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Bora Bora (Polinecia Francesa)

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WIHD LEND Program Recruiting Family Specialist Trainees

WIHD LEND Program Recruiting Family Specialist Trainees

The Westchester Institute for Human Development (WIHD) is recruiting leadership trainees for its Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (LEND) training program. Trainees will have the opportunity to develop the skills necessary for a career focused on helping children with special needs and their families.

The program includes three overview courses, clinical…

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Is There Any Point in Videogame Age Ratings?

Probably not. But let’s face it, having a blog post that’s two words long is about as appropriate as a 9-year-old getting home from school and watching the local working girls enjoy a good time from the protagonist in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Age ratings mean different things to different gamers and many are completely oblivious to their existence. It probably boils down to how strict your parents are or whether or not you grew up in a religious environment. Sometimes, unfortunately, bad things happen IRL, so should we just ban violent videogames? Hell no. So what’s the point in adding ratings?

Do Ratings Only Exist to Cover People’s Asses?

Probably, yes. But again, we are showing our hand too soon. It’s like pulling a knife on someone inCounterstrike when they’ve still got too much HP left. Or was that RL? Who can tell the difference these days?

The problem here really comes down to accountability (or, whose fault it is when something bad happens). Many more “mature” gamers would have enjoyed titles such as Double Dragon on old school consoles including the Nintendo GameBoy and Streets of Rage on the Sega Mega Drive as youngsters, and they also fall into the ‘completely oblivious that age ratings even existed’ category.

Others would not have been so lucky in the ‘liberal parenting’ department and may have found themselves relegated to Mario Bros and Ecco the Dolphin respectively.

So, are the above-mentioned either stomping around in news stories of unimaginable violence against their fellow citizens or singing Kumbaya and roasting gelatin-free marshmallows round the campfire of the local Greenpeace chapter?

No they’re not. The sad reality is, sometimes bad events do take place and they’re sometimes a lot worse than any of the scenes we may have seen in the average beat-em-up.

Can You Realistically Blame Games for Violence?

There’s such an epic philosophical and ethical debate here and we’re about to devote a short paragraph to it. As much as we want to say a categorical “no”, the reality is that a kid who’s been playing Manhunt obsessively for several months and then gone out and re-enacted some of the scenes probably got more than just a little inspiration from the game, as chilling as that may be.

On the other hand, as above we’re not all doing that. Sure, it probably didn’t help, but the real question is; would he have been doing that stuff anyway? There’s a whole lot more that goes into building a human being’s psychology than a few hours spent on a video game.

Parents of kids sure can’t go blaming the retail stores if the title is clearly labeled with an M certificate. Who’s to say a good clean game of Lemmings won’t see children lining up their classmates and encouraging them to walk forward, confident they would find a steel girder below their feet and deliver them to safety.

When Should Kids Start Playing Videogames?

We have no idea. But, if you’re going to get them started on the hard stuff early, make sure you’re there for them in general and give them an all-round loving, encouraging and positive environment to offset the violence experienced in whatever digital fantasy world of stress relief they may be engaging.

Many of the WiHD team enjoyed such violent streaks as youngsters and now we’re getting paid to play videogames using projectors on the sides of buildings. Surely, something must have gone right for us somewhere along the line?

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Next-Gen Consoles: Has the PC Met its Match?

Few debates get our nerdy juices flowing more than discussing gaming platforms and which one’s best. Console gamers love mocking PC gamers for constantly having to upgrade their crazily-expensive rigs to handle the next title hitting the shelves while PC gamers ridicule console gamers for being the casual couch potato auto-aim lovers that they so obviously are.

So what about the new up-and-coming Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4? Will PC gamers lose all bragging rights for the ‘best gaming visuals’ and be left only with the ability to alt+tab and enjoy endless libraries of high quality adult material after telling their teammates they’re “afk”?

In short, has the PC finally met its match? Let’s take a look.

Going Head-To-Head on the Visuals

One of the reasons this debate is a potentially tricky one is that there are many techie variables to be considered when looking at which platform produces the sexiest graphics, and it’s early days, too.

The PlayStation 4 looks like more of a PC rival than the Xbox One in terms of raw graphics horsepower at this stage a factor which may be the reason Microsoft seems unusually keen to push the TV-capabilities of its pending platform…

A number of early graphics comparisons videos have been leaking out and one great example is Epic’s Unreal 4 engine playing the ‘Elemental demo’. The PlayStation 4 is up against a gaming PC with an Intel Core i7 processor and an Nvidia 680 GTX graphics card.

