

Focus on the Family, a large evangelical organization, said it was trying to balance the game’s violent nature with its popularity and the fact that churches are using it anyway. “Internally, we’re still trying to figure out what is our official view on it,” said Lisa Anderson, a spokeswoman for the group.

There is little doubting Halo’s cultural relevance. Even as video games have grown in popularity, the Halo series stands out. The first Halo and Halo 2 sold nearly 15 million copies combined. Microsoft says that Halo 3 “is on track to become the No. 1 gaming title of all time.”

Hundreds of churches use Halo games to connect with young people, said Lane Palmer, the youth ministry specialist at the Dare 2 Share Ministry, a nonprofit organization in Arvada, Colo., that helps churches on youth issues.

“It’s very pervasive,” Mr. Palmer said, more widespread on the coasts, less so in the South, where the Southern Baptist denomination takes a more cautious approach. The organization recently sent e-mail messages to 50,000 young people about how to share their faith using Halo 3. Among the tips: use the game’s themes as the basis for a discussion about good and evil.

At Sweetwater Baptist Church in Lawrenceville, Ga., Austin Brown, 16, said, “We play Halo, take a break and have something to eat, and have a lesson,” explaining that the pastor tried to draw parallels “between God and the devil.”

Read On

A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber.

But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It's a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology.

Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user's forehead and reads the brain's electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating.

The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.

Engineers at NeuroSky have big plans for brain wave-reading toys and video games. They say the simple Darth Vader game - a relatively crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb - portends the coming of more sophisticated devices that could revolutionize the way people play.

Technology from NeuroSky and other startups could make video games more mentally stimulating and realistic. It could even enable players to control video game characters or avatars in virtual worlds with nothing but their thoughts.

Adding biofeedback to "Tiger Woods PGA Tour," for instance, could mean that only those players who muster Zen-like concentration could nail a put. In the popular action game "Grand Theft Auto," players who become nervous or frightened would have worse aim than those who remain relaxed and focused.

NeuroSky's prototype measures a person's baseline brain-wave activity, including signals that relate to concentration, relaxation and anxiety. The technology ranks performance in each category on a scale of 1 to 100, and the numbers change as a person thinks about relaxing images, focuses intently, or gets kicked, interrupted or otherwise distracted.

The technology is similar to more sensitive, expensive equipment that athletes use to achieve peak performance. Koo Hyoung Lee, a NeuroSky co-founder from South Korea, used biofeedback to improve concentration and relaxation techniques for members of his country's Olympic archery team.

Read on

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This is interesting, will gamers want the extra mental challenge? The problems I see with the idea of "shakiness" in the controller brought on by biofeedback, is that you disconnect the trodes and then your aim will be spot on, you could trick the trodes into thinking yur cool as a ice. Anyway, it does point to some exciting developments in gaming, in that you could potentially get more input, such as mental commands to add to the usual joystick ones.

China's growing band of young internet gamers will face virtual penalties if they stay online for more than three hours, under a new set of rules to combat cyber addiction published today.

Chinese authorities have voiced increasing concern in recent months about the number of teenagers who spend hours and sometimes days in internet cafes playing games.

In the latest measure to combat the problem, eight government departments have issued new rules that will force internet gaming companies and operators to install and run "anti-addiction" software, the China Daily reported.

Read on

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This is interesting. Will it work, perhaps in China highly controlled internet environment it may? But this means extra work for gaming companies.

Video games will only make children more violent if they already have a tendency towards aggression, a new study has found.

A Swinburne University of Technology study of 120 children aged 11 to 15 revealed children prone to worrying, neurotic behaviour and predisposed to aggression were likely to be more aggressive after playing violent video games.

But for the majority of children there was no difference in behaviour, according to the research published in the Psychology, Crime and Law journal.

The study monitored the behaviour of children from 10 schools in eastern and southern metropolitan Melbourne before and after playing the violent video game Quake II for 20 minutes, Swinburne's Professor Grant Devilly said.

Prof Devilly said only children predisposed to aggression and more reactive to their environments changed their behaviour after playing and of those only some showed more aggression.

"They were a little bit more aggressive anyway in their interaction with life," he said.

"The majority of people did not increase in aggression at all and we're not the first people to find that."

The study found that children predisposed to aggression who were relaxed before playing became more aggressive afterwards while the more hyperactive children became less aggressive.

Prof Devilly said much of the research linking aggressive behaviour to violent video games had been unconvincing.

"It's the only message parents have ever received and it's just not accurate," he said.

The study showed aggression linked to game playing depended on a player's mood and predisposition to aggression, he said.

"You've got to basically read your own kid. If you have a quite hyper kid they will come down after playing a bit, but for the rest of kids, the vast majority, it makes no difference at all in their general aggression rate," he said.

from SMH

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A study that is perhaps more grounded that those that want to push the idea that games are the cause of violent behaviour. It is a complex thing and I'm glad that one study has finally not gone for the sensationalist view.

Wow, this gaming stuff is coming thick and fast.
According to a new study published in the Archives of Surgery, surgeons who put in their downtime playing video games proved to have considerably higher surgical skills than their non-gamer co-workers, in particular when it came to laparoscopic surgery, which involves manipulating instruments while staring at a monitor. While the study is far from authoritative, with only 33 surgeons participating in it, it nonetheless found that those who played video games for at least three hours a week performed 27 percent faster, made 37 percent fewer errors, and scored 42 percent better in surgical tests than those who had not played video games. The correlation between video games and surgical skills was apparently so high that it proved to be an even greater indicator of performance than either the length of an individual's surgical training or their prior experience with laporscopic surgery. No word if those that snuck in some extra practice in Trauma Center on their DS had an even bigger advantage.
from Endgadget

Gaming sharpens vision: study

PLAYING video games that involve high levels of visual action on a daily basis can actually help improve your ability to see fine detail, a study shows.

Researchers at the University of Rochester in the US have found that people who play action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month sharpened their ability to identify letters by about 20 per cent.

"Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," said Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.

"After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in."

The study involved testing university students who had played few, if any, video games in the last year, who were divided into two groups.

An experimental group played the hit title Unreal Tournament, a first person combat game, while a control group played Tetris, which while demanding in terms of motor control is less intense visually.

The test subjects had to quickly identify the orientation of the letter T, which was placed in the middle of a crowd of other distracting symbols.

After about a month, the Tetris players showed no improvement on the test while the Unreal Tournament players could tell which way the T was pointing much more easily than they had just a month earlier.

Prof Bavelier said people that played action games actually changed their brain's neural pathways responsible for visual processing.

"These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it," Prof Bavelier said.

"That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."

Recent studies by the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia show almost 80 per cent of Australian households own a device for playing computer and video games, while the average age of the Australian gamer is about 28.

Nicola Bidwell, who specialises in human-computer interaction at James Cook University, said modern research indicated humans' visual systems generally completed their neural connections up until the mid-20s.

"Though the bulk of a lot of these things is done before the age of eight or nine years old," said Dr Bidwell.

"I would imagine, if this research had been ... done on much younger children, that the result would be much stronger."

The Rochester study also provides some hope for people with visual defects such as those with amblyopia or "lazy eye", with special rehabilitation software able to reproduce an action game's need to identify objects quickly.

The researchers also are looking into how the brain responds to virtual-reality stimuli.

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Print out and give to wives/mums everywhere!