Human subjects play mind games

'Look, Ma, no hands!'

By Tony Fitzpatrick

For the first time in humans, a team headed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis has placed an electronic grid atop patients' brains to gather motor signals that enable patients to play a computer game using only the signals from their brains.

The use of a grid atop the brain to record brain surface signals is a brain-machine interface technique that uses electrocorticographic (ECoG) activity-data taken invasively right from the brain surface. It is an alternative to the status quo, used frequently studying humans, called electroencephalographic activity (EEG) - data taken non-invasively by electrodes outside the brain on the skull.

The breakthrough is a step toward building biomedical devices that can control artificial limbs, some day, for instance, enabling the disabled to move a prosthetic arm or leg by thinking about it. The study was published in the June 8, 2004 issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering and was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Eric C. Leuthardt, M.D., a Washington University neurosurgeon at Barnes Jewish Hospital, and Daniel Moran, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering, performed their research on four adult epilepsy patients who had the grids implanted so that neurologists can find the area in the brain serving as the focus for an epileptic seizure, with hopes of removing it to avoid future seizures. To do this, the patients and their doctors must wait for a seizure. With approval of the patients and the Washington University School of Medicine Institutional Review Board, Leuthardt and Moran connected the patients to a sophisticated computer running a special program known as BCI2000 (developed by their collaborators at the Wadsworth Center) which involves a video game that is linked to the ECoG grid. They then asked the patients to do various motor and speech tasks, moving their hands various ways, talking, and imagining. The team could see from the data which parts of the brain correlate to these movements. They then asked the patients to play a simple, one-dimensional computer game involving moving a cursor up or down towards one of two targets. They were asked to imagine various movements or imagine saying the word "move," but not to actually perform them with their hands or speak any words by mouth. When they saw the cursor in the video game, they then controlled it with their brains.

"We closed the loop," said Moran. "After a brief training session, the patients could play the game by using signals that come off the surface of the brain. They achieved between 74 and 100 percent accuracy, with one patient hitting 33 out of 33 targets correctly in a row."

The ECoG method is orders of magnitude faster to learn than EEG.

"It takes many months to train using EEG, whereas our approach was done basically in an hour or so," Moran said. "That's because we got the signals from the surface of the brain rather than having to go through the skull."

"To put this in perspective," Leuthardt said, " the previous EEG-based systems are equivalent to a 1908 Wright brothers airplane in regards to speed of learning to achieve control. Right now with our results we're flying around in an F-16 jet."

The two note that ECoG has higher spatial resolution, broader bandwidth and higher amplitude than the EEG approach, allowing the use of more electrodes and the gain of higher frequencies, which let the researchers go another step - they tried it out on a 2-D game and were able to predict where the patients would move by seeing which electrodes were active on the grid. However, this group of patients did not control movement in the 2-D game with their brains, as they had with the 1-D game.

The researchers next want to try patients out with 2-D games to see if they can control the movements with their brains. They also will implant the ECoG grids into non-human primates - monkeys - to see how long they can get reliable data from them, the goal being eventually to develop a brain-machine interface device that will last years, say, up to 10, making the choice to have one implanted into a motor-impaired patient's brain practical.

"We are pretty confident that we can get signals from these for many years," Moran said. "There will have to be a rigorous study on monkeys for an indeterminate number of years before we can consider permanent implants in human subjects, but we're really excited about this advance. Brain-computer interface research is one of the hottest things going in biomedical engineering today."

"Our work," said Leuthardt, "has significant clinical relevance to potentially improve the lives of people with such disabilities as ALS and spinal cord injuries. Additionally, this type of research is producing some fundamental insights into a myriad of different fields ranging from neurophysiology to clinical medicine."

Collaborators on the study are Gerwin Schalk and Jonathan R. Wolpaw, M.D., of the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, Albany, N.Y., and Jeffrey G. Ojemann, M.D., University of Washington School of Medicine.

Want to Relax? New Study Says Play Games

We take a look at a study recently published which suggests that playing violent games causes players to become relaxed, and less violent.

