Brandon Erickson's blog

The link between videogame experience and surgical ability has been widely reported in the media. Until now, however, there has been no published research regarding the question of how videogame experience affects the speed of surgical skill acquisition.

Music can't really make the game part of a game better. With the exception of rhythm-based games, music doesn't really have any connection to gameplay. Which kind of begs the question: to what extent is it fair to judge a game by its music?

I haven't played Grand Theft Auto IV yet, and I probably won't play it for quite a while. But that doesn't mean it isn't exerting an influence on my life. Like many people, I've been keeping track of the game's astronomically high Metacritic ranking, and it's safe to say that I'm pretty damn stoked about the possibility of playing it. The problem is that I'm currently in the midst of a competing set of interests and commitments, which for sake of brevity I'll simply refer to as "life."

It seems that as long as there are videogames there will be scientific studies trying to prove how harmful they are. The credibility of these studies varies widely, ranging from rigorous and well thought out to flawed and utterly misleading. An article in the upcoming May issue of the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology entitled "The effect of the amount of blood in a violent video game on aggression, hostility, and arousal" lies a little closer to the dubious end of the spectrum.

For most people, the idea of "virtual reality" probably conjures up images like those from The Lawnmower Man or The Matrix, with a heavy emphasis on visual realism. The upcoming May issue of Computers in Human Behavior, however, looks at the rather foreign concept of virtual reality for the blind.

I can't count the number of times I've heard people talk about getting bested at a videogame by a kid. These stories typically involve people in their thirties playing games with their kids and getting totally dominated, which then leads them to talk to their friends about how they can't believe how good this kid is at playing videogames. We've all heard some version of this, or perhaps experienced it firsthand.

Despite all the attention that has been given to so-called "wiiitis," there has yet to be any detailed description of the condition in the scientific literature. That's all about to change, however, with an article in the forthcoming May issue of the journal Skeletal Radiology that closely examines a case of acute "wiiitis" with the help of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The April issue of the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction contains a fascinating series of articles on the topic of videogame addiction, and in particular, on the question of whether such a thing as videogame addiction even exists. These writings make for an interesting discourse on a highly controversial subject.

The debate over videogames and violence shows no signs of abating, and despite having grown a little weary of the topic, I'll admit that there's a part of me that remains ever intrigued by the latest research in this area. So in that spirit, here's another scientific article to further fuel the discussion.

Videogames are filled with absurd contradictions; and one of the most pervasive of these by far has to be the inability of game characters to interact realistically with their environments. It's precisely the inclusion of environmental interaction that makes Assassin's Creed so special. It's also a terrible shame that, having created such a remarkably realistic and tactile world, the game goes to such great lengths to undermine that very realism.