ACT lab hosts game law colloquium

At the ACT Lab this morning, we had Jon Festinger (author of Video Game Law), his UBC Law students, and UVic Law students (via videoconferencing) and colleague Eric Gross come to the Games Lab for a very informative colloquium.
We had a seminar, roundtable on research, and played games (of course!). The most interesting part for me was seeing how the field of Law is changing to look at Internet regulation (and its associated evils). Being interested in the grassroots of usage myself, I think my research would provide a lot of case studies that drive policy implementation that these law practitioners would work on. Online games are such a new thing, that it is easy to see how people just don't know what to make of it yet. It's really inspiring to see that people are making inroads, and the debates that are resulting are fascinating.
Kudos go to Sara Grimes (who is taking the UBC course) for organizing this event!

Flomaster

Defended, and all's good....
we now return you to regularly scheduled life :)

The end is nigh....

FYI.... on the broadcast channel:

Ms. FLORENCE CHEE will be defending her Masters Thesis:

A SENSE OF PLACE: MEDIA AND MOTIVATION IN KOREA BY THE WANG-TTA EFFECT
ORDER AND CHAOS IN AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF KOREAN ONLINE GAME COMMUNITIES

Date: 22 November 2005 (Tuesday)
Time: 10:00am
Place: Room 2270 Harbour Centre - Downtown

Chair: Dr. Morley Lipsett
Senior Supervisor: Dr. Richard Smith
Supervisor: Dr. Andrew Feenberg
Supervisor: Dr. Roman Onufrijchuk
External Examiner: Dr. David Mitchell, Professor of Communication & Culture, University of Calgary
(via tele/video-conferencing)
ALL WELCOME

Red Herring story on WoW: Youth’s Death Linked to Game

With less than 2 days left until my defense, this is appropriate...
Summary: Chinese following lawsuit-happy American style... parents suing games company because their kid takes a fatal jump (allegedly) because he saw it in the game.
Critique: ... while this is tragic for its own reasons, why is blaming a game (that MILLIONS enjoy...) for something like this not thrown out of court outright? There are tonnes of people who do stupid things they see on television everyday. Hmm, would we sue the maker of the television, the people who broadcast the show, the makers of the television show... all of the above? hmm... . You get the idea. Again, it seems a case of it being easier to implicate a big games producer than to look at perhaps... other issues.

Quoted text:
Source: is here

Blizzard faces a lawsuit from Chinese parents, who say World of Warcraft caused the death of their son.
November 18, 2005

In the latest saga over online gaming addiction in China, the parents of a 13-year-old Tianjin boy are suing the makers of World of Warcraft, blaming the game for the death of their son, according to the Chinese news agency Xinhua.

The parents filed a suit against Blizzard Entertainment on Wednesday, saying their son jumped to his death while reenacting a scene from the game, the report said. The parents are backed by the anti-Internet addiction advocate Zhang Chunliang.

Mr. Chunliang has spoken to 63 parents whose children have allegedly suffered from online gaming addiction and plans to file a class-action suit, according to the report.

Blizzard executives weren’t available to comment to RedHerring.com about the lawsuit.

The high-profile backlash to China’s booming online game market reflects the growing size of the industry. World of Warcraft alone has 1.5 million paying players.

China’s online game market brought in $580 million this year, and is the fastest-growing market in the world, according to research firm DFC Intelligence. That market is set to nearly triple in size to an estimated $1.7 billion by 2010.

Blizzard Entertainment developed the game and works with The9 in China as the local distributor. The9 already posted second-quarter revenue of $6.7 million, up from first-quarter revenue of $1.5 million.

Some analysts estimate the game is raking in more than $30 million per month in basic subscription fees.

Vivendi Universal Games, the parent company of Blizzard, recently said that through the first half of 2005, World of Warcraft brought the company’s revenue up 61 percent from the year before to €238 million ($290 million) (see World of Warcraft Storms Asia).

But the company, which now counts 4.5 million World of Warcraft players worldwide, must contend with the backlash of parents concerned with addictive behavior.

Many Chinese parents contend that their children spend hours gaming in Internet cafes at the risk of their health, work, and school (see Wang-ba Crusade).

China Clocks Gamers

The Chinese government is looking into how to respond to its own citizen’s concerns.

The Chinese government has already said it plans to restrict gamers to three hours of consecutive play, using a “fatigue technique” in games. After three hours of play, the online game would lose some player power, and after five hours, the player would lose most power. After that, there would be a delay of five hours before the game could be accessed to its full capacity.

Analysts and industry execs are concerned the restriction might dampen the growth of the Chinese online game industry.

Analysts like Elias Glenn with Shanghai-based Pacific Epoch think the regulation will have a major effect on the industry. “It has the potential to have a serious impact.”

But beyond government restrictions, other factors like piracy and an increasingly competitive market could throw a wet blanket on the industry’s growth.

“There are huge potentials, but there are also a lot of pitfalls,” said Alexis Madrigal, a DFC Intelligence analyst who recently authored a study on the industry.

