According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll in the UK, three in five 11 - 16 year olds are in favour of using video games in the classroom. I'll let Eurogamer break down the numbers for you, but suffice to say this is a bit of legitimacy/ego pleasure for the video game industry.

"Using video games to teach kids," goes the theory "makes it a more legitimate entertainment form." Sure, why not? There are however a couple of major flaws in this plan. Speaking as a chap who has worked with and around kids of various ages in recent times, here are my reasons why educating kids with video games is extremely difficult (not impossible, but the word "difficult" introduced into the vernacular of any publicly funded education system is read as "impossible", for various reasons we won't go into here.)

• Most of the games used in education are crap. Kids, from 4 to 14 and up, are not stupid. If you present them with a sub-par game, which many of the current educational crop are, then they will not want to engage with it. These are kids with PlayStations, Xbox's and PC's at home - they know what a current title should play like, and they expect the kind of high production values they see in their games at home. Even if the play is good the game has to look the biz.
• Good games aren't used intentionally. Gaming being a hot potato issue, any educaters wanting to use video games to teach have to jump several hurdles of perception with parents. Therefore any games that remind mommy and daddy of GTA, even from a graphical point of view, is off the cards. These games also cost more money, and harkening back to the previous point the educators prefer the cheap and cheerful games that look too innocent to attract any heat over something that the kids might actually enjoy - and therefore become engaged with.
• Educational games are too obviously educational. The best way to learn is to do it when you're having fun. Indeed, that's the very idea behind educating through gaming. However most, if not all, educational games have a very direct and obvious educational slant which kids will pick up on immediately, and then they'll switch off. Games have to be fun first, educational second - for example, a Civilization player can tell you quite a bit about the industrial revolution that he or she certainly didn't glean from a long forgotten text book. Of course if you let kids run wild with Civilization then there may be a few questions asked at the next PTA meeting.
• Games aren't being used to teach the right things. Games can substitute for text books in teaching facts and figures, but they are not used by educators to teach the other things that one can learn from playing a video game. Tetris is an extremely simplistic example of this - it's not considered an educational game, yet it is a great training tool for the mind in logic and problem solving. Bearing in mind that the objective of the near universally dreaded advanced maths taught in schools is to teach logic and problem solving more so than ensuring that we have a population that can solve for X, well you see the benefits of fun video games which teach these same fundamental skills.

I'm sure it's an argument that will rage on. I'm all for the idea of using video games to teach kids, but I can't see it happening until at least parents, teachers, administrators and politicians are of a gaming generation who can understand and properly exploit gaming for the purpose of education.

Until then, kids will have to put up with another bore of a class when yet another sub-par game tries to teach them their 7 times tables with crap graphics, a basic interface and absolutely no relation to the cutting edge, immensely fun games they enjoy at home.

So apparently, says EAs big chief operating officer for worldwide studios David Gardner, the gaming industry is failing women. "We have all been talking about this for a long, long time," he says. Well, he's right about the talk part.

He's worried that the industry isn't reaching out to girls and women, lamenting that The Sims is just about the only thing they're interested in, and hypothesising that it's relationships and interaction, chat rooms, that the girls want. Well, EA tried that with The Sims Online, a game which has become something of an underage whore house if I recall correctly.

The Sims is, of course, the top game for female players - over half of all Sims players are female - but do we really understand why they're playing it? Has anyone checked recently to see if the girls are enjoying The Sims so as they can play Mommy and Daddy; or if they play it because they enjoy putting little sims into swimming pools, removing the ladders and seeing how long it takes for them to die?

Nobody seems to understand female gamers, and all we're continuing to do is talk about it. I think that that's all we can do, until the current generation of female gamers come of age and become developers. Men making games specifically for women doesn't work, most of the time.

A Sudanese man has been forced to marry a goat he was found having sex with. Actually, this could be a rather short post as I'm kind of stuck for words at this point. Apparently, the goats owner found the man, "Mr Tombe", on top of the goat. The owner startled Romeo in the act and he "fell off".

Romeo was then taken to a council of elders and forced to pay a dowry of around $50 and take the goat as his wife.

Sorry, I just read that and simply had to share it with the world. I hope you weren't drinking hot tea or coffee when you came across this. My nose still burns... And I swear, a more thought provoking and high-brow post is coming in a minute.

We've seen plenty of psychiatric studies in recent years that examine the behavioral effects of playing video games, especially violent games. For example, earlier this year I interviewed Dr. Craig Anderson, a professor of psychology at Iowa St. University who is recognized as a leading expert in the effects of media violence. These psychological examinations have long suggested there are significant effects of playing hours and hours of violence video games, but there hasn't been as much hard scientific data to indicate what the effects are exactly.

However, a new study indicates that there are indeed physical effects on the brain that manifest themselves during the play of violent titles. Dr. Vincent Mathews, professor of radiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, lead a recent study that randomly selected 44 adolescents to play a violent game or a "nonviolent but equally fun and exciting game" for 30 minutes to see how their brains reacted. The games selected were Medal of Honor: Frontline, which is a mildly violent T-rated title, and the completely nonviolent racing game Need for Speed: Underground. Using MRI technology, the doctors observed and recorded the differences in brain activity during the 30 minutes.

