Right. We've been gone for a while, but that hasn't stopped the Witless and Ridiculous Opinions of those pesky Non-Gamers from populating our public spaces - and this morning we've got a good'en.
Realising that their individual reports portraying gamers as frothing mentalists weren't quite ridiculous enough, this morning our friends at the Daily Mail have joined forces with the Sunday Times to conclusively confirm what Anne Diamond and co. always suspected...
'Violent video games DO make people more aggressive,' reads the Mail's imposing headline this morning, alongside the obligatory photograph of a small child playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The report cites a Sunday Times article pointing to research by the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, which "took a group of 22 men aged 18-29 and performed MRI scans on them".The University then split the group in half and asked one lot to play violent video games for at least ten hours a week, while the second group played none.
That's right, before we've even started, the Mail's headline is basing research conducted on 22 men - a football match - as evidence that those 6.5 million people who bought Modern Warfare 3 on day one will imminently transform into kitten-beating nut jobs.
Anyway, as you might expect once the Daily Mail article gets to the actual science bit, the Indiana University research doesn't specifically claim violent games make players more aggressive. It simply says games can 'alter' activity in certain areas of the brain.
The report said: "Subjects showed relatively less activation in prefontal regions associated with executive function following one week of violent video game playing.
"This investigation provides the first longitudial, experimental investigation of video game play on brain activity."
Even better, the research claims that when gamers stopped playing, their brains "returned to normal". So we suppose it's only the handheld gamers we should worry about punching us in the street.
Meanwhile, the Sunday Times chose the far more respectable headline of, 'Violent video games can alter how brain works'.
Earlier this year, a psychological study by Huddersfield University struggled to find a link between violent video games and aggression in players.
The research discovered that far from being 'pumped-up' whilst playing a violent game (Gears of War 2, if you're interested), its 40 test subjects were left physically unflustered by the experience - inclusive of heart rate, brain activity and respiration. This was thought to be because the participants could easily decipher that Gears of War bore no similarity to their everyday experiences.
This lack of aggression was later epitomised when a football title (PES) caused the opposite effect - more frustration, supposedly because players could relate sports to everyday real experiences, and so were more liable to become emotionally involved in proceedings.
See? Conclusive. 'Games DO NOT make people more aggressive,' will be our headline, and unlike the Mail piece, which started off so hostile, we won't conclude the article with a hugely contradictive statement like theirs: "They found no connection between the players behaviour and game playing."

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...re-aggressive/ ...

If you’re one of those people who thinks that queuing up outside a shop in the middle of a night to ensure you’re first in line for a sale the next morning is mental, then try this one for size.
Scenes of chaos gripped a US branch of Walmart on Friday after the commencement of the shop’s Black Friday sale lead to a furious stampede that resulted in one shopper pepper-spraying her ‘competitors’.
Walmart’s San Fernando Valley outlet was already rammed with consumers when a whistle was blown at 10pm to signify the beginning of the Black Friday deals.
Masses of people suddenly rushed the video games isle in hope of grabbing discounted games and consoles.
"People started screaming, pulling and pushing each other, and then the whole area filled up with pepper spray," one shopper told the LA Times.
"I guess what triggered it was people started pulling the plastic off the pallets and then shoving and bombarding the display of games. It started with people pushing and screaming because they were getting shoved onto the boxes."
The video games section itself was effectively destroyed, with displays being torn down as staff tried to restrain the frenzied crowd.
"I heard screaming and I heard yelling," another added having been set upon by one woman who attacked a handful of shoppers with a can of pepper spray.
"Moments later, my throat stung. I was coughing really bad and watering up."
Still, on the up side it wasn’t all bad news. "I don't care. I'm still getting my TV. I've never seen Wal-Mart so crazy, but I guess it could have been worse,” 20 year old Nakeasha Contreras added.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/walma...-frenzy/087759 ...

Earnest and reputable mainstream newspaper The Daily Telegraph has today run a headline warning parents about the dangers of videogames.
The print edition ran the headline 'Video Games Sending Kids Crazy', while online the tag was 'Games Wage War on Young Minds.' Meanwhile, the full article carried the significantly more descriptive headline 'Distressed families flood psychiatrists over children dangerously addicted to computer games and the internet.'
The 'flooding' in question comes from the news that videogame addiction and internet addiction are currently candidates for inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, although no numbers are given to support the growth of the condition.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/aussi...s-crazy/087768 ...

Online auction giant eBay is hitting the High Street this week with the support of at least two games retailers.
Both Zavvi and Comet will have a presence at eBay’s temporary Christmas Boutique store in London’s West End from Thursday, December 1st to Monday, December 5th. Customers will be able to browse real life items in the shop, use a smartphone to scan the QR codes beside them and buy products online, with discounts of up to 70 per cent.
Online retailer Zavvi and electronics specialist Comet will have a range of goods on display to promote their own individual eBay pages. Zavvi is planning on selling Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and 3DS games including a selection of EA titles, Forza 3 on 360, Yoostar 2 on PS3, Just Dance on Wii and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D on the 3DS.
“We are very excited to be taking part in the eBay Christmas Boutique and will be providing some of our best selling items on eBay,” Paul Gedman, CEO of consumer for Zavvi.com, told MCV.“Our customers are big gaming fans clued up on all the latest technology, so we really hope they head down to take a look. What better way to be inspired, hunt for the best deals, and have fun shopping with ease and convenience using just their smartphone?”
The store will open from 10am to 6pm each day at 34 Dean Street in London. Ubisoft used the same store-for-hire to promote its Child of Eden Kinect game in June this year.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/games...y-store/087771 ...

