The latest Wired has an interesting article Game Changers: How Videogames Trained a Generation of Athletes. It is a summary of the rise of sports videogames and how the Madden franchise in particular is now having an effective on the actual sport. It appears at this point that most new players entering the NFL have grown up playing the videogame and are bringing certain habits and play styles with them. The article briefly touches on the brain science aspects of videogames by touching on the FPS study that I have mentioned before. The article also does point out that we are not likely see trends such as this except in a few areas such as football and poker.
Game Changers
January 30, 2010
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brain science, games, video games | Tagged: brain science, football, Madden, NFL, This Is Your Brain On Videogames, videogames, Wired | 
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Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Mario Bros. AI Competition Results
November 19, 2009The results of the Mario Bros. AI competition have been made available. (Not really surprising that the top three entries used A*.)
Robin Baumgarten has won, and has made his source code available. AIGameDev.com also has an interview with Robin.
No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: A*, AI, games, machine learning, Mario, Nintendo, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Knowledge Transfer Through Video Games
October 12, 2009Certainly, if you’ve been around the rule space long enough, you will be familiar with such terms as “knowledge engineering” and “knowledge capture”.
Robert X. Cringely’s latest column is (somewhat) about a knowledge capture platform. Nestled in among the usual rant about IBM and outsourcing (and I say that as a fan), is a link to an IBM patent for a “Platform for Capturing Knowledge”.
I haven’t read the patent myself, only Cringely’s commentary. But it seems the end result is not an expert system, but a video game for training experts. That’s an interesting aspect, although I’m not sure what the patent has that is unique. I seem to recall seeing plenty of prior art in this area years ago, especially in terms of expert systems for training medical personnel.
I don’t have time to spend digging up prior art right now, but I bet a number of readers have seen some as well.
No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: expert systems, games, knowledge engineering, Robert X. Cringely, This Is Your Brain On Videogames, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Using The XBox 360 For Heart Disease Research
October 8, 2009Just a quick post to highlight some recent media coverage about the XBox 360 being used to research heart disease. The article suggest that Simon Scarle used – you guessed it – some of the graphics hardware in the console.
No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: games, heart research, Simon Scarle, video games, XBox 360 | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Learning To Play Mario Bros.
August 6, 2009Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy have organized a competition to create an agent (or AI) that plays the video game Super Mario Bros. – or, more accurately, Infinite Mario Bros. a tribute game featuring random level generation.
The advantage of using Infinite Mario Bros. is the random level generation – which can let the agent learn more generalized playing tactics rather than tactics that are tailored to a static set of levels as in Ms. Pac-Man or Pitfall.
I look forward to seeing the results of the competition, and hope to see source code published as well.
No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: AI, games, machine learning, Mario, Ms. Pac-Man, Nintendo, Pitfall, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
A Computer That Plays Pitfall
June 29, 2009From Rutgers university comes a learning algorithm that they have applied to playing the Atari 2600 game “Pitfall!”.
An example video is on YouTube.
One of the research papers is apparently here (although the site isn’t being very responsive at the moment).
I’ll get around to posting on machine learning for Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man at some point as well.
(Spotted on Kotaku and GameSetWatch.)
No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: AI, Atari 2600, games, machine learning, Pitfall, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
25 Years Of Tetris
June 14, 2009Nice to see some recognition of the 25th birthday of Tetris:
- Time Magazine: 25 Years of Tetris: From Russia With Fun
- Kotaku: Tetris Creator Wants To Turn Puzzler Into Sport
- Joystiq: Interview with Alexey Pajitnov
No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, games, Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Tetris | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
This Is Your Brain On Tetris
April 25, 2009We’ve all seen the findings showing that Tetris has effects upon cerebral glucose metabolic rates (GMRs). Well, the game is back in the news with more brain research…
No Comments » | brain science, games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, brain, brain science, games, PTSD, Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Videogames | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Tracking Used Video Game Prices Over Time
April 21, 2009I wasn’t previously aware of VideoGamePriceCharts.com, but I learned about them recently through Kotaku. The site tracks the prices of used video games. Of particular interest is their recent article tracking prices of series games when a new installment is released.
The article shows historical data for series games such as Resident Evil, Pokemon and Call of Duty that shows spikes in prices for used copies of the older series installments surrounding the release of the newer installments. This is not entirely surprising, but I’ve never seen real data laid out to support the idea. They also have a posting from last year that shows the release of GTA IV causing a spike in prices for the earlier GTA games.
This has a few interesting implications:
No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: capitalism, datamining, economics, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Portable Video Games
March 31, 2009No, I’m not talking about handheld games. I’m talking about games that get ported to a variety of hardware platforms.
Code portability is a topic of interest to me, and some video games allow an opportunity to study code that is ported across multiple hardware platforms and multiple operating systems. And sometimes, it is just a pleasure to see a good game move to another platform.
There are actually several categories here, so I’ll take a quick moment to sketch out how I divide them.
No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, Atari 2600, Dallas Gaming Mafia, Doom, emulation, first person shooter, FPS, id Software, portability, Quake, Tetris, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
