Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being

Video games are a massively popular form of entertainment, socialising, cooperation, and competition. Games’ ubiquity fuels fears that they cause poor mental health, and major health bodies and national governments have made far-reaching policy decisions to address games’ potential risks, despite lacking adequate supporting data. The concern-evidence mismatch underscores that we know too little about games’ impacts on well-being. We addressed this disconnect by linking six weeks of 38,030 players’ objective game-behaviour data, provided by six global game publishers, with three waves of their self-reported well-being that we collected. We found little to no evidence for a causal connection between gameplay and well-being. However, results suggested that motivations play a role in players’ well- being. For good or ill, the average effects of time spent playing video games on players’ well-being are likely very small, and further industry data are required to determine potential risks and supportive factors to health.

Educating Adults with a Location-Based Augmented Reality Game: A Content Analysis Approach

With the exception of Pokémon Go, relatively little is known about other Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) games, and the attitudes of middle-aged and elderly adults towards them are hitherto poorly examined. The aim of this research is to examine the opinions of young, middle-aged, and elderly adults about the location-based MAR game Ingress. The responses to questions related to Ingress were collected from 24 adult players aged 20–60 from Greece and subsequently were analyzed by means of content analysis, both qualitatively and quantitatively, using the Jaccard index of similarity. Our findings showed that opinions of young people (20–35) agree more with those of elderly adults (>52) than with those of the intermediate age group of 36–51. It was also revealed that knowledge of geography facilitates the ability to play the game better, the game’s scenario is very interesting to adults, and the feeling of playing locally in a global game is also appreciated by all age groups. Along with these findings, with this research, it was shown that (a) content analysis is a valuable method for exploring opinions and attitudes of adult users towards MAR games and (b) Jaccard indices can be used to quantitatively explore themes emerging from content analysis.

Neo-Orientalist Gambits in South Asian Global Game in Aslam's The Blind Man's Garden

This study focuses on the great global game of chess of Neoimperialist played in South Asia. It explores that to fetch global capitalist designs, global forces have devised a global Neo-Orientalist game of chess in three perspectives, i.e. economic, cultural and political, for three-level players, i.e. great players, little players and domestic players. The economic ventures urge the need to divide the South Asian Muslims into good and bad categories through neo-orientalist cultural and political gambits, as is revealed from Nadeem Aslam's 'The Blind Man's Garden' (2013) that critiques the hegemony of Neo-imperialist global forces working purely for their global designs in the region. It exposes economic, political, cultural and strategic motives behind two basic goals: the establishment of neo-imperialism through the elimination of borders for neo-liberalist gains by homogenizing world culture; and the eradication of global terrorism for which war has already been launched there.

How to Study Game Publishers: Activision Blizzard’s Corporate History

There is little disagreement among game scholars about the important, if not crucial role of game publishers in the wider game industry. Yet, there is surprisingly little literature on the role of individual game publishers, let alone their publishing strategies. Drawing on critical political economic theory, document analysis is conducted on financial statements of global game publisher Activision Blizzard. Its 2010 publishing deal with game studio Bungie and the 2015 acquisition of King Digital Entertainment serve as case studies to analyse game publishers’ role in the formatting of cultural commodities and the subsequent rationalization of game production. Despite the increased accessibility of game development and distribution platforms, publishing power is still a significant institutional force to be reckoned with.

Unity Production: Capturing the Everyday Game Maker Market

The production of games using ‘free’ and accessible all-in-one game engines dominate the market for the development of game products and services. This shift has consequently ‘opened’ production to what I name everyday game makers, who share multiple professional and leisure-based game making identities, and ‘closed’ development behind platform governance policies, proprietary technical requirements, and multisided market strategies. I examine the local and global strategies of Unity Technologies and how game makers ‘make do’ with its production platform tools in developing digital games. I argue strategies of companies like Unity Technologies constantly transform and tailor its production platforms to the local norms and practices of everyday game makers through its desire to capture a larger market share of the global game industry’s creative production sector.

Game Developers Playing Games : Instrumental Play, Game Talk, and Preserving the Joy of Play

Critical studies of the global game industry have shown how employment in game companies is often advertised as a chance to get paid for playing games. The same love of games that often brings people to the game industry also places them at a disadvantage when negotiating the terms and conditions of work. Drawing from fourteen in-depth interviews conducted with game industry representatives, the chapter traces the different roles and functions playing games has for game developers and how working in a game studio changes their playing habits over time. Developers appear aware of the trade-offs associated with playing games as part of their work and apply various strategies to preserve the joy and relevance of play.

FORMATION OF STUDENTS ‘ LEADERSHIP SKILLS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSES AT A NON-LINGUISTIC UNIVERSITY

The article makes an attempt to justify the need for the formation of leadership qualities in students of various fields of training within a non-linguistic university. The author divides the factors contributing to the solution of this problem into two categories: the personal and professional qualities of the teacher, as well as the actual set of educational activities. The author pays special attention to the usefulness of creative group types of students’ activities and the use of global game technology. In conclusion, the author expresses the hope that future generations of specialists in various professional fields, being taught to be leaders, will significantly improve the world community.