The next generation, and Mario Kart at home!

Chris Berrow talks to Andrew Przybylski -  an experimental psychologist and Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, who authored the study linking gaming to happiness.

Andy - Well, I mean, in a funny kind of way, this is definitely the kind of study that should have probably been done, you know, 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Um, social scientists tend to fall back when they can... on asking questions, uh, of their participants. You know, whether you're interested in aggression or addiction, uh, or, or maybe even the positive benefits of play, we haven't really bothered to directly measure the behavior of players themselves.

Chris - Do you believe that the fact that there's a positive trend now in that people are gaming for longer and, and I suppose reporting feeling happier that has anything to do with this year in lockdown and pandemics and people being more disconnected this year?

Andy - Yeah, it, it, it might, and it, it also might have something to do with the fact that we only looked at two games out of, you know, a few million that are out there in the wild and, and the games that we looked at, we looked at them specifically because they were social, uh, that a social component to them and they were internet connected. So there's probably a question about how much these findings would generalize, you know, whether or not it would just be, uh, all a mess when it comes to the amount of time people play games and their wellbeing, but really, uh, this is why more research of, of a higher quality is needed. 

Chris - What would you like to see done next in regards to research in this field? Because it seems like as you suggest that there's a long way to go...

Andy - Nintendo of America and EA they really stuck their necks out, you know, that tiny, positive correlation we found, uh, between playtime and wellbeing that could have easily gone in the other direction. And then they would have been facing a lot of really bad press. Um, and so I think it's, uh, it's it's, and they didn't know what the results were. I, I should actually make that very clear. Um, we, we collected the data in such a way that, that for the surveys, the people's wellbeing, we, we collected and stored that here at Oxford, and they had data on telemetry, but we're the ones who kind of married it together, uh, with, with a unique identifiers that the games companies couldn't control the results, or, you know, they couldn't exert control, not since they wanted to obviously, but, um, but no, th th the big next step obviously, is, is involving more companies and following a larger, more representative sample of players, uh, over time.

Chris - And was this small, positive correlation, big enough to get excited about cause obviously everyone is getting excited about it, but in your opinion, do you think it's enough to go off?

Andy - No, your parents shouldn't be going out buying consoles on the basis of it. Uh, and, and it, it, it really, it really should be a very strong cautionary now, uh, for, for my colleagues in other areas of, of psychology, who would go on to say, uh, to make very strong unsubstantiated claims about the negative effects. 

Chris Berrow and Leigh Milner review Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity...

So this is the origin story of Zelda Breath of the Wild - Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. It's basically the huge fight that took place a hundred years before.

So everyone was super excited to see, well, basically what the story is and to see it unfold, the graphics are awesome.

The graphics are exactly like Zelda Breath of the Wild, that cartoon you style, which you saw a bit of it when I was playing it actually, um, it's very like a game called Dynasty Warriors, which you may or may not have played, but you've got hundreds of people running at you and then you hack and slash them to death.

So it's basically Dynasty Warriors, but with the Zelda graphics - it's beautiful. It runs really smoothly.

I was a bit worried because a lot of people were saying in the demo version, it was very jittery and laggy. And I thought, Oh, I don't even, I don't really want to play the demo, but they sorted out all the problems.

8/10 and it's out now for the Nintendo Switch. 

Chris Berrow & Leigh Milner review Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit.

Have a listen to their review, and you can watch the video

Chris Berrow and Leigh Milner review the Game and Watch: Super Mario Bros. 

It's literally the size of my hand and you can play games in it, which you can hear at the moment. Well, it's the, it's the old school Mario that, you know, you used to play on. I'm not obviously not very good at talking and playing games... it isn't my forte. So basically it's like the old school Mario that we used to play. And then when you're bored of playing, you can just literally press time and look at that... it'as also a clock!

Eva Higginbotham finds out how gamers in EVE Online are fighting Coronavirus. 

Probably the most important thing is we're trying to help scientists in the fight against COVID. So one of the technologies that's being widely used is full cytometry. What we use for assumption four is look at the different cells that are present in our blood, the white blood cells that are used to both detect infection and to fight infection. We, uh, take a sample of a patient's blood and we label the cells so that they glow with light. When they run past the laser one by one, what we label these cells is on proteins. On the cell surface that we know define the function of these cells.

These protein markers act as signposts to scientists telling them what kind of cells are present in a patient's blood. This is important because when your body mounts an immune response to something, a lot of different types of white blood cells get involved and understanding which immune cells are prevalent. And in what proportions tell scientists loads of information about how a patient is responding to an infection like coronavirus or a treatment scientists can now label up to 50 different proteins on the surface of these cells at the same time. So what Ryan and his team have done is broken down the 50 dimensional data into lots of two-dimensional puzzles. And that swear Eve online comes in. These 2D puzzles are prettied up and uploaded into the Eve online world where players can access them as a part of a mini game, like a side project to the main business of hunting down enemy spaceships. And the more puzzles you solve, the better rewards you get within the game.