Approaches to gender and computer gaming have been dominated by textual and content analysis at the expense of broader understandings of gaming. This paper examines computer games through gendered game content, game spaces and activities. The paper suggests that despite the popular stereotype of the computer gamer as an antisocial male teenager, there is increasing evidence of female gaming. This suggests the need to examine the relationship between gender and this activity in greater depth and within everyday contexts. The authors examine the possibility of computer gaming as a potential site for challenging dominant gender stereotypes, relating this to the production and consumption of contemporary leisure.

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.

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

Video game playing is an attractive form of entertainment among school-age children. Although this activity reportedly has many adverse effects on child development, these effects remain controversial. To investigate the effect of video game playing on regional cerebral blood volume, we measured cerebral hemoglobin concentrations using near-infrared spectroscopy in 12 normal volunteers consisting of six children and six adults. A Hitachi Optical Topography system was used to measure hemoglobin changes. For all subjects, the video game Donkey Kong w was played on a Game Boy w device. After spectroscopic probes were positioned on the scalp near the target brain regions, the participants were asked to play the game for nine periods of 15 s each, with 15-s rest intervals between these task periods. Significant increases in bilateral prefrontal total-hemoglobin concentrations were observed in four of the adults during video game playing. On the other hand, significant decreases in bilateral prefrontal total-hemoglobin concentrations were seen in two of the children. A significant positive correlation between mean oxy-hemoglobin changes in the prefrontal region and those in the bilateral motor cortex area was seen in adults. Playing video games gave rise to dynamic changes in cerebral blood volume in both age groups, while the difference in the prefrontal oxygenation patterns suggested an age-dependent utilization of different neural circuits during video game tasks. q 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy studies in children