Sighs of relief all round on the 8th January, as the Royal Institution announced that Baroness Susan Greenfield, whose increasingly hysterical pronouncements on gaming and social networking we've discussed at some length on Dazzle Ships, had been let go as the Institution's Director following a governance review.
But it appears this gave us only temporary respite from the stupid.
Now, as a general rule, life is too short to read Metro, however this morning's front page had such a startling headline that I was compelled to pick it up.
Gaming leads to surge in rickets, it shrieked. (It was cancer last year)
'Video games and social networking sites have been blamed for a shocking rise in cases of rickets in children' according, Metro report, to a new study in the BMJ.
Not being a subscriber to the BMJ, I've been unable to read the study (though the abstract makes no mention of gaming or social networks).
That said, Professor Simon Pearce, one of the authors, offers the following 'Kids tend to stay indoors more these days and play on their computers instead of enjoying the fresh air. This means their vitamin D levels are worse than in previous years'.
Oh, please. You might as well blame housing. Or long sleeve shirts. This is moronic.
Let's have look at what's happening in the fast moving world of gaming:
Perhaps the biggest news is the rise of GPS and wi-fi connectivity which is driving a whole new genre that meshes the real world with a gaming element.
SoLocoMatrix, for example, is developing location based games like Fruit Farmer and Treasure Hunt, that encourage kids to run around in a real environment to find virtual objects and avoid virtual hazards.
A similar idea is Aspyr Media's 'Treasure World' for the Nintendo DS, which is already on sale in the US (and is getting rave reviews on Amazon).
For the iPhone fanatics out there, The Hidden Park, by Australian developer Bulpadok, is a download from the App store that overalys digital data onto real data, leading kids around their local parks, whilst giving them missions to accomplish and hazrds to avoid. it currently supports nine cities, including London.
Another huge groth area is that of mental agility games, popularised, again, by the Nintendo DS and their Brain Training series. So popular is this sector becoming that a chain store, Marbles, is spreading through the US, catering exclusively to this area of the market.
And it's not just big comapnies that are profitting from all this, gamers are as well. Molecule Media's Little Big Planet actually allows players to create their own game levels and encoourage others to play them. By the middle of last year, over 1 million of these levels had been created, which had been played over 250 million times, creating huge social and even revenue potential for those people prepared to put the time in.
So, Metro, it's not all bad. And, while I'm here, I'm might as well have a go at that old canard that gaming stunts social development.
According to ESA's Essential Facts, 59% of gaming is now done in a face to face group setting.
In short, the wider debate about whether gaming is a ‘good’ or a ‘bad ‘ thing feels increasingly irrelevant and out of touch, based as it seems to be on a perception of games and gamers that bears less and less relation to reality. They'll just carry on gaming, whilst the 'anti's', with their ever more ludicruous pronouncements, will increasingly look like the out of touch and hysterical, clinging desparately to every scrap of evidence, however tenuous and tangential, that supports their narrow and anachronistic views, and become increasingly dvorced from reality.
Weirdly, that's one of the things they accuse gamers of being.
-- Toby