Video Game Addiction

Telegraph.co.uk recently posted an article about game addiction concerns and the release of the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King

Incase you have been living in a box (or maybe had better things to do), World of Warcraft (aka WoW) is one of the most popular online rpg games around. To date they boast over 11 million subscribers (I was one of them a few years back).

Anyway, it's an interesting article and worth the read if you get the chance... Check it out here.

The NPD group recently release sales figures for the video game industry for last March. Overall video game sales topped $1.7 billion (again, that's just in March alone) - this includes software, hardware and accessories. With that said however, over $945 million of that was for the software alone!

The report also notes that these numbers are not simply due to the popularity of a few select games as there were twice as many SKU's sold this March as compared to March 2007. These are crazy numbers considering the place we are in with regards to the economy.

Of course the housing market gets the attention, which of course makes sense - losing your house is a very significant ordeal. However, it looks as though that won't keep kids from asking their parents to continue buying them video games.

As for me, I tend to be spending the same on video games this year as I was last year. In fact, I may spend more this year as well once a number of pre-orders have been taken into consideration that I have already purchased, as well as a number of other titles coming on the horizon I know I will be getting into... maybe that's why I am still in an apartment instead of a home.

Okay guys, some bad news. It looks like we are already in danger of obsessing over video games right from birth.

The Stanford University School of Medicine conducted Video Game Addiction research recently (published on Feb 04, 2008) regarding how our brains function while we play video games. It didn't bode too well for us males.

In the part of our brains that control/generate feelings of reward, there is much more activity then can be found in females while playing Video Games. The study was conducted among 22 young men and women (11 of each gender) who were allowed to play a game in 24 second intervals while hooked up to an fMRI machine. The machine produces a dynamic image that shows which parts of your brain are working during an activity, such as playing a video game.

You can read more about their Game Addiction study on their site at The Standford School of Medicine here.

As you can see, we have a new look here as well as a few other new things. We consider this Phase 1 of the changes to come. There are still some pages that need some work, and we have information coming in the near future for others so please be patient as we get everything rolling again!

Updates have been a bit slow around here, I will be the first to admit it, haha. Things have been very busy for me over the last six months but I have not forgotten about our little home here and within the next few months I'm proud to say there will be some big changes here. We will be expanding our coverage of video gaming addiction - the stories and statistics and much more.

With that said, let me thank you for your continued support and visits here despite my lack of focus ;) Good things are coming!