Elysium

M U I S y L E YE E E H T EETS

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HA T E R O M

This magazine will serve to celebrate and elevate gaming culture and discussion.

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FROM THE EDITOR

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lysium is a bold new video-game culture magazine.

It was created to celebrate and elevate the gaming culture discussion. Gaming has been the target by mainstream media and politicians and far too often the blame and scapegoat for every violent act in modern society, which has created a set of stereotypes and the negative perception towards gaming. Elysium strives to change that perspective and narrative by showcasing community favorite independent games (indie) that have a strong emotional story, beautiful artwork. That is overshadowed by its triple-a title counterparts in the media being constantly blamed for violence and causing violence, which ends up painting gaming with a general brush. If video games did indeed cause some mass shootings, one might expect such events to be common in Japan or South Korea. Places where per capita spent on gaming is more then the U.S. The first issue will play host to a rich variety of voices from inside and outside the industry, interwoven with stunning imagery from the games also featuring four creator interviews of the process and behind the scenes of the indie games, four mini wholesome moments, and news in gaming. The magazine will serve to celebrate and elevate gaming culture and discussion. Gaming is more then what is portrayed in the media and by politicians.

Gaming is a medium that unites people through beautiful artwork, game play, community, challenges, characters and powerful emotional story. Gaming is for everyone there is countless games, genres and type of gaming.

Gaming is a medium that is more then meets the eye. •

CONTENT ELYSIUM NAME

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CONTENTS

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03.

05.

07.

WHOLESOME MOMENTS AND NEWS

AN ELYSIUM CREATOR FEATURE: FIREWATCH

AN ELYSIUM CREATOR FEATURE: LIFE IS STRANGE 2

STILL BLAMED

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11.

13.

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AN ELYSIUM CREATOR FEATURE: BROTHER: A TALE OF TWO SONS

AN ELYSIUM CREATOR FEATURE: NEVER ALONE

THAT, DRAGON CANCER

WHICH SYSTEM IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

CHANGING THE PERSPECTIVE.

WHOLESOME MOMENTS Oldest Gamer/ Youtuber

By Emiko Jozuka, CNN

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Japanese woman who built a cult following online with her video game skills has been recognized as the world’s oldest YouTube gamer — at the age of 90.Hamako Mori, known as “Gamer Grandma” to her 250,000 YouTube subscribers, started gaming 39 years ago. Her YouTube channel launched in 2015, and she posts up to four videos a month. In her clips, she does everything from unboxing new consoles to broadcasting her gaming prowess.And now Mori, who counts the “Grand Theft Auto” series among her favorites, is officially the world’s oldest gaming YouTuber, according to Guinness World Records.

“After living for this long, I feel more than ever that playing games for this long was the right choice. I am truly enjoying my life — it’s rosy,” Mori said in a media release from Guinness World Records.

Mori maintains a sharp sense of humor in her videos, with one dubbed “elder plays Elder Scrolls V Skyrim,” referring to the popular fantasy role-playing title. They also offer a candid close-up on her life: In “90-yearold grandma plays Dauntless” — which has more than 3 million views — Mori blows out candles on her birthday cake before vlogging her take on the monster battling game.

“I’m going to play ‘Dauntless’ today,” she says.

“After I started playing this, it was such fun, and I couldn’t stop. I can’t look at any other games — it’s all about this one ... sometimes I end up playing until 2 a.m.”

Mori has also collected an array of consoles over the decades. The first one she owned was Cassette Vision, which was released in Japan on July 30, 1981.

“It looked like so much fun, and I thought it’s not fair if only children played it,” Mori said.

Acer For Education

By Samantha Bresnahan, CNN

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here has been a lot of criticism around gaming for children, but many studies suggest that playing domestic video games improves visual attention and spatialmotor skills. The social and psychological benefits of gaming On the other hand, the specific application of gaming in education generates a lot of benefits in the learning process. Generally, educational video games and simulators teach many skills such as algebra, biology, computer programming and flight training. In particular, simulation games can develop the children’s soft skills. They indeed may increase the children’s sense of self esteem and improve socialization skills, leadership skills and team building. Let’s see specifically which are the benefits of learning through gaming, so that teachers and schools may comprehend the potential of integrating an

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educational gaming learning platform into their classroom. Gaming is a social activity.

