Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

Netflix Plans Push Into Video Games

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on MediaPost.

Netflix announced that it’s hired a Facebook executive to lead games development — apparently signaling its intention to leap into publishing video games.

The news that the world’s largest streaming power is focusing on games for its first content production foray beyond films and TV shows is already making waves in the gaming world.

GameStop Corp shares dipped 6% and shares of other gaming players declined by smaller margins in premarket trading on Thursday, as Netflix shares rose 2.4%.

The executive picked to be Netflix’s vice president of game development, Mike Verdu, has most recently served as vice president of Facebook Inc.’s Reality Labs, overseeing Oculus Studios and teams bringing games and other content to Oculus virtual-reality headsets.

Specifics are scarce at this stage, but Bloomberg sources report that Netflix is planning to build out its gaming team in the coming months, and has begun recruiting to fill game-development positions via ads on its website, with the goal of offering video games on its streaming platform within the next year.

Netflix plans to offer the games as a new programming genre on the streaming service, alongside existing content — and currently does not plan to charge additional fees for the games, those sources said.

Video games should help Netflix compete for new subscribers and retain existing ones amid the expanded array of major streaming services — some of which, unlike Netflix, offer access to live sports. They could also serve to help cross-promote Netflix’s original streaming content, and perhaps eventually allow the company to increase its service fees while minimizing subscriber losses.

“This feels like a significant event with broad ramifications across the video games landscape," Citigroup analyst Thomas A. Singlehurst wrote in a note cited by MarketWatch.

Netflix’s entry is likely to accelerate video games’ transition to cloud-based platforms, which could trigger a “shift in the monetization model for the traditional PC/console side of the market," he wrote.

Source: MediaPost
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/365091/netflix-plans-push-into-video-games.html

More Than One Hour of Video Games or Internet Use on School Days Leads to Poor Grades

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on StudyFinds.

No video games on school nights? As both schoolwork and entertainment become more and more synonymous with “screen time,” it can seem impossible at times to keep kids off of their digital devices. However, a study finds limiting how much time teens use the internet for recreation can be good for their grades.

Researchers at Rutgers University say children in middle school who play video games or use social media and the internet for more than an hour on school days have significantly lower grades and test scores than their peers. Study authors add their findings give parents some tangible boundaries for their kids when it comes to digital entertainment. They recommend limiting students to one hour of recreational screen time daily on weekdays and four hours a day on weekends.

Working with Professor Lia Nower, also from the Center for Gambling Studies and Renmin University of China, the team examined data from the China Education Panel Survey. The national report provided information on school performance and recreational habits for nearly 10,000 students with an average age of 13.5.

The survey results reveal children using digital technology for entertainment over four hours a day were four times more likely to skip class. Researchers discovered boys are much more likely to entertain themselves using social media, the internet, and video games than girls. In turn, boys also performed worse and displayed less desire to engage in their schoolwork than girls.

On the other hand, keeping screen time under control seems to provide a boost academically and socially for youngsters. The survey shows children using technology for fun less than one hour a day on weekdays experienced less boredom in class. Researchers say using technology in moderation also helped to boost cognitive development among these students.

The study appears in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

Source: StudyFinds
https://www.studyfinds.org/video-games-internet-school-grades/

Boys Who Play Video Games Regularly Less Likely to Suffer from Depression

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on Study Finds.

While parents probably don’t like the idea of their children sitting around all day playing video games, a new study finds it could actually benefit the mental health of young boys. Researchers from University College London say boys who regularly play video games are less likely to suffer from depression when they reach their teenage years.

Unfortunately, not all types of screen time have the same impact on young minds. The same study reveals young girls who regularly use social media are more likely to experience depression as they grow.

Scientists find that the social and problem-solving features of video games can boost the mental health of young boys.

The researchers analyzed data from 11,341 teenagers born in the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2002. At 11 years-old, researchers asked participants in the study how much time they spend on social media, playing video games, or surfing the web daily.

Three years later, the group answered questions about depressive symptoms, such as low mood, loss of pleasure, and poor concentration. The team also took into account other factors which may influence mental health. These include socioeconomic status, levels of physical activity, reports of bullying, and previous emotional traumas.

The report finds 11-year-old boys who did not exercise regularly benefited mentally from playing video games on a regular basis. On average, they experienced a 24-percent drop in depressive symptoms in comparison to boys who only play games once a month.

The results reveal girls who use social media on a daily basis from the age of 11 are more likely to experience mental health problems three years later. Boys, on the other hand, did not suffer the same effects of digital media, especially if they are less physically active.

The findings appear in the journal Psychological Medicine.

Source: Study Finds
https://www.studyfinds.org/boys-video-games-less-depression/

Playing Video Games as a Child Can Improve Working Memory Years Later

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on EurekAlert.