The media, parents, clinical studies... the list goes on of sources that claim that violent video games will make kids more vehement themselves. And until now, there hasn’t been much evidence to dispute these claims. In fact, it’s almost become an accepted fact that hardcore action games will cause people to potentially commit aggressive acts of misbehavior. That is until now.

A new study is out that proclaims gamers playing violent video games are actually less violent and even more relaxed after playing them. This shocking new study has come out of the London-based Middlesex University. Middlesex's findings were recently presented by the British Psychology Society to a Dublin-based symposium.

Their analysis asked players questions before and after they partook in violent gameplay. In order to conduct a study like this, a series of questionnaires were given to the gamers before and after they played in order to discover the amount of aggression they were experiencing. The new study resulted in the fact that higher states of relaxation were observed before and after the violent games were played than would be feelings of anger.

One use of these findings that researchers hoped to put to work was which personality was more prone to transfer violence in video games into everyday life. As Jane Barnett (the person who spearheaded the Middlesex study) said, "There were actually higher levels of relaxation before and after playing the game as opposed to experiencing anger but this did very much depend on personality type." She went onto add, "This will help us to develop an emotion and gaming questionnaire to help distinguish the type of gamer who is likely to transfer their online aggression into everyday life".

Basically what her study concluded is that video games aren't going to change a crazed lunatic into a calm person but they're also not going to make a normal person a violent offender. They may even help relax them.

This Middlesex University study is quite a variance to things that have previously come out. One study done all the way back in 1983 was a near copy of the Middlesex version and dealt with players after they had entertained themselves on arcade games. Called the "Gibb Study", this work claimed that aggressive behavior was related to playing the arcade games and that, as the violence in the games got more realistic, so did tendencies for violent thoughts.

Another study that came out in 2000 from the University of Central Lancashire echoed the Gibb Study and found that teenagers got more hostile after playing violent games.

Even the end results of a study presented at this year’s Dublin symposium didn't favor heavy video game play. It presented the similarities between game addiction and a form of high functioning autism, also know as Asperger's syndrome. Apsperger’s syndrome is a combination of anti-social behavior, being overly agreeable, and neuroticism.

A representative from the University of Bolton and Whitman College said, "Our research supports the idea that people who are heavily involved in game playing may be nearer to autistic spectrum disorders than people who have no interest in gaming." These accusations of avid video gamers having autism were of course false but researchers from Bolton and Whitman did conclude that these people will interact better with a machine better than they do with people.

However, as much negativity as these studies cast towards the act of playing video games, it is still nice to know that there is something on the other side of the fence with regards to the Middlesex Study. Because let's be honest: a sane human being isn't going to become a mass murderer just because they play a violent video game.

Article by Jake Olson.

Game-Based Movies - Will They Improve?

Are you tired of seeing your favorite video games butchered on the big screen? I think that it’s pretty safe to say a lot of people are, as numerous games have failed once they’ve been taken to Hollywood. Films such as Doom, Silent Hill, Blood Rayne, and Super Mario Bros. (if you can remember this one) have all pretty much failed despite being based on their much more popular video game counterparts.


A recent announcement by 3D Realms could see some of the best movies and TV shows based on games coming to screens in the near future.

Silent Hill

And, unfortunately, things haven’t looked too bright for the future of game-to-movie adaptations. But that could all change in the future if Scott Miller has anything to say about the matter.

Scott Miller is the co-founder and CEO of video game developer 3D Realms Entertainment. And his company has pounded out hit game after hit game over the years with “Wolfenstein”, “Duke Dukem”, and “Max Payne” as a few of the notable ones. But Miller wants to do more than make successful games and he just so happens to have a vision for where he wants to take video game-to-movie adaptations.



Super Mario


He plans to make video games with their transitions to movies in mind the whole way. And in order to accomplish these lofty goals, Scott has launched two companies called the Radar Group and Depth Entertainment. Rader Group will be responsible for working the video game side and Depth Entertainment will work the movies-from-games side.

This all sounds great but without a method to go along with these companies, Miller’s idea might not differ a whole lot from other companies. That’s where his “storyverse” concept comes into play.

Miller believes that there are certain ideas that exhibit success no matter what form of entertainment they are taken to. This is because their concepts create a story universe, or something that translates to universal entertainment. In his opinion, the best ones are Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings.