Gaming stimulates students and children to play together.

Many games require players to work together in teams to achieve goals or to compete against each other. In order to achieve that, students shall refine their communication skills: this will help them to establish better relationships and have high self-esteem. Gaming improves critical thinking Many classical literature teachers are bringing visualization games in the classroom to explain Odysseus’s journey.

Overall, gaming may create an educational future where teachers can recreate a more engaging and connected environment, and students may benefit to develop critical skills by attending exciting lessons.

AND NEWS The Silver Snipers

By Samantha Bresnahan, CNN

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he world’s oldest esports team is gaming their way to longer lives. At a row of computers, the team sits, ultra focused, fingers flying over their keyboards.

The video game “Counter-Strike” plays out on their monitors as they communicate over headsets, engaged in a fierce competition at Moscow’s IgroMir Expo, Russia’s largest computer and video game convention. But this is not your average group of gamers.

The slogan on their black jackets reads “We’ve got time to kill.” With an average age of 67, the Silver Snipers from Stockholm, Sweden, are the oldest esports team in the world. “We want to win, so we have to train a lot,” said team member Inger Grotteblad, 66, nicknamed “Trigger Finger.” But she doesn’t mind. “The team is so close to each other. We know each other very well.” Last fall’s world tour, their first, also included stops in Paris and Finland. Grotteblad hopes the team can

score invitations to upcoming competitions in South America. Esports is “a lovely community to be in,” Grotteblad said, adding that before she started playing, she thought it was young guys sitting at home, playing games all night long. But she and the team found something unexpected: a welcoming community and a loyal legion of fans to cheer them on. “It’s very lovely ... because you could be treated like ‘go away,’ “ she said. “Instead, they are opening their arms for us and saying, ‘Oh, you’re so cool!’

My grandsons say, ‘You are the coolest grandmother in the world!’ “ It might sound simple, but happiness and fun are proven to have measurable impacts on our health and longevity. One study found that older people were up to 35% less likely to die during the five-year research period if they reported feeling happy.

Ai In GTA V

By Alex Kuang The Daily Pennsylvania

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enn researchers are using Grand Theft Auto to help test self-driving cars The popular video game Grand Theft Auto is helping Penn researchers test new autonomous vehicle technology.

Electrical and Systems Engineering professor Rahul Mangharam is leading a team of six to test an autonomous driving software called the Computer Aided Design for Safe Autonomous Vehicles. “We can crash as many cars as we want,” Mangharam told the Philadelphia Inquirer.to test the self-driving cars, Mangharam and his team use virtual simulations that mimic crashes in Grand Theft Auto. This helps better evaluate how the vehicles respond to their surrounding.

The autonomous car technology is constantly executing a three-step process: perceiving its surroundings, routing, and then driving. As the car teaches itself through

experience, it creates what scientists call a “black box” mystery in which researchers cannot tell exactly why the car makes certain choices. It can be especially confusing when the car makes a mistake, though.“Was the cause of the problem that it cannot perceive the world correctly and made a bad decision, or did it perceive the world correctly and make a bad decision?” Mangharam said.

The researchers can modify the environment within the game to better understand how the car reacts to different weather conditions, as shown in a simulation found on Mangharam’s research website.

Mangharam is the director of Penn’s branch of the program, and his research focuses on determining regulations for autonomous cars to ensure safety to the public.

WHOLESOME MOMENTS AND NEWS

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FIREWATCH ELYSIUM

H C T A W E R I F CREATOR INTERVIEW Creator Jake Rodkin Interview By Nintendo

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ithout spoilers, the narrative design of Firewatch is rather unique. What was the inspiration behind it? How did you go about making the narrative?

Jake Rodkin: So, one thing that our team was really interested in was the role-playing aspect of gaming. Like, what if we put you in the shoes of a specific human being who’s coming into this story with a bunch of problems and a bunch of baggage that are unique to that character. And then we ask the players to deal with that. A lot of the design came from asking who is Henry and what kind of person would go out into the world like this? We wanted players to feel like some of his problems are their own and have them wonder “How would I react in moments like this?”

