ESA INVITES VIDEO GAME COMPANIES TO JOIN ITS HEARTLAND SERIESESA’s Heartland Series highlights the geographic diversity of the video game industry by interviewing innovators across the country like Phosphor Studios CEO Justin Corcoran (top left), Filament Games CEO Dan White (top right), and Multivarious CEO Chris Volpe (bottom). Each month, ESA interviews video game publishers, developers, and innovators from companies across the United States for its Heartland Series. Now ESA invites your company to be the next featured in this series highlighting the geographic diversity of the video game industry and how companies are bringing innovation and opportunity to every corner of the nation. Recent entries in the series have included interviews with Justin Corcoran, CEO of Chicago-based Phosphor Studios; Dan White, CEO of Filament Games in Madison, Wisconsin; and Chris Volpe, CEO of Multivarious in Columbus, Ohio, who talked about their latest projects and how they are making an impact in their communities. If your company is interested in being featured in the Heartland Series, please email Richard Dillio at rdillio@theesa.com. IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGY FUELS WORKPLACE ADVANCEMENTFord Motor Co. designers use immersive technology to create a product prototype. Immersive technology helps companies looking to modernize and change the way employees work. The technology contributes to a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, warehouse management, equipment maintenance, and design. In a renewable energy factory owned by General Electric (GE), augmented reality (AR) made complex processes more manageable. Skylight-powered smart glasses provide GE factory technicians step-by-step instructions in place of traditional manuals, increasing workplace productivity by enabling the technicians to work faster. In fact, the company found that, even when using the technology for the first time, technicians were able to work 34 percent faster than they did without the technology. Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin uses mixed reality (MR) like the Microsoft HoloLens to build and design physical prototypes, including the Orion spacecraft and the NextSTEP space habitat in partnership with NASA. “We build the outer shell or basic structure of that system as a full-scale physical mockup, and then somebody can put on an augmented reality device and start to see additional engineering details,” said Darin Bolthouse, manager of Lockheed Martin’s Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory. “Before augmented reality, you would have to take time to build those additional details into the mockup, using printed texture maps or additional physical mockups.” As the video game industry continues to advance immersive technology like AR, MR, and VR, the insights the technology provides into how products are built and maintained continues to grow. Forrester estimates 14.4 million US workers will be wearing smart glasses in the workplace by 2025. DID YOU KNOW? You can raise money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals through Extra Life every day of the year. Pledge to play games on any day that works for you. Fundraise by asking your family and friends to donate and recruit others to join your team. Learn more here. SKILLED GAMERS HAVE HIGH INTELLECTProfessional esports team Virtus.pro celebrates after winning the 'Dota 2' Major in Hamburg, Germany, October 29. The world’s smartest people might just be its best competitive gamers, according to researchers from the University of York who discovered recently a link between being good at popular esports games League of Legends and Dota 2 and high intelligence. Two studies, carried out by the university’s psychology and computer science departments, found the best players in the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games also score the highest on traditional IQ tests. “Games such as League of Legends and Dota 2 are complex, socially-interactive, and intellectually demanding,” said York Psychology Professor Alex Wade. “Our research would suggest that your performance in these games can be a measure of intelligence. Research in the past has pointed to the fact that people who are good at strategy games such as chess tend to score highly at IQ tests. Our research has extended this to games that millions of people across the planet play every day.” The first of the studies examined experienced League of Legends players, while the second analyzed big datasets from League of Legends, Dota 2, and the first-person shooters (FPS) Destiny and Battlefield 3. In both studies, researchers found player performance in the MOBA games and IQ behave in similar ways, while player performance in the FPS declines with age and therefore does not share the same link to player IQ. “Unlike [FPS] games where speed and target accuracy are a priority, multiplayer online battle arenas rely more on memory and the ability to make strategic decisions, taking into account multiple factors,” said the studies’ lead author Athanasios Kokkinakis, a doctoral candidate at York. “It is perhaps for these reasons that we found a strong correlation between skill and intelligence in MOBAs.” The link between MOBA ability and IQ provides an enormous new data source for researchers. As a proxy for IQ tests, video games could be useful for studying health and intelligence across lifetimes and populations. VIDEO GAMES HOLD NEW HOPE FOR PARKINSON'S PATIENTSA Purdue University researcher works with a Parkinson’s patient to test an experimental treatment option for the disease. (Source: WISH TV) Playing specialized video games could improve movement, speech, and overall quality of life for patients with Parkinson's disease, according to a new pilot study conducted in collaboration with researchers at Purdue University, Indiana University, and the University of Calgary. The researchers created a video game that targets cognition and balance, two key faculties affected by Parkinson’s. Using their body to control the game, players must move a cursor to specific targets on a monitor in front of them. “The results were pretty positive. We did find a lot of their balance measures improved, a lot of the gait measures such as gait speed, improved,” said Jeff Haddad, associate professor in the Purdue Department of Health and Kinesiology. “We think that will help because in everyday life when people do motor tasks and have to do things and move around, they’re usually engaged in their cognition simultaneously.” Jessica Huber, a professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences, believes game play is even having positive impacts on study participants’ speech patterns. “As speakers, we typically take pauses at set locations – a major thought, a minor thought, not really in the middle of a thought,” Huber said. “After therapy with this, their pauses were more typically placed. They didn’t pause as often in unexpected locations.” The cause of the speech improvement is not known, but scientists plan to expand their research. They also hope to create a final, home-based version of the game for Parkinson’s patients within a couple years. ESA JOINS EXTRA LIFE TO HELP RAISE MILLIONS FOR CHARITYESA joined gamers around the world in November to support ESA Foundation grantee Extra Life’s annual video game marathon and fundraising event for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. This year, gamers have raised a record-breaking $10 million in donations through Extra Life. ESA participated in the fundraiser by streaming Fuzion Frenzy, Rocket League, Quiplash, and Rock Band and raising $545 for Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. The ESA Foundation also continued its tradition of sponsoring the ESA Foundation Extra Life Challenge, which awards the two most supported hospitals – overall and per capita – each with an additional $30,000. This year’s winners included the Seattle Children’s Hospital for top overall fundraising and the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation for top per capita fundraising. STATISTIC OF THE MONTHThe social and casual video game market is expected to reach $74.3 billion by 2021. (Source: PwC) IN THE NEWS QUOTE OF THE MONTH“Games can pull us into a learning environment, offering the user interactive experiences that are needed to solve problems. They engage the user in the process, an aspect which couldn’t be more vital in the classroom. With a game you have to make choices, and these choices have consequences. This is a key skill to learn early on in life. It is these mistakes that provide a platform for learning, as each mistake is made, you adapt, change and get a different result.” - Simon Fenton, Head of Gaming, Escape Studios (Source: PC Games Insider) CONTACT USEntertainment Software Association
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