A number of studies have shown how playing video games can lead to structural changes in the brain, including increasing the size of some regions, or to functional changes, such as activating the areas responsible for attention or visual-spatial skills. New research from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has gone further to show how cognitive changes can take place even years after people stop playing.

This is one of the conclusions from the article published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. The study involved 27 people between the ages of 18 and 40 with and without any kind of experience with video gaming.

"People who were avid gamers before adolescence, despite no longer playing, performed better with the working memory tasks, which require mentally holding and manipulating information to get a result," said Marc Palaus, who has a Ph.D. from the UOC.

The results show that people without experience of playing video games as a child did not benefit from improvements in processing and inhibiting irrelevant stimuli. Indeed, they were slower than those who had played games as children, which matched what had been seen in earlier studies.

Likewise, "people who played regularly as children performed better from the outset in processing 3D objects, although these differences were mitigated after the period of training in video gaming when both groups showed similar levels," said Palaus.

The study lasted a month and the researchers analyzed participants' cognitive skills, including working memory, at three points: before starting the training in video gaming, at the end of the training, and fifteen days later. The video game used was Nintendo's Super Mario 64.

According to Palaus, "Video games are a perfect recipe for strengthening our cognitive skills, almost without our noticing." Nonetheless, he stressed that these improvements only have a limited effect on the performance of other activities not linked to video gaming, as is the case with most cognitive training.

Source: EurekAlert!
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/uodc-pvg092220.php

What Parents Overlook When Their Teen Is a Heavy Gamer

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on HealthDay.

Most American parents believe their teens spend too much time playing video games, but many underestimate the actual amount, a new survey shows.

The poll of nearly 1,000 parents with at least one child aged 13 to 18 found that 86% said their teen spends too much time gaming.

Among parents of daily gamers, 54% report their teen plays three or more hours a day, compared with 13% of teens who don't play every day.

Yet, only 13% of parents of daily gamers believe their teen spends more time gaming than other teens, and 78% believe their teen's gaming is less than or about the same as their peers, according to the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health, from the University of Michigan.

"Many parents of frequent gamers have a misconception that the amount of time their teenager spends playing video games is in line with their peers," poll co-director and Mott pediatrician Dr. Gary Freed said in a university news release.

Twice as many parents said their teen boy plays video games every day compared to parents of teen girls. Teen boys are also more likely to spend three or more hours of gaming.

Parents said gaming often gets in the way of other aspects of their teen's life, such as family activities and interactions (46%), sleep (44%), homework (34%), friendships with non-gaming peers (33%), and extracurricular activities (31%).

The survey found that parents use different strategies to limit the amount of time their teen spends gaming, including encouraging other activities (75%), setting time limits (54%), providing incentives to limit gaming (23%), and hiding gaming equipment (14%).

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/kids-health-information-23/video-game-health-news-786/what-parents-overlook-when-their-teen-is-a-heavy-gamer-753982.html

Parents Hiring Fortnite Coaches to Improve Play, Help Children Level Up

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on BleacherReport.

As Fortnite Battle Royale continues to dominate the world of video games, parents are starting to invest in coaches in the same way they would for sports or academics.

Sarah E. Needleman of the Wall Street Journalreported parents are throwing down between $10 and $20 per hour so their kids can level up and become better Fortnite players.

"There's pressure not to just play it but to be really good at it," Ally Hicks, who purchased four hours of lessons for her 10-year-old son, told the WSJ. "You can imagine what that was like for him at school."

Epic Games struck gold with Fortnite's free-to-play model.

Gamers are able to compete in 100-player lobbies in search of a Victory Royale as the last character standing. The hit game, which is currently in its fifth season, is available on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, iPhone and Nintendo Switch.

Players are able to purchase skins as well as accessories such as gliders, pickaxes, back bling and emotes using V-Bucks, the game's digital currency. Those add-on elements present no in-game competitive advantage but have generated massive revenue for Epic.

Last week, Devon Pendleton and Christopher Palmeri of Bloomberg reported Fortnite is on track to generate $2 billion for its parent company in 2018.

In some cases, it's paying off. Nick Mennen told the Wall Street Journalhis 12-year-old son, Noble, struggled to win on the highly competitive Fortnite landscape.

"Now he'll throw down 10 to 20 wins," Mennen said.

The demand for coaches may continue to grow with the latest update from Epic in June placing the player count at 125 million.

Source: BleacherReport
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2788860-parents-hiring-fortnite-coaches-to-improve-play-help-children-level-up

Esports Niche Getting Bigger; 62% Play At Least An Hour Per Week

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on MediaPost.

With scarcely the kind of attention other sports marketing endeavors are receiving, esports is growing into a major platform for marketers. New research from Parks Associates shows that 10% of U.S. broadband households watch esports content on sites ranging from Amazon’s Twitch to YouTube, and 62% actually play an esports game for at least an hour a week.