But then you think about how much players are bringing themselves into the game: Are they acting like themselves? Or are they thinking about what Henry would say in that situation? And then you think about if players even want to help Henry out.

JR: The second part of the narrative is that we really wanted the game to be reactive to what players did. We wanted players to feel like they were given a National Forest version of a theme park… admittedly a very sad theme park about sad people dealing with spooky stuff. But if you go and explore you’ll get new narrative content out of almost any place you go. We wanted to produce rewarding narrative experiences in a way that doesn’t just feel like you’re playing cutscenes. We want the player to feel like you’re building a story with the game and the characters in it.

How did you came to work with the artist, Olly Moss, and the visual aesthetics of Firewatch?

That one is actually pretty simple! I and a couple

of the people who started Campo Santo really just liked his work online. He was familiar with some of our previous work, and Olly sent me a message on AOL Instant Messenger, asking, “Hey, do you want to make a video game?” As for the aesthetic of the game, we wanted it to feel like all those old National Park posters and paintings and posters of the great outdoors from the early to mid-20th century that are so beautiful and evocative. An interesting thing about that art is if you put a tiny dot of a person in the middle of it, it’s suddenly both beautiful and creepy at the same time. We wanted to get those two feelings operating at the exact same time.

What your favorite things about this project?

Other than working with a small group of amazing people, I really liked the end of the process: when you basically have the game put together and you can start play testing it to see how people actually interact with it.

There’s a moment late in the game where Henry can find a shovel on the ground, and you can pick it up and tell Delilah that you found it. He’s like really excited—he’s going to take it back to the tower and open a beer with it, etc. And then she says, “Oh, that’s for burying poop.” Now if players happen to be holding the shovel at the moment when Delilah tells you that it’s for poop, Henry says, “Oh no, I’m holding it” and both of them get grossed out. But, of course, if a player didn’t pick up the shovel, that conversation just doesn’t happen. And adding those little details were totally from play testing and seeing how people played the game. It was at the end we really got to pump up a lot of those details. And I know I was just talking about poop, so I’m sorry for that. •

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LIFE IS STRANGE 2 CREATOR INTERVIEW

Creators: Michel Koch & Jean-Luc Cano Interview By: Duncan Heaney

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he first series of Life is Strange was received incredibly well. What was the impact of this success on DONTNOD? Michel Koch: We certainly didn’t anticipate it!

When we started five years ago, we just wanted to create a game we loved. We didn’t know if it would find an audience, or even if it would work - we’re obviously very happy it did. But that positive response also puts a lot of pressure on us to work on the second season - to find a good story and a good set of characters. Jean-Luc Cano: And because we don’t want to let down the community. MK: Right - it’s challenging because the first season told a complete story. And that’s what we basically want to do - tell good stories, but to do that, you have to be renewed So with this season, we wanted to do something new - deal with new themes, look at social issues and show characters from different backgrounds.

Life is Strange 2 deals with a lot of issues most games don’t - like abuse, alcoholism and racism.

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How do you go about to make sure you present these issues sensitively? MK: So one of our goals is to talk about the things we want to in the right way. When we start working on games, we take elements from our own backgrounds. In that way we use ourselves as reference. But obviously we can’t use that for everything, particularly some of the more unpleasant issues we deal with in Life is Strange 2. So we read books, look at biographies and watch documentaries to try to get good reference points for how to approach these very serious topics with sensitivity. Then, when we get to the process of writing, and actually making the game, we do focus testing and try to get a sense of how things are being perceived. If they aren’t being treated in the perfect way, we need to identify that, and rework the scene so they are.

Life is Strange 2 keeps a lot of its key decisions largely invisible to the player - why that approach? JLC: When you make a decision in life, you don’t always see the consequences right away.