The footage for the gaming PC is about 12 months old now, but the hardware used is still very much towards the high end of things. Honestly? There’s not much in it at this stage and PC PlayStation 4 does a damn fine job in rendering a stunning short movie.

Also to be considered in favor of the PlayStation 4 is that this is without the code having been highly optimized for the console by developers with some experience under their belts.

The short version is, it it’s going to be a close call.

The Future-Proofing Problem

If this debate sounds a little familiar to you, it’s not without a good reason. When Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hit the market, it was the first time the consoles offered PCs a serious competition. There was much discussion about how these consoles were “PC-killers”, as seems to be fashion within the tech sector.

The problem is though, as developing consoles becomes increasingly complex and expensive, the life cycles involved between generations are getting longer. While no major improvements or upgrades are seen to the core hardware, companies such as Intel and NVidia stomp forwarded as Moore’s Law works its magic and these days, even a low to medium-end gaming PC will own an Xbox 360.

Graphics may be close on release, but it’s unlikely that even developer experience in optimizing code for the next-generation consoles will outstrip the exponential increases in raw horsepower on offer to PC gamers. It’s just massive shame enjoying the latest goodies is going to cost 4-5 figure sums of money. And so the great debate rages on…

Should PC Gamers Upgrade Right Away?

Whether or not to upgrade is a huge area involving many factors. Usually, PC gamers upgrade a when there’s a game coming out that their rigs won’t run at a smooth frame rate (25fps or above) at acceptable graphics levels.

Unless this is the case, it’s probably not worth upgrading immediately. Okay, so for a short time you may be jumped from every angle by console gamers looking to get ‘best visuals’ bragging rights over you, but this won’t last long and they can’t alt+tab anyway… The next set of PC upgrades will be just round the corner and so things will fall back to the natural order which is, of course, lots of awesome arguing.

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Gaming at 24’ x 24’: Because Size Matters

You heard it here first, kids. Santa Claus isn’t real and size matters. Before we go into our ridiculous experiment where we use the state-of-the-art wireless HD-ready projector to enjoy a gaming session on the side of the building, let’s first consider the above colossal statement (the size thing, not the Santa Claus thing).

There was a time when size was a definite issue. The old glass screen CRT TVs and PC displays (what were they, like four pixels resolution?) were as expensive to manufacturer as they were easy to mount on the ceiling. Mercifully, advances in flat panel technology and the manufacturing processes behind them have meant the human race crawling slowly towards the standardization of appropriately massive televisions and displays. Good times.

The Contradictory Explosion in Mobile Gaming

If you were feeling slightly intimidated by our statement about size being important, you may be eager to point out the explosion in mobile gaming. Good point. But, within this platform there wages a battle of size. Even the iPhone with its previously perfect form factor has opted for corrective surgery, and now has a marginally more well-endowed 4” display compared to the 3.5” inch display of its predecessors.

In a grand show of exaggerated manliness in order to outperform its competition, Samsung has taken things to the next level with the Galaxy Note, a smartphone so big, you can barely fit the phone in your hand due to it’s girthy 5.3” display.

Of course, this raises the issue of tablet gaming. As we all know, anything you can play on smartphone is made better with the tablet version. For those of you feeling quite happy with the size of your iPad’s 9.7”, you may want to look away now as the Planar Helium PCT2785 tablet will emasculate you with its monstrous 27” display. PC Big-Screen Gaming

PC gaming is potentially a little different when it comes to the big screen. Sitting hunched over a keyboard and mouse means that anything much larger than 30” in front of you would involve far too much creaking of the neck to see from corner to corner, especially since it’s right in front of your nose.

That said, anyone who’s done PC gaming on a 27” display with a 2,560×1,600 resolution will know that the detail offered from upgrading in size produces a truly breathtaking experience, especially if it’s backed up with some powerful hardware for smooth frame rates.

What about when you’re playing a console-like or controller friendly game on your PC? Well, this is one of the reasons why WiHD is so popular. Without any extra hassle, you can enjoy PC goodness on your 52” plasma TV and kickback on your sofa with a controller while you play Portal 2 or your favorite indie titles.

