The media influence on the beautiful game.

I grew up playing soccer. A lot. From a tender age I was shuttled around by my loving parents to practices, soccer games, tournaments, and camps. Pretty much 3-4 days of the week and every weekend I played soccer for many, many years. Perhaps, it is needless to say that I enjoy watching the world cup and especially enjoy watching the US Team.

One thing that I noticed with this cup was a general sense of discontent from the calls made by the referee. I haven't reviewed the perspective of other national media outlets, but I can't imagine that Mexico or England was especially happy by the blown calls in either of their games.

Sepp Blatter the President of FIFA openly opposes instant replay saying soccer needs to keep the human element. However, I see one major problem with his comment, and that is the use of extra slow motion replay in the media. Commentators now have instant access to multiple angles and slow motion replay to see the errors of the officials. This use of media to scrutinize the real-time decisions of match officials is unfair to the officials and perhaps is even putting them in danger of eventual persecution from a begrudged fanatic of one nation or another.

This is a sport where players have been shot for scoring own goals. It is fairly serious business, and this is why I don't understand why FIFA doesn't protect its officials from the media with the use of some carefully considered replay. If a ball goes over the line there is absolutely no reason that it should not be considered a goal. This is not hockey were 12 players are probably laying on the puck in the crease and it is hard to determine if it crossed the line. One replay should quickly tell the match official if the goal counts.

I understand that off-side calls would be a trickier matter. Especially since this would lead to every player called off-side deciding they had better take the ball to goal and score (just in case replay confirms they were onside). Still, it seems to me like this problem is only going to continue to plague soccer. The media is not going to stop using instant replay and multiple angles to determine if the play was on or off-side.

The Game Industry and Psychology

Lately I have noticed a lot of recent articles, conferences, calls for papers, etc. about games and psychology. It has left me wondering - "Why the recent interest in the intersection of psychology & games?"

The way I see it game designers have always tried to take psychology into account. However, when doing so they seem to have thought things like - "How can we make this psychologically interesting, fun, enjoyable?" A few games have even taken this to the next level (making money), using psychological tools that marketers have long known about. I think Magic the Gathering & Warhammer fit this mold. What made Magic and Warhammer unique was that they took advantage of human psychology to make money (booster packs, army expansions, new rules sets every 3 months). Recently, (The last 5 years) business models for digital distribution have become tractable. Digital distribution really lets developers take advantage of human psychology. Imagine if your random loot drops in WoW were microtransactions? What if every transaction cost a penny or 30 seconds. How tempting would it be to just save yourself 5 minutes and spend 10 cents? Its So cheap and easy. Its classical conditioning at its best, your reward pathways keep firing when the payout is random. (This is because your reward pathways fire in order to help you predict when you will receive a reward, not when you get the reward.)

In Dragon Age it really pissed me off that they had in game NPCs offering to sell you digital content. There are a couple great penny arcade comics about it (SPOILER ALERT) here and here. It really does ruin the suspension of disbelief, but worse when I buy a 60 dollar game I want all the content! I don't want to be running around just having spent 60 dollars to find out I can get 10 more dollars worth of game play the day the game is released. WoW recently made some 25 million dollars selling Celestial Steeds - Celestial Steed probably cost them 1000 bucks to make? No wonder game publishers/designers are interested in psychology.

Anyway, now that I think about it there is one place that has lots of games and is very concerned about psychology.

Vegas.

Study: Casual Games "Improve" Cognition

Recently, I stumbled upon a study via Raph Koster's Website. The study has gotten a degree of publicity - games are super hot.

The study can be found here: Casual Games Help Cognition

According to the study:

"Researchers measured and tracked the participants' brain waves via electroencephalography (EEG) -- one group played the games, and a control group didn't. The study found that subjects who played casual games for 30 minute periods showed an 87 percent improvement in cognitive response time and a 215 percent increase in executive functioning. This makes it, according to ECU, about as effective as other medical treatments for cognition."

It appears that the full article has not been released yet. I am interested to see what exactly cognitive response time is operationalizing. And, are they measuring this during or after? The executive region of the brain is responsible for a variety of processes, and EEG won’t really tell us much about what region is active. Both goal processing and the processing of novel tasks are located in the executive region (prefrontal cortex) so these would certainly be candidates.

One really interesting thing about expertise and a novel tasks is, when you are new to a task you process the task in the prefrontal cortex. However, when you have become more of an expert the processing shifts to the posterior cortex. This has been seen in chess players when examining their brains using an fMRI. Do all, some, a few, or no video games shift to the posterior cortex after expertise is gained?

I suppose my point is that while this study is certainly interesting there are still quite a few unanswered questioned. The good news is that suggesting people play video games as a way to increase brain activity has a very low social cost, and the potential benefits are high.