That’s something we’ve always examined in Life is Strange and wanted to continue into Life is Strange 2. We do show the player some key decisions but, as in life, there are lots of consequences to little decisions. A perfect example of this is that the behavior of Daniel is shaped by the small choices you make as Sean. That ties into the theme of responsibility in Life is Strange 2 How do you design decisions to be impactful and dramatic, without making the player feel punished for their decisions? MK: The Life is Strange games are about life and real issues. We try not to portray anything as black or white, but instead as shades of grey. There is no pre-defined right way to live - a person’s life is defined by the decisions they make. Some decisions may come to bite you, but you have to live with it. That’s what we try to emphasis JLC: There are no good or bad decisions in life. There are just decisions.

One thing I loved in Episode One is how subtly Daniel’s powers are represented - particularly in

the opening section. There’s nothing showy - it’s fast and matter of fact. Why did you choose to present it this way?MK: Well, Life is Strange 1 and 2 are not about the powers. We’re not creating, you know, ‘sci-fi’ stories. We use supernatural twists to add another layer to the story and characters to increase the characters weakness. In the first Life is Strange, Max is still a teenager. She doesn’t know who she really is or what she wants to be.

She’s at the point in her life where she has to make decisions. So her rewind power amplifies that weakness - she’s no longer locked into one path, which makes it even harder to pick the right thing to do. In Life is Strange 2, Sean has to take responsibility for Sean - basically become a father.

By giving Daniel powers, it amplifies the amount of responsibility he has.JLC: They have to seem like they fit in the world we’re creating. But, as Michel says, Life is Strange is not about superpowers.

It’s not about what the power is, but how the characters deal with it. • LIFE IS STRANGE 2

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STILL BLAMED Video Games Aren’t Why Shootings Happen.

Politicians Still Blame Them.

By Kevin Draper The NY Times

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fter two mass shootings over the weekend that killed 31 people and wounded dozens more, powerful Republicans, including the president, blamed an old bogeyman: video games.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society,” President Trump said on Monday in a White House address on the shootings. “This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace.” Mr. Trump’s words echoed those of Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader.

Armed with little and often unconvincing evidence, politicians have blamed violence on video games for decades. Their rhetoric quickly ramped up in the 1990s, after games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom popularized the genre of violent first-person shooting games. Since then, video games have been blamed for shootings at Columbine High School in 1999 and at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, and many others in between.Researchers have extensively studied whether there is a causal link between video games and violent behavior, and while there isn’t quite a consensus, there is broad agreement that no such link exists.

According to a policy statement from the media psychology division of the American Psychological Association, “Scant evidence has emerged that makes any causal or correlational connection between playing violent video games and actually committing violent activities.” Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University, led the committee that developed the policy statement. In an interview Monday, he said

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the evidence was clear that violent video games are not a risk factor for serious acts of aggression.

Neither are violent movies, nor other forms of media. “The data on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive,” said Dr. Ferguson. “Literally.

The numbers work out about the same.”

The Supreme Court has also rejected the idea.

In striking down a California law that banned the sale of some violent video games to children in 2011, the court savaged the evidence California mustered in support of its law. “These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively,” Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion. He added: “They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule realworld effects, such as children’s feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game.” If video games did indeed cause some mass shootings, one might expect such events to be common in Japan or South Korea. Both countries spend more per capita on video games than the United States, according to Newzoo, and have huge video game communities. Japan is home to video game makers like Nintendo, Sega and Sony, while South Korea has a highly developed competitive video gaming industry, but Japan and South Korea — both of which have very strict laws limiting gun ownership — have among the lowest rates of violent crime in the world, and mass casualty events are quite rare. •

“ T HE DATA ON BANANAS CAUSING SUICIDE IS ABOUT AS CONCLUSIVE,”

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BrOTHER: A TALE OF TWO SONS CREATOR INTERVIEW

Creators: Michel Koch & Jean-Luc Cano Interview By: Kyle Hilliard

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osef Fares never made a video game before Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, but you wouldn’t know that by playing the game. It feels like the veteran effort from a designer with a story that he is determined to tell. Fares’ history is in filmmaking, but he has always been fascinated by interactive storytelling Where did the idea for the game come from?

Did it start from the innovative control scheme?

