Ever Lost Your Sense of Time While Playing Games?

Anybody who’s played the Civilization series knows that it’s possible to lose one’s sense of time while playing a game. In fact, games themselves are good at removing a sense of time by design. Level designers rely on the ability to mess with our perception of time. Heck, I’m not going to lie, I lost track of time playing a few casual games too. I digress, the point is that it’s easy to lose our temporal connection to the world around us thanks to games.

How we understand time is based on our time perception which can be altered in various ways and understood in others. Our understanding of time can be influenced by everything from how hungry we are to what language you speak.

This video is here so the block of text appears more welcoming. It’s the first music video that I saw when searching time on YouTube.

Things get more messed up when physicists look at time because some of them conclude that it all might be an illusion. How very zen.

A very interesting thing happens when we combine the social and the natural sciences, and this is evidenced in how we loose track of time while playing video games.

After analyzing the data, the researcher found that time perspective was indeed connected and related to how frequently someone plays video games. Specifically, that “larger amounts of playing time correlates with lower level of future time perspective and higher levels of present time perspective — especially present fatalistic.”
…

Present fatalistic is connected with dissatisfaction, aggression, and depression. We could hypothesize that people who spend significant time playing develop the present fatalistic orientation.

However, it is more likely that people who already are present fatalistic play more, because playing helps to decrease their negative feelings. This would support Yee’s suggestion that extensive playing is an indicator of mood management.

Source paper:

Lukavska, K.. (2011). Time Perspective as a Predictor of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Playing. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. doi:10.1089/cyber.2011.0171.



March 5th, 2012 by admin

Civilization Far From Equilibrium

Yesterday this talk came up twice in two very different conversations, one related to game design and the other related to the nature and necessity of complexity and energy in society. This is a talk worth watching (or listening) to.

The talk in question is a Civilization Far From Equilibrium: Energy, Complexity and Human Survival by Thomas Homer-Dixon. It was delivered last June at the Equinox Summit in Waterloo.



January 12th, 2012 by admin

Gamers Solve AIDS Enzyme Puzzle

Flodit is a game that you can play to help scientist solve issues that computers can’t – in this case it’s the complex folding of an enzyme. The idea to essentially crowd source science is not new (think SETI@Home) but using a game to get people to participate in such a large task is. And it worked!

You can read about the success of the program and more about the complexity of enzymes here.

Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — using a set of online tools.
To the astonishment of the scientists, the gamers produced an accurate model of the enzyme in just three weeks.
Cracking the enzyme “provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs,” says the study, referring to the lifeline medication against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
It is believed to be the first time that gamers have resolved a long-standing scientific problem.
“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” Firas Khatib of the university’s biochemistry lab said in a press release.

Here’s a video of the game in action:



September 22nd, 2011 by admin