According to Dr. Mathews' study, the adolescents who had played violent video games exhibited more brain activity in a region thought to be important for emotional arousal and less activity in a brain region associated with executive functions, which includes the ability to plan, shift, control and direct one's thoughts and behavior. Meanwhile, the group that played the nonviolent game exhibited more activation in the prefrontal portions of the brain, which are control inhibition, concentration and self-control, and showed less activation in the area involved in emotional arousal.

"Our study indicates that playing a certain type of violent video game may have different short-term effects on brain function than playing an exciting but nonviolent game," Dr. Mathews said in a press statement about the new study. It's not clear, of course, what the long-term effects on brain activity are for playing these two titles, and the IU researchers have said they plan on conducting future studies that examine the duration of violence in video games and its effect on brain functions.

While 44 adolescents are a relatively small sample for such a big issue like video game violence, I for one am intrigued by these studies. I think it's laughable to suggest violent games will lead to children killing people in Grand Theft Auto-style. On the other hand, I suspect there may be smaller, more subtle effects on the brain from playing games 10 hours a day. I wonder if IU is taking applications for its next video game study...

El Beeb has been fussing over the topic of piracy of TV shows over the internet. "Ohh woe is me," says the TV industry, "for how can I make money with ad-free pirated versions of shows going online mere minutes after broadcast?"

How indeed. It seems that everyone and their cat is loading up torrents of their favourite shows, from geek fests like Battlestar Galactica to general audience pleasers like Desperate Housewives. Lost gets hit up an estimated one million times an episode, which is plenty of eyeballs not glued to their TV's.

The sad fact is that the TV industry can do pretty much nothing to stop this, given their current thinking. Increasingly networks are offering up their shows for download shortly after release, but most, if not all, of those who would previously have said they only download to allow for more convenient scheduling will not be buying these episodes through legitimate channels. The sad fact is that people are stingy, and if you're offered something for nothing without having to physically walk out of a shop with it under your jacket then you'll take it.

Foreign audiences are also accounting for a big proportion of downloads. The UK alone counts for 10 - 15% of the illegal downloads of TV shows. Why? Because these shows won't be broadcast to UK homes for months, and who wants to wait? I recall, many years ago, renting episodes of my favourite TV shows on VHS before they were broadcast, some of the scheduling is that lopsided.

So, what's the solution to this illegal download problem if you can't even sell episodes online? Well, give them away for nothing, duh. Obviously the TV market will always suffer from piracy, because who wants to watch officially sanctioned shows with ads stuck in, but the TV industry can dent the illegal one in a real way.

The industry can throw in shows with ads, perhaps inescapable ones to keep them happy (hey, they need their revenue, which is a paradox some downloader's don't get), and so long as the service is prompt, efficient and simple - just like BitTorrent, say - then the masses will come to ABC.com before TorrentSpy.

The rather progressive Slamdance indie film and video game awards has been forced to pull the sensitive RPG "Super Columbine Massacre" from its list of 14 finalists - the first time the festival has pulled any game or film. The reason for the retraction of the finalist status, after festival organisers themselves urged for it to be entered into the running, is because of pressure from financial sponsers, who threatened to pull the plug on the festival if the game continued to be counted among the finalists.

SCM was always going to be a controversial game, focusing as it does on a rather horrific event which some might say is best left to the history books. Media forms such as film and, increasingly video games, are not always prone to simply leaving difficult topics alone, and the banning of SCM from the festival raises interesting questions of censorship.

Obviously the game itself has not been banned in a wide sense; but at the end of the day it is financial backers who can effectively pull the plug on a game - or film - if they so desire. I will not argue that games such as SCM, JFK or Postal are in bad taste to some or many. However there is a line between objecting to something and demanding that it be pulled from shop shelves, festivals and award ceremonies.

Just because something is difficult to swollow does not mean that it should be shunned. The idea of festivals such as Slamdance is to award those films and video games which make us think; bring us out of our comfort zones and help to expand our world views. This knee-jerk banning of a game from a festival should be deplored - when art is repressed, generally trouble is not too far behind.

< img width="100" height="90" border="0" src="http://omidr.typepad.com/twitchblog/images/9.jpg" title="9" alt="9" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px; float: left;" /> Going to the midnight launch of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion pack I expected to see one or two nuts (besides the one accompanying me) and a lot of geeks. What I didn't expect to find was a pretty accurate demographic spread of Southern California; ranging from dyed in the wool geeks to what one less politically correct than I might term "hot chicks". Even a square-jawed security guard sidled up to me at the top of the line to ask me if I played. He's a level 60 mage.

We've seen a lot of crazy lines for launches recently, what with the PS3 and Wii launching at the end of 2006; but I didn't expect to find people who had been queuing up since 6.30am for a videogame, easier to mass manufacture than a console as it is. Still, if ever there was a living example of how far video gaming has progressed in terms of the demographic it reaches - everyone, basically - it was this World of Warcrack line.

I met middle-aged and upwards folks who have been playing Blizzard games since time began; and I met high school kids high on caffeine and planning their Tuesday morning illnesses. I met professionals and I even met a three year old girl who had accompanied her mother along for the launch; daddy having been unfortunate enough to have to queue up for his copy on the snowstruck East Coast earlier that night.

So there you have it - everyone's a geek nowadays.