Games as drugs, nothing new

Catchy title, but I'm with Kurt Squire (quoted near the end of the article, probably not an accident) in that games are an activity that can be taken to excess, but the physical consequences do not approach drugs. From MIT's Technology Review

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Game Away the Day - New research suggests that people who play video games to excess exhibit traits similar to those of drug users. By Emily Singer

Show a smoker a lighter, and he or she will get the urge for a cigarette. The same physiological responses that trigger a smoker's craving may also be at work in the brains of people who spend a lot of time playing video games, researchers say. And that could add more fuel to the long and heated argument over whether video games are hazardously addictive.

In new research presented Monday at the Society for Neurosciences meeting in Washington, DC, neuroscientist Sabine Grusser-Sinopoli of the Charite-University Medicine in Berlin showed pictures of video games to a group of men who displayed signs of gaming to excess, such as neglecting work or school for gaming. Using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity, Grusser-Sinopoli found that gamers respond to game-related pictures much as gamblers respond to the sight of cards or heroin addicts to the sight of needles. The findings are evidence of the addictive potential of video games, Grusser-Sinopoli says.

In fact, evidence for and against that conclusion has been building for more than a decade. Addiction experts say that almost any exciting activity can develop into a compulsion that disrupts daily activities, such as work, school, sleep, or time spent with the family.

But whether society should treat immersion in video games as a risk tantamount to abusing drugs and alcohol is hotly debated.

Grusser-Sinopoli's own work is built around the idea that many of the most long-lasting effects of drug addiction are the result of learned responses, rather than the drugs' direct chemical effects. Addicts learn to associate neutral cues, such as the street where they used to buy heroin, with the physical response caused by the drug. Such a link remains years after a user has overcome a physical dependence on a drug -- and can easily trigger a relapse.

Grusser-Sinopoli and colleagues study responses to these cues in both drug addicts and people with behavioral compulsions, such as gambling, with the hope of creating better treatments. She began studying video games after getting inquiries from parents whose children spent entire weekends game-playing.

In previous research, Grusser-Sinopoli has shown that heroin addicts, alcoholics, and compulsive gamblers respond to addiction-related cues much like they do to strongly emotional stimuli, such as prurient pictures, and that they consider the cues to be pleasurable. But drug- or gambling-related cues induce a neutral response in non-addicts.

"You see the cue and feel a craving," says Grusser-Sinopoli. "It's not always conscious, but the physiological system is reacting." She says the same link may develop in excessive gamers.

Other experts are more cautious about comparing the enticing qualities of gaming to the addictive potential of drugs. "Gaming is not a drug. It's an activity like working out," says Kurt Squire, an education researcher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

"Games are compelling, people get very wrapped up," Squire adds. "But it rarely gets to the point where you would actually want to compare that response to a drug."

Oyster - pwned.

Reveling in my post-thesis done-syndrome, I met with a few friends on Friday night at a Korean restaurant in Coquitlam, known for having great BBQ. Normally, I have very good experiences there with the only negative side effect being that your clothes are charcoal/meat scented after the fact. However, Friday night was horrible as I think the raw oyster I had wrapped in a vegetable leaf (that tasted off to begin with...) was the culprit in the -food poisoning- I had this weekend. I spent all of Saturday in pain and Sunday feeling like an "undead."
I started to feel somewhat normal yesterday. Not my idea of relaxation, despite being bed-ridden!
It's back to the daily grind... sans oysters.

World Cyber Games November 16-20

The grand final of the World Cyber Games takes place from 16 - 20 November in Singapore and will see 800 gamers take each other on in six PC games and two Xbox titles.

Total prize money on offer is $435,000 (£250,000) and, like the Olympics, the top three in each game get gold, silver and bronze medals.

Booya.

Net cafe curfew - Malaysia

Policy, technology... it all mashes up into a big yummy mess like so much colcannon. Here's another story from the BBC to add to the pile of "curbing game addiction"--this time about the implementation of curfews for Malaysian Internet cafes. I love that the picture isn't even of Malaysians at an Internet cafe... but South Koreans!
That alone, I find interesting that 1) South Korea is still the iconic representation of "Internet/game addiction" 2) It's somehow sufficient to show South Koreans in a picture when the story is about Malaysia.... really, would you show a picture of Greek Internet cafes if you were talking about the British being raging Internet addicts?
...and the beat goes on.

Flo on CBC Radio - Freestyle

People have been wondering...
It is true. I was on the CBC radio show Freestyle yesterday afternoon, hosted by Kelly Ryan and Cameron Phillips. As part of their show, they asked me fun questions about the "couple zones" at PC game rooms that I found during my fieldwork in Korea.
They found it interesting that young couples would want to date at these technological hangouts, but I explained that it was very much a cultural factor in Korea--wanting to get out of the house to get some privacy, availability of these PC game rooms, and a whole host of other unique aspects.
I love soapboxing.

Feenberg photos at Exposure Gallery

architecture
Originally uploaded by FlorenceChee.

Andrew Feenberg, in addition to being a professor, is a photographer as well. He's got 2 photos in a show, here at Exposure gallery in Vancouver. The exhibit opens tomorrow.

Quote of the moment

"Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.