No, no, no. The first thing that happened… just a little bit of my background. I normally work as a film director. This is actually my first game that I directed. In Sweden I am kind of well-known as a director, but in every interview I’ve talked about games and how much I love games, because I am a hardcore gamer. I’ve owned everything. It just happened that one of the guys I knew had a school where he had some students, and he asked me, “Do you want to do something during

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the summer, like a prototype?” And then I got so pumped up for it and thought, “Wow! This is a dream come true.” This has always been a dream of mine to make a game. So I came up with pretty much the foundation of Brothers, like controlling with two sticks and how it was going to end. That was actually the first thing I came up with.

I didn’t realize you were a filmmaker. I thought you worked for Starbreeze. There were many skeptical voices when I came in. And I didn’t have any experience in gaming at all.

Can you talk about the ending a bit. It’s a somber ending. Was it necessary for the growth of the younger brother? Definitely. I feel the same way, it’s kind of an optimistic ending in many ways. You have to go on, get a life and stuff. Of course it’s a sad scene and I know many people have cried at the ending which, it somehow makes me happy. Of course, at the same time, I

feel that there is an optimistic ending, and we see that. I don’t want to talk too much about it. I don’t know if you interacted with everything. I think a lot of people have missed a lot. There’s huge amount of interactive stuff. If you look closely, with the brother, the little brother especially in the beginning, he’s a bit – In the beginning he’s a bit childish and mischievous. You see as the game goes, he grows more, and more, and more, and matures throughout the game. The game is about the little brother, for me. He’s the one that’s transformed from a boy to a mature man, you could say. He grows to this. And there is an optimistic look in his face in the end. He still has his father, and he’s ready to go on with his life. It’s in many ways a very personal game to me. When I was in Lebanon – this is very private but, anyway – when I was young, like seven years old, I really wanted a younger brother, and my mother, she lost a baby in

birth. And actually, she gave him to me to bury him.

So I actually pretty much did that scene that is in the game, which is extremely powerful for me.

I was curious if the themes of death and the message of moving on was a product of personal experience or loss? Yeah, definitely it is, but of course he was just a newborn, but still I was very young. In a country like Sweden or America, they would go like, “Who would let a child…?“ but in those days there was war. But of course, it was a very powerful moment that’s been with me throughout my whole life. We talked about that moment of swimming without your brother, but another really touching and powerful moment is burying your brother. I can’t think of any comparable experience in a video game that I’ve had like that. Once finished, it was like “Whew!” •

BrOTHER: A TALE OF TWO SONS

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E N O L A NEVER CREATOR INTERVIEW Creator: Alan Gershenfeld Co-Founder And Presidant Of E-Line Media, Gloria O’neill Ceo And President Of Cook Inlet Tribal Council Interview By: Wired

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ever Alone: Kisima Ingitchuna is the first video game developed in conjunction with an indigenous people, the Alaska Native community. A puzzle-platformer based on cultural myths and incorporating traditional art, players take on the role of Nuna, an Iñupiaq girl, and an arctic fox, searching for the cause of an endless blizzard threatening their community.

Production of the game was driven by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council developed by E-Line Media.

First of all, what role does the CITC serve?

Gloria O’Neill: Cook Inlet Tribal Council is an NGO social service agency located in Anchorage, Alaska. Our goal is to connect Alaskan Native people to their potential through investments in education, and working with our youth to make sure they’re successful in their endeavors.

We do that by connecting them to jobs and careers that are meaningful and also help families that are in crisis.

And how did Never Alone itself come about?

GO:We have a really young population, but we also wanted to do something that reflected who we are as Alaskan Native people. The idea emerged of video games. How do we take a great asset, our culture, who we are, and share that, create opportunities and at the same time be very progressive and innovative, using technology?

I asked one of my staff to go and find someone who’s pioneering the space around video games.

E-Line Media came to us through one of our staff members. Their values aligned with ours, we said, “okay, if these guys are interested in coming to Alaska during the first week of January, let’s have a conversation!” We wanted to produce something powerful & authentic.

Are the stories and mythologies of Alaska Natives seen as possessions of the storyteller or the community? GO: It depends on which tribe

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you work with and what indigenous group. That’s the other part of this inclusive development project. You have to have the right partners in the mix so that you know how to approach the community in the most respectful way.