Max Payne


And, in unison with his beliefs, these three franchises have all done well at creating good movies, games, and books. But Miller wants to go beyond just movies and that’s why he is relying on the help of Depth Entertainment president Scott Faye to not only present the storyverse ideas to Hollywood, but to television production companies as well.

According to Faye, “It would be unwise to throw all the media eggs into one basket and simply say that all of Radar's games are going to be films. I'm sure there are going to be IP’s coming down the road from Radar to Depth that will be better suited for TV, and so that's the path we'll take with Depth serving as the production company.”

He went on to say that, “Filmmakers often disregard what made the video game so successful in the first place, something they wouldn't do if they were creating a movie from a John Grisham book or a revered graphic novel. Depth's role will be to guarantee the sanctity of the video game IP; we will insure that the valuable underpinnings will be preserved throughout the development process.”



DOOM


Miller, Faye, and Depth’s first test will be “Max Payne” which is scheduled to be done in mid to late May and is supposed to be released on October 17th. Games they are working on are “Earth no More”, “Prey 2”, and “Incarnate”.

But don’t expect them to rush anything with these new projects as Faye added, “We want each of our media to stand on its own. In our opinion, when you try to release a game and a movie simultaneously, you compromise the quality of one or the other, and it's usually the game that gets the short end of the stick. Movies usually take 10-15 months to create while it's hard to make a good game so quickly.”

It’s easy to be skeptical of the game-to-movie conversions as few have been anything to talk about but what Faye and Miller envision does provide some optimism. For their sake, and the rest of us who want to see good video game-based movies, let’s hope that this turns out to be more than optimism, and becomes a success!

Article by Jake Olson.

Info game Perfect World Online

Permainan dunia maya di Indonesia akan semakin marak dengan hadirnya Perfect World Online. Game yang dikembangkan perusahaan China ini dihadirkan PT Lyto Datarindo Fortuna (Lyto) yang saat ini telah menyediakan Ragnarok Online, Getamped-R, Seal Online, dan RF Online.



"Kami targetkan Maret tahun depan sudah bisa jalan," ujar Andi Suryanto, Presiden Direktur LYTO, usai peluncurannya di sela-sela Lyto Game Festival 2007 yang digelar di Hotel Ciputra, Jakarta, Sabtu-Minggu, 3-4 November 2007. Pihaknya telah menyiapkan distribusi CD instalasi dan voucher pembayaran melalui representatif agen yang tersebar di 25 kota dengan jaringan game center mencapai sekitar 6000 lokasi.



Untuk permainan ini, Lyto tidak akan menerapkan sistem voucher pembayaran berdasarkan waktu. Selama terhubung ke internet, pemain bebas menikmati tanpa dipungut biaya kecuali akan membeli sejumlah item yang memperkaya perannya dalam permainan, misalnya senjata atau baju. Dengan model bisnis demikian, pihak Perfect World Ltd. berharap Lyto dapat meraih pelanggan sampai satu juta dalam waktu satu tahun.

"Dengan populasi sebesar 200 juta penduduk dan pertumbuhan ekonomi yang pesat, kami memprediksikan akan banyak penduduk Indonesia yang antusias dengan game online," ujar Billy Wang, Vice President of Overseas Business Perfect World Ltd. dalam rekaman sambutannya.

Perfect World merupakan game petualangan dan fantasi yang dikemas dengan gaya oriental. Lyto mengklaim ini sebagai permainan pertama yang menawarkan fitur untuk memoles karakter tokoh sehingga memiliki wajah mirip pemainnya. Tidak hanya dengan tampilan tiga dimensi saja, permainan ini juga menampilkan suasana terbang atau berenang sealamiah mungkin.

"Tokoh laki-laki dan perempuan juga bisa menjalin hubungan layaknya pasangan. BIsa saling memeluk, mencium, menggendong, atau menunggang kuda bersama untuk bertualang," ujar Ostra Ligwina, Brand Manager Lyto. Jadi, tunggu saja tanggal mainnya.

Author: Kompas Cyber Media
Source: Kompas.com