Abstract: Worldwide the pros and cons of games and social behaviour are discussed. In Western countries the discussion is focussing on violent game and media content; in Japan on intensive game usage and the impact on the intellectual development of children. A lot is already discussed on the harmful and negative effects of entertainment technology on human behaviour, therefore we decided to focus primarily on the positive effects. Based on an online document search we could find and select 393 online available publications according the following categories: meta review (N=34), meta analysis (N=13), literature review (N=38), literature survey (N=36), empirical study (N=91), survey study (N=44), design study (N=91), any other document (N=46). In this paper a first preliminary overview over positive effects of entertainment technology on human behaviour is presented and discussed. The drawn recommendations can support developers and designers in entertainment industry.

It has been speculated that computer game play by young people has negative correlates or consequences, although little evidence has emerged to support these fears. An alternative possibility is that game play may be associated with positive features of development, as the games reflect and contribute to participation in a challenging and stimulating voluntary leisure environment. This study examined the relationship between game play and several measures of adjustment or risk taking in a sample of 16-year-old high school students. No evidence was obtained of negative outcomes among game players. On several measures—including family closeness, activity involvement, positive school engagement, positive mental health, substance use, self-concept, friendship network, and disobedience to parents—game players scored more favorably than did peers who never played computer games. It

Digital game-based learning is a hot topic of research and development. Since the advent of computer and video games, educators were inherently interested in utilizing the beneficial aspects of computer games for educational purposes. These factors are primarily the intrinsic motivation of games, immersive environments, engaging stories, and an artful balance between challenges and continuously growing abilities. Proponents of computer games delivered a large number of empirical investigations revealing that games may foster the development of abilities and competencies. Besides the advantageous aspects of computer games, a variety of problems were reported by researchers. Due to the high costs of professional game development, many educational games are technologically poor and cannot compete with entertainment games in terms of visual design, possibilities for interactions, or storytelling. Moreover, many current educational games do not incorporate a sound psychological, pedagogical, or didactic background; instead they are focusing on transmission or rehearsal of isolated facts or skills. Finally, such games lack the ability to adapt to individual competencies failing to balance challenge and abilities regarding knowledge or skills. The ELEKTRA project, introduced in this article, aims for addressing these problems relying on an interdisciplinary approach of cognitive science, neuroscience, pedagogy, game design, and game development. The project will develop an adventure game that can keep up with commercial games and that focuses on primarily curriculum-related educational purposes by incorporating a sound psychological and pedagogical framework. Moreover, the project will prove the outcomes of research and development by a comprehensive game demonstrator.

This study examines issues of online identity and language use among teenagers (ages 13 – 17) who create and maintain weblogs or blogs, which are personal journals created by individuals and made publicly accessible on the Internet. Online identity is investigated in terms of the disclosure of personal information, online name choice, avatar selection and emotive features. Language use is explored in terms of word counts and semantic themes. This study also examines common blog topics, blog characteristics, blog abandonment rates and frequency of use. Overall, the results indicate that teenagers reveal a considerable amount of personal information in their blogs, including name, age, and location, as well as contact information in the form of an email address, an instant messenger name or a link to personal homepage. The content of blogs typically reflects what is expected to impact a teenager’s life, such as school, intimate relationships, sexual identity and even music. While almost half of teenage blogs are abandoned, active blogs

Texas at Austin. The authors would like to thank Barbara O’Keefe for her support and guidance.

Development Agency for a programme of research and development. The m-learning project is also supported by the

to care for a real pet whilst interacting with

The allocation of children’s time among different activities may be important for their cognitive and non-cognitive development. In our work we exploit time use diaries from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to study the effect of time allocation across a wide range of alternative activities. By doing so we characterize the trade-off between the activities to which a child is exposed. On the one hand, our results suggest that time spent in educational activities, particularly with parents, is the most productive input for cognitive skill development. On the other hand, non-cognitive skills appear insensitive to alternative time allocations. Instead, these skills are greatly affected by the mother’s parenting style. We wish to thank Frank Wolak, Katrien Stevens, Jennifer Bowes and seminar participants at the

This paper focuses on issues of interaction with a particular type of mobile information system – virtual pets. It examines the impact of owner age on companionship with virtual pets, and tests the hypothesis that younger virtual pet owners will experience closer companionship with their virtual pet than older owners. This is in response to the marketing stance adopted by virtual pet manufacturers who clearly target younger people as the main consumers of their products. The hypothesis was tested using survey data and companionship was measured using the Comfort from Companion Animals Scale. Support was found for the hypothesis at all definitions of young: there is a highly significant difference between the companionship offered by a virtual pet to young people than that offered to older people. Although this finding generally indicates that virtual pets offer more, in terms of emotional-engagement, to younger people than older people we suggest that much more research in this area is needed in order to better understand the phenomenal commercial success of virtual pets. In addition, there is an abundance of literature examining the benefits of owning real pets. It is possible that a virtual pet might be able to deliver some of these, and given our result, it is likely that virtual pets will be more likely to bring these benefits to young people rather than to old people.