"Esports is currently a niche market, but it has the ability to engage often hard-to-reach demographics," says Hunter Sappington, a Parks research analyst, in comments accompanying the latest report.

"Esports is a young, dynamic, and fast-growing industry. While viewership of many traditional sports is waning, esports is well positioned to capture the attention of a generation that grew up playing video games.”

In some ways, esports is a perfect reflection of how sports and leisure changed with the internet: the report says 67% of viewers use computers to watch esports, followed by 45% using TVs and 34% using a smartphone.

Indeed, “real” sports and esports have twinned seemingly easily.

This year, the NBA helped start its own esports offshoot called the 2K League with partner Take-Two Interactive, with 17 teams competing in the first season that started in May.

Some brands have been quick to react. The Samsung Galaxy Pro-Game team has been a powerhouse in the League of Legends championship series. Coca-Cola, LG, Intel and IBM earned street cred with gamers by sponsoring major events.

Parks says the typical gamer is under 35 and, not surprisingly, up on the latest video trends and technology. They spend an average $47.23 on non-pay-TV video entertainment, the new study says, compared to just $22.97 for non-gamers.

Teen Gamers Have as Many Friends as Non-Gamers

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on ScienceDaily.

Young digital gamers do not have fewer friends at school than their non-gamer peers, two new research articles from Uppsala University indicate.

In their study, researchers Lina Eklund and Sara Roman investigated how digital gaming affects young people's friendship formation. The results show that neither the adolescents who spend much of their time gaming nor those who self-identify as gamers have fewer school friends than their peers who play little or not at all. Evidently, too, students who are self-identified gamers tend to become friends with one another. In other words, the common interest of digital gaming seems to lead to new friendships at school.

The adolescent respondents (in their upper teens) themselves think that, as they approach adult life, they are limiting and managing their gaming in a way that enables them to prioritise what individuals of their age find important, such as friends, sport and school.

The study was based on analysis of all (115) first-year students at a new upper-secondary school in a Swedish metropolis. In particular, the authors analysed how the students' social networks were created and changed during their first year at the school. Ten in-depth interviews with student gamers were conducted.

"The results are both surprising and expected. Sure enough, we thought 'gamers' would turn out to be making friends with one another. Gaming is such an important part of today's youth culture that anything else would be odd. Just as adolescents used to get together through shared music tastes, so gaming is now a key element in media consumption. On the other hand, we weren't so sure whether players would prove to be less sociable, or thus have fewer friends at school. Here, the previous research is limited," Eklund says.

Source: ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180307101029.htm

Active Video Games Have Exercise-Like Effects in Kids

Adolescents who play active video games increase their heart rate, use more oxygen and expend more energy, according to a small new study.

Low levels of physical activity are associated with obesity in children. Compared to video games that youngsters can play while sitting on the couch, active video games encourage movement and could help children increase their physical activity levels, according to researchers Stephen Smallwood and colleagues at the University of Chester, in England.

The games, "Dance Central" and "Kinect Sports: Boxing," increased the children's energy expenditure by 150 percent and 263 percent, respectively, above resting values. Energy expenditure while playing the active games was 103 percent and 194 percent higher, respectively, than playing traditional video games.

The active games also led to significant increases in heart rate and oxygen uptake, in the study published online Sept. 24 in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Source: U.S. News & World Report
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/09/24/active-video-games-have-exercise-like-effects-in-kids-study

Risk-Glorifying Video Games Linked to Reckless Driving

Teens who play video games that glorify reckless driving may bring some of their virtual dangerous habits to road, a new study shows.

Researchers surveyed more than 5,000 U.S. teenagers over four years in four waves of telephone interviews that occurred when the teens were, on average, between the ages of 14 and 18. Half of the teens reported in the first interview that they were allowed to play mature-rated games — among them, Grand Theft Auto III (58 percent), Spiderman II (32 percent) and Manhunt (12 percent).

By the third interview, when most teens were 16, a quarter of them answered "yes" when asked if they engaged in any unsafe driving habits, the researchers said. By the final interview, 90 percent said they engaged in at least one unsafe driving habit, including speeding (78 percent), tailgating (26 percent), weaving in and out of traffic (26 percent), and running red lights (20 percent).

The study found that playing mature-rated, risk-glorifying games was associated with an increase in self-reported risky driving, as well as sensation seeking and rebelliousness — qualities measured by the teens' rating of themselves with regard to such statements as "I like to do dangerous things" and "I get in trouble at school." And higher rankings in thrill seeking and rebelliousness were directly linked to risky driving habits, car accidents and being stopped by police, according to a statement from the American Psychological Association (APA), which published the study in its journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture.

Source: LiveScience
http://www.livescience.com/23104-video-games-teen-reckless-driving.html