The idea of "slippery texts" provides a useful descriptor for materials that mutate and evolve across different media. Eight adult gamers, encountering the slippery text "American McGee's Alice," demonstrate a variety of ways in which players attempt to manage their attention as they encounter a new text with many resonances. The range of their…

As the obesity epidemic in the United States spreads among children and teenagers, due in part to sedentary lifestyles, some physical education programs are using interactive video games to keep students engaged in physical activity. These innovative games make physical activity fun and challenging for both high- and low-skilled students. Although…

Analyzes federal district court case involving legal action against certain companies that produced violent video games, a violent motion picture, or maintained pornographic websites. Parents of three Kentucky high school students shot and killed by another student who regularly viewed the aforementioned material brought suit. The court dismissed…

Not long after he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, Mike Van Lent used his interest in videogames and artificial intelligence to land a research professorship at the University of Southern California (USC). There he edits the Journal of Game Development and conducts studies for the Institute for Creative Technologies, a $45…

Efforts to merge popular digital games with education seem to rev up with every new generation of technology. The latest came last October, when game developers, researchers, and educators came together in a meeting to explore whether digital games' powerful attraction for young people could be used to pull them deeper into academic learning.…

With the widespread public interest in games as learning tools, digital game-based learning (DGBL) proponents now need to explain why games are engaging and effective and how those principles can be leveraged to best integrate games into the learning process. In this article, Richard Van Eck outlines why DGBL is effective and engaging, how those…

Video games have become increasingly more popular and more technologically advanced. This one-month study used interview, observation, self-report, and reading and listening test data to demonstrate and investigate how one intermediate Japanese-as-a-foreign-language (JFL) student improved his listening comprehension and kanji character recognition…

Research driving the mandates of the current education reform law, No Child Left Behind, indicates a 300% increase during the last 10 years in students being labeled with specific learning disabilities. In addition there has been a dramatic increase in the number of minority students labeled as having learning and emotional disabilities (U.S.…

The simultaneous publication of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You and appearance of media reports of X-rated content in the popular game Grand Theft Auto has renewed controversies surrounding the social effects of computer and video games. On the one hand, videogames scholars argue that videogames are complex, cognitively challenging…

This article addresses three questions. First, what is the deep pleasure that humans take from video games? Second, what is the relationship between video games and real life? Third, what do the answers to these questions have to do with learning? Good commercial video games are deep technologies for recruiting learning as a form of profound…

The effects of exposure to violent video games on automatic associations with the self were investigated in a sample of 121 students. Playing the violent video game Doom led participants to associate themselves with aggressive traits and actions on the Implicit Association Test. In addition, self-reported prior exposure to violent video games…

In this interpretive study of children's social interactions in a family child care setting, children were seen to spend a significant portion of their time playing, watching others play, and distracted by video games. When children were focused on video games, their interactions with one another were disjointed, rushed, and ineffective. Because…

Children have a right to play. The idea is so simple it seems self-evident. But a stroll through any toy superstore, or any half-hour of so-called "children's" programming on commercial TV, makes it clear that violence, not play, dominates what's being sold. In this article, the author discusses how teachers and parents share the responsibility in…

The purpose of this study was to examine students' learning of simple machines, a fifth-grade (ages 10-11) forces and motion unit, and student engagement using a teacher-created Multiplayer Educational Gaming Application. This mixed-method study collected pre-test/post-test results to determine student knowledge about simple machines. A survey…

Computers are becoming the norm for teaching and learning. The Internet gives people ready access to text, visual and audio messages from around the world. For teachers, content is critical and the future dictates the need for major changes in the role of the teacher and learner. Today's digital tools and video games have proven to be well known…