It’s All about the Projectors

So, in mobile gaming there’s size war going on ready to prove the fact that bigger is better and with PC gaming, we’d choose a larger display at every chance. It goes without saying that our living rooms will be blessed with the biggest goddamn TV we can possibly afford and/or persuade the better halves to let us buy. So what comes next?

It’s all about the projector. While we all wait for the standardization of fully 3-D 4K WiHD projectors, we can only sit around and have some fun and that’s precisely what the WiHD team intend on doing.

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Is the Xbox One Revolutionary or Evolutionary?

The word ‘revolutionary’ can conjure up a lot of things. Maybe the silhouetted face of Che Guevara or the pointy hats of soldiers from the American Revolution. Often, it conjures a facepalm as you see the latest tech company talking about their next product and how “revolutionary” it is.

The truth is that a revolution in technology is a rare thing. So what about the pending release of Microsoft’s Xbox One? Let’s take a trip down nerdy nostalgia lane look at the Xbox of old and how things shaped up over the generations.

The Original Xbox

When the first Xbox was announced, you can bet there were a lot of facepalms going on. Sony’s PlayStation had the market tied up nicely with the PlayStation and even pushed industry giants Sega into early retirement. Sceptics labelled the Xbox as “a budget PC in a box” and no one expected much.

So everyone was a little surprised by a combination of Halo and the fact that Xbox actually offered pretty amazing online multiplayer. You almost get away with saying the Xbox revolutionized online multiplayer for consoles. Sure, Sega’s Dreamcast had sketchy dial-up for a few titles such as Phantasy Star Online, but nothing like Xbox Live.

Evolutionary steps were seen for Xbox Live when the Xbox 360 delivered Xbox Live Marketplace and further fine-tuned the online multiplayer goodness delivered by the Xbox One. Times were good, they were about to get better.

Xbox Versus Xbox 360

There was some serious progress made in between these two consoles and Microsoft showed it wasn’t messing around (apart from when it did actually do a load of messing around which caused the “red ring of death” catastrophe).

A pretty solid hardware jump was seen between these two consoles. The Xbox’s underwhelming 733 MHz Intel Celeron/Pentium III Hybrid CPU got boosted right up to a PC rig-challenging 3.2 GHz IBM chip and the processing power of the GPU more than doubled.

Many games saw epic graphics improvements and GUN , Need for Speed Most Wanted, NBA Live 06 and NFL Madden 06 were great examples of the steps forward made between 2001 and 2006.

So, was it revolutionary? Probably not. Certainly it was a juicy evolutionary step and one which had us all glued to our TV screens for a long time. Even the fact that the Xbox 360 was HD-ready wasn’t exactly a revolution as such, especially considering the fact that most of us were using 480i TVs around the time of launch.

Xbox 360 Versus Xbox One

So, here comes the big one. Details are a little fuzzy at this stage and IGN even recently reported how Microsoft executives were flat-out contradicting each other on some of the specs and features.

One thing we do know is that another fine hardware bump will be enjoyed. This includes a custom AMD CPU sporting a whopping 8 processing cores and the system memory has gone from 512 MB up to 8GB, a move which is probably to accommodate the supported 4K resolution (and yes, of course WiHD products already support 4K…)

Early predictions suggest the Xbox One will be a combination of exciting evolution and revolution. We recently reported that Microsoft had filed a patent for a device that projects the image all the way around the four walls of the room. If we see this for Xbox One, we may just be in for some revolutionary gaming experiences. However, at this stage it looks like a juicy evolutionary step (albeit an exciting one) is the best we can hope for.

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What Must They Think of Us?

What horrors must lie in the mind of a non-gamer? Imagine having a life so utterly devoid of videogames, confined to the limiting constraints of real life. As baffling as it may be to try comprehending why somebody would not want to play video games at least in one description or another, we are surrounded by judgmental bystanders.

Perhaps more importantly though what must the rest of the world think of us? We’ve all experienced those reality check moments where we’re shouting hardcore game terminology urgently and enthusiastically over voice comm’s only to think somewhere in the back of our minds “God, what the hell am I talking about?”. Imagine what it’s like for our nongamer roommates who hear us as they walk past our bedroom doors at such moments. You can imagine the shaking heads, the rolling eyes and the barely stifled laughs…

Confessions of a Videogame Nerd

Look, we all love gaming. But even as enthusiasts, if we look at our behavior objectively, sitting in front of a computer, TV or projector screen for straight 12hr+ sessions sucking down Red Bull like it’s oxygen is not ‘normal’ behavior. And, it’s probably not very healthy. We hate to admit it, but these are the facts.