Although Never Alone is focused on Alaskan Native culture, Were you deliberately tapping into that wider demand? AG: When we were looking at representations of native people in popular culture, especially in games, we came up with a bit of a taxonomy. A lot of it was caricature, a lot of it quite naive. Some of it was sampled, not very thoughtfully done -- like how you sample music, take bits from here and there. Now, we weren’t interested in doing an exact documentary.

The word we used was “infusion”. We wanted to get the soul, the essence. We wanted to get the themes and values and feel a way to bring it to the new medium, but being a bit intentional about how we bring those values to a new culture. Part of the big vision of this global gaming project is not just to get young people exposed to all the wonderful cultures all over the world but also to start to reflect on their own culture and their own heritage. GO: That’s why we’ve been very careful with our inclusive development process to have the right people involved in the project. I am of the community and will continue to be of the community. I understand the nuances of the community and culture. The community has to embrace this and support it. That’s why it was so important to be sensitive to who is the voice of the game. How we balanced the male and female spirits in the game was a huge conversation, or how we implemented the natural helper spirits.

So to me it was hugely important that the Alaskan native community embraced this and supported it. And do it right. •

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THAT, DRAGON CANCER A Father A Dying Son. Playing For Time

By Jason Taz

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reen began working on That Dragon, Cancer in November 2012. Joel, who had been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer just after his first birthday, was approaching the age of 4. Green and his wife, Amy, lifelong devout Christians, saw this longevity as a miracle; back in November 2010, when Joel developed a new tumor after several rounds of chemotherapy, the doctors had declared him terminal, placed him on palliative care, and given him at most four months to live. The Greens had spent much of the next two years celebrating small victories and enduring crushing setbacks. Tumors that shrank, or even disappeared, then reemerged with greater vigor months later. Steroids that filled Joel with a powerful rage. A tumor that pressed on Joel’s optic nerve, causing his right eye to turn inward.

Green’s idea to make a videogame about Joel came to him in church, as he reflected on a harrowing evening a couple of years earlier when Joel was dehydrated and diarrheal, unable to drink anything without vomiting it back up, feverish, howling, and inconsolable, no matter how Green tried to soothe him. He had made a few games since then and had been thinking about mechanics, the rules that govern how a player interacts with and influences the action on the screen. “There’s a process you develop as a parent to keep your child from crying, and that night I couldn’t calm Joel,” Green says. “It made me think, ‘This is like a game where the mechanics are subverted and don’t work.’”

Green—along with Josh Larson, his co-designer— built a scene around that idea, and in early 2013 they started bringing it to video game expos to drum up interest. Players found themselves in a hospital room with Ryan, clicking the walls and furniture in search of some way to relieve Joel’s suffering and quiet his screams. Yet every action—rock him, bounce him, feed him—only

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caused the crying to intensify. On the soundtrack, Green’s voice grew increasingly frantic until, pushed to the edge of despair, he broke down in prayer, at which point the scene ended.Amidst all the plasma guns and power-ups, it can be easy to overlook the fact that video games are inherently metaphysical exercises. Designing one is like beta-testing a universe. Its creators encode it with algorithms, maps, and decision trees, then invite players to decipher its hidden logic. Intentionally or not, games contain implicit messages about purpose, free will, the afterlife. cycle of death and rebirth.

In a 2011 lecture titled “Truth in Game Design,” developer Jonathan Blow declared that games were a unique platform through which to explore the mysteries of the universe. “We can come to the game with question after question after question and type in some code and get answer after answer after answer,” he said. “And if we’re tapping into the right thing, then the volume of answers available to us can actually be quite large.” The questions That Dragon, Cancer is asking, on the other hand, are the kind of spiritual and existential quandaries that have haunted humanity since Job: Why are we here? Can we influence our fate? What kind of God would allow such suffering? How do we endure the knowledge that we, along with everyone we have ever met and loved, will die?

Green wait somberly in line: cosplayers, young women, middle-aged men. They sit in front of the monitor, put on the Bose noise-canceling headphones, and pick up the Xbox controller.

