Thursday, March 1, 2012

WoW in the news

Oh my goodness, three days, three posts in a row! Gotta catch up from when I was gone. :) Anyways, a number of WoW related news stories.

First, an article in the LA times on research around how playing video games, and specifically WoW, can improve cognitive ability in older adults. Psychology professors at NC State have just published a paper on their findings.

With this National Science Foundation grant funded project, they found that older adults (aged 60-77) who scored low on initial cognitive tests experienced significant improvement in spatial ability and focus after two weeks of playing WoW for about two hours a day. And why did the researchers choose WoW? One of the researchers noted that:

"It met a bunch of criteria we had. Primarily that it is really engaging and cognitively complex, so we chose a game that we thought would have the best chance of exercising older adults' cognitive abilities and thereby improving them."

Hmmm... so playing WoW as a prescription?

But on the other end we have this video below from Anthony Rosner about his WoW addiction.




I think his film is incredibly well made and engaging, and I think he has a bright future in film making. But anytime I see something like this I feel like it puts a notion or stereotype out there that every WoW player is addicted to some degree. Saying things like "playing WoW is wasting your life" just reinforces that negative stereotype.

At the same time I do wonder how things might be different for someone who starts playing WoW at a much younger age, like in high school. If I had started then, opposed to starting the game at 30 years of age, could I have gotten more addicted? Perhaps I had less self control at 16 or 17? For me, probably.

Or is it that by the age of 30 I had already gotten the advanced degrees and built the career/professional life that I wanted, so I didn't feel like I was "giving up" as much in my "real life"? That it was just more a matter of balancing WoW within my life and interests and hobbies? Hmmm... deep thoughts.

Finally, something much less deep. I've blogged before about Adrianne Curry playing WoW. Two recent interviews from her from Kotaku. In this clip, she talks about being anti pandas.

(I can't get these videos to embed right so you may just have to go click on the links.)


Hmmm.


And in the clip below she talks about getting kicked out of Comic Con, some fragrance she is touting called Erox, and dating a fellow death knight in her guild.


Just think death knights.... YOU could be dating the ex-wife of a Brady Bunch kid.

3 comments:

  1. Yeah Anthony's video is great.

    Whether everyone would be tarred with the same brush is a good question... maybe not, as he is clear about what he got himself into, but then, the average non-wow player doesn't see the difference between and Anthony and a 3 hour a week player.

    I wonder also whether starting playing younger, like lots younger (say Odin at 5 years), changes the dynamic too. Will he grow up, having an allocated few hours a week and carry that through adulthood... or will he binge when he is responsibly for his own activities.

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  2. lol I wasn't going to watch the Adrianne videos... but I clicked on the 2nd one (because it was kind of visible... ohhh the fragrance chat... lol

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  3. @Gnomer: Yeah, I probably contributed to the loss of some brain cells with that second video... but I found the mention of her dating a fellow death knight amusing.

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