Now, imagine what other people must think. Imagine people who already think that video games are for losers, even if you’re only having a quick, light hearted session in between getting home for the day and having dinner. What must they think of all the nerdy acronyms which pop up in our text messages as we try in vain to communicate with the wider world as they sit there thinking “wtf does ‘idk tbh lawl’ mean”? Let’s face it; no one would use ‘roflcopters’ out in public. We do try to keep some dignity… Just not very much.

Inside Every Non-Gamer Lies a Nerd Waiting to Be Unleashed

While many people are quick to speak up and announce themselves as videogame opponents, the fact is this, they are capitulating too. The popularization of games such as The Sims, Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training and Angry Birds has seen millions taking up keyboard and touch screen alike – people from all kinds of ‘unusual’ or non-gamer demographics.

And what about Call of Duty, Halo and Xbox live Arcade? You wouldn’t see your classical nerd running off to Afghanistan to follow lifelong dreams of becoming a Marine on the front lines, but many military-types session harder than even hard-core geeks. And it’s a good thing too. According to our recently quoted statistic from TED it was reported that we spend 3 billion hours gaming per week as a race. Yes, dear fellow gamers, it looks as though our days of being stereotyped as the pimple-faced, socially inept undesirables having no social skills with the opposite sex are coming to a close. Or, so we can only hope.

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Gamer Kids: Owning You like the Gomer You Are

Difficult as it may be for the uhm.. mature geek to admit, gaming is a perishable skill. Anyone who plays highly competitive PVP, whether it’s Fifa, Call of Duty or World of Warcraft will know that even taking a couple of weeks of vacation will damage your win/lose or kill/death ratio considerably.

On a broader timescale, as we get older it seems difficult to have any success at all when playing against our younger gaming counterparts, whether they’re our children, cousins or family friends. Why is it that we just can’t seem to get the upper hand without some kind of slap happy midplay sabotage? The WiHD Rocks! team attempts to understand the forces at play.

There are ‘Gamers’ and There are Gamers

Just because you played a few rounds of Pac Man back in the 1980s doesn’t make you a gamer with a valid skill set. If this is you, don’t feel bad losing as you never really stood a chance in the first place. If however, you were perhaps involved with the original Counter Strike or perhaps battling it out online in Quake II, it’s likely that you’ll give the modern young gamer much more of a run for her or his money. Even then however, if you’re over the 35-40 age range you’ll likely be struggling regardless.

What then if you were to take two gamers of roughly equal enthusiasm, but with 15 years’ experience difference between them? Take a 15-year-old avid gamer and a 30-year-old avid gamer, put them into separate rooms with a modern console and a title which they’d never played. Each has 3 hours practice before the consoles are connected in an online lobby to battle things out.

In spite of the fact that it may damage our fragile egos, most mature gamers would concede that the young 15-year-old gamer would win time and time again. Perhaps this is because many gaming nerds are somehow ashamed of their favorite hobby and go out their way to conceal it like a bad habit while, conversely, the 15-year-old would indulge in bragging rights and strategic conversations regularly with his young schoolmates.

They’re engaged in a process of constant improvement as they laugh about how you sabotaged the controller with honey under the buttons, tried to use speed cheats, wallhacks, stayed up practicing past their bedtime and still lost anyway. Maybe, you’re just not a real gamer anymore.

Are Your Cognitive Skills Degrading?

As we get older, our cognitive skills have a bad habit of degrading. Perhaps this process sets in before we are considered “elderly”. This is somewhat shaky ground, as surely it depends on the person. You better believe somebody with an organic whole food diet doing daily meditation and yoga will be in better physical and mental shape than somebody who spends 75% of their time eating McDonald’s and the other 25% watching Jerry Springer reruns. Maybe someone who lives in between these two extremes might just start to see their twitch reflexes dwindle.

Video games have been proven to improve the cognitive skills of elderly people. In results recently published by Prof. Fredric Wolinsky of the University of Iowa, groups of elderly people took part in an experiment.

One control group embarked in the joyous activity of computer-based crossword puzzles while three other groups were told to play an image recognition game called Road Tour, (later changed to Double Decision). After one year, over three year’s worth of improvement in cognitive capabilities were seen in the gaming groups. The moral of the story? Never stop practicing, hope for the best and prepare to be embarrassed anyway.