Fifteen minutes later they stand and push back from the table. Many of them affect sheepish grins, rise quietly, walk off abruptly without making eye contact. “Are you OK?” Green asks. “It’s just so sad,” the boy says. He wanders away, dazed. Then, just under a year later, Joel was declared terminal.

The news caused Green to reassess his life. The

“ Both of us at that point were like, ‘let’s do what you’re passionate about and not just get through life. Let’s make decisions we love.”

“You think, ‘Ugh, I kind of hate this, but I get it,’” dialysis company was giving him paid time off Amy says. “Both of us at that point were like, ‘Let’s and the flexibility to take care of his family, and do what you’re passionate about and not just he was using it to work for somebody else. He was one month away from a $30,000 retention bonus— get through life. Let’s make decisions we love.’”

Larson says “The idea of grace is that you don’t money that was crucial to his plan to strike out have to do something good to earn your salvation,” on his own—but he couldn’t stomach the idea he says. “People are always so concerned about of accepting it under such pretenses. Over the what you do in a game, and they can be that way protests of his employer, he quit. “Everybody about life too. Whereas some people, depending around me was like, ‘Don’t fall on your sword, you on what kind of faith they have or what kind don’t have to do this,’” Green says. “I don’t want of person they are, that’s not necessarily what it to sound more noble than it was, but it just felt defines them.”• like a moment where I could have some integrity.”

That, DRAGON CANCER

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G N I T T GE D E T R A T S Which System Is Right For You?

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he Golden Age. It was in the early 1980s that most innovation for the industry took place. All-time favourite games such as Pac-man, Mario Bros, Final Fantasy, and The Legend of Zelda made its debut in this period.

Cartridge-based video consoles also became the norm with Sega and Nintendo dominating the industry during this time. In 1990s, the change was made on the storage, shifting from cartridges to compact discs. Sony also entered the industry in 1994 with the Playstation and 3D graphics were introduced by Nintendo in its Virtual Boy console.

Contemplate on the amount you can spare for your game console. A budget of $300 can already provide you with a decent console. The range of prices also depends on the services and the features of the device. Some consoles are for 4k gaming or online games, while others offer a larger volume of games or exclusive titles. Look for deals and special offers to help in your purchase. If you can spare $900 or more, then you can purchase and build your own gaming PC. If you already own a 4K TV, then you may want to consider PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. These consoles are impressive with the

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best graphics and powerful hardware. HDR effects are included with improved frame rates and visual upgrades. Xbox One X is said to be superior in raw computational power. Thus presenting an authentic 4K gaming experience, as compared to PS4 Pro that offers checkerboard 4k.Choosing a gaming PC will provide you with more capabilities. Aside from gaming, you can utilize the PC for programming, photo and video editing, surfing the web, and others. Although a PC is non-portable compared with a console.

Although development in the gaming industry has been going at a regular pace, the introduction of technology has been continuous.

And with these developments comes more choices. But do remember that choosing the perfect game console still boils down to your personal preference and requirements. Keep in mind that all video games have a esrb rating of recommended age group for each game.

And that if you have children its important to buy games suitable for them. Video games like movies have a maturity rating for a reason. The important thing is to be smart in your choice and enjoy the game. •

Family & Young Kids

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ith games such as Super Mario Party, Luigi’s Mansion 3, Ring Fit Adventure, as well as cool activity packs such as the Labo Toy-Con Variety Kit, Nintendo maintains its position as the best option for families to use together. The Switch works both as a stationary console that plugs into your TV and a portable gaming device with two builtin controllers and a touchscreen. The recently released Switch Lite, on the other hand, uses the same games as the Switch, but it’s only for gaming on the go. Include parental controls so you can help your kids regulate their use. Check out the Best Nintendo Switch Games for Kids. •

Family, Tweens & Up

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hese may be the basic systems from Microsoft and Sony, but they’re still very powerful and run all of the games that you can get your hands on. Xbox One S is a better choice for families who already own a lot of Xbox games. If you’re tired of discs cluttering things up, consider the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition console which stores all your games in the cloud. The PS4, through its digital store and its PS Now service. Of course, violent games such as Resident Evil 2, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Wolfenstein are available for each, but so are family-friendly titles such as The Lego Marvel, Madden NFL 20, both contain parental controls. •

Teens & Up

P

Cs have some different advantages, you can customize your PC, the visuals are sharper and more life-like, peripherals are more accurate than a console, and you can modify your games. By building your own gaming PC you can choose where, when and how much you want to invest in your computer.

