A Lot Of Games

"There has been a lot of attention wasted in figuring out whether these things turn us into killing machines," said computational analyst Joshua Lewis at the University of California in San Diego, who studied 2,000 computer game players. "Not enough attention has been paid to the unique and interesting features that videogames have outside of the violence."

Broadly speaking, today's average gamer is 34 years old and has been playing electronic games for 12 years, often up to 18 hours a week. By one analyst's calculation, the 11 million or so registered users of the online role-playing fantasy World of Warcraft collectively have spent as much time playing the game since its introduction in 2004 as humanity spent evolving as a species—about 50 billion hours of game time, which adds up to about 5.9 million years.

With people playing so many hundreds, if not thousands, of different games, though, university researchers have been hard-pressed to pinpoint the lasting effects on cognition and behavior.

Blizzard Entertainment Inc. in Irvine, Calif., which sells World of Warcraft, StarCraft II and other popular games, did not respond to queries about whether the company supports gaming research or conducts its own studies. Neither did RiotGames Inc. in Santa Monica, which markets League of Legends.

Different Games' Effects on Your Brain

Computer gaming has become a $25 billion-a year entertainment business behemoth since the first coin-operated commercial videogames hit the market 41 years ago. In 2010, gaming companies sold 257 million video and computer games, according to figures compiled by the industry's trade group, the Entertainment Software Association.

For scientists, the industry unintentionally launched a mass experiment in the neurobiology of learning. Millions of people have immersed themselves in the interactive reward conditioning of electronic game play, from Tetris, Angry Birds, and Farmville, to shooter games and multiplayer, role-playing fantasies such as League of Legend, which has been played 1 billion times or so in the two years since it was introduced.

"Videogames change your brain," said University of Wisconsin psychologist C. Shawn Green, who studies how electronic games affect abilities. So does learning to read, playing the piano, or navigating the streets of London, which have all been shown to change the brain's physical structure. The powerful combination of concentration and rewarding surges of neurotransmitters like dopamine strengthen neural circuits in much the same the way that exercise builds muscles. But "games definitely hit the reward system in a way that not all activities do," he said.

Mentally Manipulate 3D Objects

Scientists also found that women—who make up about 42% of computer and videogame players—were better able to mentally manipulate 3D objects, a skill at which men are generally more adept. Most studies looked at adults rather than children.

Electronic gameplay has its downside. Brain scans show that violent videogames can alter brain function in healthy young men after just a week of play, depressing activity among regions associated with emotional control, researchers at Indiana University recently reported. Other studies have found an association between compulsive gaming and being overweight, introverted and prone to depression. The studies didn't compare the benefits of gaming with such downsides.

The violent action games that often worry parents most had the strongest beneficial effect on the brain. "These are not the games you would think are mind-enhancing," said cognitive neuroscientist Daphne Bavelier, who studies the effect of action games at Switzerland's University of Geneva and the University of Rochester in New York.

When Gaming Is Good for You

Videogames can change a person's brain and, as researchers are finding, often that change is for the better.

Love them or hate them, online videogames are a treasure trove for researchers who are studying how all those keyboard taps, mouse clicks and joystick moves may affect behavior, perception and even cognitive skills. WSJ's Lee Hotz reports.

A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability.

People who played action-based video and computer games made decisions 25% faster than others without sacrificing accuracy, according to a study. Indeed, the most adept gamers can make choices and act on them up to six times a second—four times faster than most people, other researchers found. Moreover, practiced game players can pay attention to more than six things at once without getting confused, compared with the four that someone can normally keep in mind, said University of Rochester researchers. The studies were conducted independently of the companies that sell video and computer games.

NEW PLATFORMS

Even Zynga, considered a success story after a billion dollar IPO in December, is trying to reinvent itself to keep its 240 million users coming back.

This week, it will pitch its new games service, Zynga.com -- which analysts say is an attempt to whittle down its heavy reliance on Facebook for gamers - when chief operating officer John Schappert gives the keynote speech at the conference.

Other companies, like Pocket Gems, believe the future is mobile. The company's games, where players run zoos and hotels, have been downloaded more than 60 million times on Apple and Android devices.

But even then, the startup is hedging its bets, said Liu, the chief operating officer. The company is holding hackathons - marathon programming sessions - to develop for HTML5 technology, which allows programs to run in mobile Web browsers that people do not need to download. ABI Research has said that 2.1 billion mobile devices are expected to use HTML5 browsers by 2016.

Away from the development sphere, a battle is brewing between operating software players. Research in Motion is making its biggest gaming push to date at the conference, said Meggan Scavio, the director of the Game Developers Conference.

The Blackberry maker is hosting sessions on how to make games and turn a profit using its system, all in the hopes of attracting developers to its ailing tablet, PlayBook.

"They are trying to draw attention to their platform and their hope is to do what Google did with Android," Scavio said, referring to how Google boosted the number of games on its system by appealing to developers at last year's conference.

Google itself will be pitching its new "native client" technology that video game makers can use to bring games to the nternet. So far, 15 games on Google's Chrome Web store use the technology, including one by Japan's Square Enix. Google has also been trying to woo developers to its "Google +" social network with more attractive fees for companies than Facebook and Apple, which take a 30 per cent cut of revenue of games on its system.

While this week's conference is all about predicting the next big thing in gaming, sometimes it just isn't clear what is around the corner. Apple's expected iPad 3 announcement on Wednesday, for example, being made just blocks away from the conference centrer, could usher in a whole new way to play games.

"Every two or three years, there's a new trend, a new technology and a new way to make video games you never would have thought of," said Colt McAnlis, a game developer advocate at Google whose job it is to bring game makers to the Internet giant's platforms.

After all the changes he has seen working for the past decade at former employers Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, he has learned that, "if you manage to last 10 years in the industry, you're that old guy on he porch."

Video game industry looks for new plan to reach players

The $US64 billion global video games industry, shaken up by the likes of Zynga in recent years, may be on the verge of another identity crisis.

Hardware and software sales for consoles keep dropping, market-leading Activision Blizzard, which makes the Call of Duty and World of Warcraft mega franchises laid off 8 per cent of its staff in February, and a proliferation of games on app stores is making it costlier to stand. So, an estimated 20,000 video game industry types, executives and game designers will descend on this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco looking for answers.

The interactive entertainment industry has been trying to cope with the rapid growth of online and mobile gaming for a few years, but now even the companies making games in these burgeoning areas are finding it harder to turn a profit.