It may be tough times on the High Street, but online retailers are expecting their most successful Xmas yet.
IMRG and Kelkoo both estimate £13.5bn will be spent in the UK online during the next four weeks, up 14 per cent over 2010. And consumers will be spending earlier than ever in a bid to avoid the snow chaos that disrupted deliveries last year.
IMRG says that £4bn will be spent over the first two weeks of December alone, while Monday, December 5th is tipped to be this year’s ‘Mega Monday’ – the biggest online sales day of the year.
But the growth in online spending is bad news for the High Street. Kelkoo estimates that spending will be 2.1 per cent down at traditional retailers over Christmas.
Online games retailers are preparing deals over the coming weeks to capitalise on the spending boom. Amazon has already kicked off its activity, with a week of temporary deals.
“Consumers seem to respond positively to price-led special promotions that can be found online around this time,” said HMV’s Gennaro Castaldo.“It’s an optimum date when peaks of supply and demand meet, and it just keeps getting bigger as online shopping grows.”
The Hut Group’s head of business development Sarah Jasper added: “We are confident this will be our busiest Christmas to date.”
Asda is preparing itself for its first Xmas with an in-house entertainment site.
“Now we have migrated the entertainment range onto the Asda Direct platform it gives us the opportunity to capitalise on the customer traffic driven through entertainment-led campaigns and new releases across the piste,” said Asda Direct’s trading boss Frazer Locke.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/uk-on...as-boom/087772 ...

TT Games' LEGO Pirates Of The Caribbean and Ubisoft's Just Dance 2 both snapped up trophies at the British Academy Children's Awards.
The swashbuckling adventure won in the Video Game category, while Just Dance 2 won in the Games category of BAFTA Kid's Vote, in which 7 - 11 year olds picked the winners.
Online game Binweevils won the BAFTA Kid's Vote Web category, with Moshi Monsters taking second place. Privates, a sex education game, won in Learning Secondary category.
Nose Dive Studios won the BAFTA Young Game Designers award with Rollin' Scotch, a game designed for iOS devices. Noah Shepherd, Louis Scantlebury, Nathaniel Weisberg, are all 15 years old and based in London.
The award is open to children aged between 11 and 16, and this year's jury included developers from TT Games, Sony Computer Entertainment's Cambridge Studio and EA Bright Light.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...ildrens-baftas ...

Modern Warfare 3 held on to the number one spot in the UK all-formats chart for the third consecutive week.
The previous game in the series, Black Ops, was unseated by Gran Turismo 5 in its third week on sale.
However, after last week's bumper crop of new games major contenders have started to thin out, and Modern Warfare held its position despite sales falling 41 per cent.
Assassin's Creed: Revelations also held firm in second place - even with a 61 per cent decline in sales - while Saints Row: The Third moved past Skyrim into third position.
The highest new entries were THQ's WWE 12 and Nintendo's Professor Layton and the Spectre's Call, which entered the chart at 6th and 7th place respectively.
The only top 10 games to show growth were FIFA 12 and Just Dance 3 - both enjoyed an increase of 22 per cent over last week - which took 5th and 8th place respectively.
The last two places in the top 10 were taken by Battlefield 3 in 9th and Super Mario 3D Land in 10th.
Moshi Monsters: Moshling Zoo showed an 85 per cent increase in sales, jumping from number 18 to number 12 in the chart following a successful "Black Friday" promotion.
The lowest entry was Warner Bros. Interactive's The Lord Of The Rings: War In The North, which scraped into the top 40 at number 38.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...for-third-week ...

The ABC is reporting that 'Australia's five major ISPs have revealed their plans to crack down on online piracy by sending warning notices to suspected illegal downloaders while assisting rights holders to pursue serial offenders through the courts.' The idea is that '[d]uring an 18-month trial, rights holders would send copyright infringement notices, including evidence of copyright infringement and the IP address involved, to ISPs who would then send "educational notices" to the internet users concerned.' Further action would entail that '[u]sers who are suspected of further copyright breaches would then receive up to three warning notices before rights holders are able to pursue court action.' This seems a gentler approach than other countries. Will it prove more effective and/or cost efficient?

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/11/...down-on-piracy ...

Team Ninja's Yosuke Hayashi says that the recent revival of the fighting genre is great, but things haven't changed much.

"To be completely honest, after Dead or Alive 4 we weren't sure what the future was going to be. We were trying to think of something new, but we weren't getting any ideas of what to do for 5," he told Siliconera candidly.
"Then we saw Street Fighter IV and the fighting genre come back because in a large part of Capcom and what they were doing. For all of the fighting games that came out we looked at them, but there was something wrong," added Hayashi.

"They looked great with updated graphics and had online gameplay, but the gameplay itself hasn't changed. It's still the gameplay we've had for years."

Hayashi says it was this lack of change that prompted to company to go for a more extreme approach to its fighting arenas and environments in the new Dead or Alive 5.

"We started to think how can we change the genre. What could we add new and put that into the fighting game? And that's how that idea came out," he said.

Team Ninja billed DOA 5 as 'fighting entertainment' during its TGS unveiling, and you can see why in this trailer.

"Dead or Alive is different from both of those. We're looking for simple, but deep fighting entertainment. We're not looking to be a technical hardcore fighter. We want a game that a lot of people can have fun with, but people who want that depth can find it. When people watch the second part of the demo that will give players a sense of what we're thinking of when we mean 'fighting entertainment'," concluded Hayashi.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...gh-team-ninja/ ...