Some gamers invest in maintaining a very highend computer, preferring to run the newest game releases at the highest possible settings.

While others invest in a budget gaming PC and upgrade only when required. •

WHICH SYSTEM IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

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CHANGING THE PERSPECTIVE “How Violent Video Games Fit in With Violent Behavior,” ABC News

By Michael Lawn

J

ust a few years ago, headlines like this were continuing to flood the Internet. The headlines on the Internet are beginning to take a new form as the public perspective begins to match the evidence being presented through new research and the rise of video games as a premier form of entertainment.

The defining question for so long has been whether video games, especially violent ones, cause people to become more aggressive, violent, or even desensitized to violence. For many years, the perception was they were detrimental to society and particularly damaging to children.

These concerns may have started with such instances as the 1999 Columbine High School killings because perpetrators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were said to be obsessed with the violent video game Doom. While initial news articles and studies linked video games to acts of aggression and violence, ensuing academic studies suggest there is no link. Originally, the research and studies on this issue pointed towards children and teenagers becoming more aggressive the more they played games that involved violence. In a study led by Dr. Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University, one set of participants played violent video games for several days and another set played non-violent video games. Afterwards, the participants read ambiguous stories about potential conflicts Along with the ability to blast other participants with noise through headphones. According to Dr. Bushman, the more violent group, which blasted others with louder noises, played violent video games. However, there are other researchers that argue the opposite. In the book Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen Tekinbaş, the authors discuss the ability of humans to separate play violence from real violence. This ability

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to separate helps keep video games and other forms of media from making us more violent, aggressive, or less sensitive to instances of it.

Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University in Florida, measured the consumption of violent video games against youth violence rates of the previous 20 years. The study concluded the rise of violent video games coincided with a fall in violent crime perpetrated by 12- to 17-yearolds. In his study, Dr. Ferguson, also questioned the validity of other studies on the matter. He wrote: “The degree to which laboratory studies faithfully capture the media experience is also debatable. Many such studies provide exposure to only brief clips of media, rather than full narrative experiences, in which violence exposure is outside of a narrative context. The resultant aggressive behaviors are also outside a real-world context, in which aggression appears to be” The earlier studies happened in environments that could result in more aggressive participants, and at the most they could only show casual correlation between short-term violence and violent video games. Further studies suggest that violence in video games may not desensitize us either. In one study on the effects of video games, German researchers recruited 15 men (average age of 23) who have played video games with violence for at least four years. Another group was composed of similar aged men who had little to no experience with violent video games. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as participants looked at images of violent scenes and neutral scenes. The participants also used questionnaires to describe their feelings of the images. The researchers found the gamers reacted the same as the nongamers. They both expressed similar amounts of empathy and sanctioned by the researchers themselves, who provide the opportunity for aggression, and their brain scans did not show

“ Ultimately, video games do not appear to be these detrimental objects that many people once perceived them as.”

any signs of a difference in desensitization to violence. Another study by Canadian researchers comparing gamers to non-gamers found in the long-run both groups expressed There was no difference in memory, physical arousal, or feelings and emotions.

Furthermore, a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General’s report claimed the strongest risk factors for instances of violence, such as school shootings, were related strongly to mental stability and quality of home life rather than media exposure.

Studies indicating that video games make us more violent merely show a casual correlation at

the most, which means that violent people like violent video games rather than creating violent individuals.

Ultimately, video games do not appear to be these detrimental objects that many people once perceived them as. They are opportunities for individuals to live scenarios they never imagined and enjoy themselves in a space we separate from reality. Just because a teenager decides to run over civilians in Grand Theft Auto does not mean they will run over pedestrians when they get their license. •

CHANGING THE PERSPECTIVE

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