A new study by University of Ottawa researcher Jean-Philippe Chaput shows that, apparently, teenagers who spend an hour gaming typically eat more afterwards than teenagers who spend an hour performing a similarly sedentary activity. The study involved plopping teenagers in front of a game console –no word on what they had them play– and then giving them an open buffet afterwards. The control group did some other, sedentary, mundane activity and were also awarded with an open buffet. I haven’t finished this article yet, but I can already tell you that, regrettably, there is no open buffet waiting for me when I finish.

What the study found is that the teenagers who were playing games eat, on average, 163 calories more than the teenagers who were doing something else. On top of that, the gamers didn’t actually burn any more calories than the control group, so the increased calorie intake wasn’t replace the energy spent on all that thumb movement or anything. There were also no biological indicators of stress in these gamers, so that couldn’t explain it either. No stress? Seriously, I want to know what they were playing.

Quake 3 Arena is something of a classic. As such, it has been ported to a number of consoles, iOS (unofficially), and a version of it is even available to play in a browser online. Well, now you can add another device to the list, the $25 Raspberry Pi computer. That’s right, the low-cost, high-portability computer that aims to bring affordable computing to everyone for the purposes of education and communication also plays a mean Quake 3.

It’s worth clarifying that this $25 PC does not hobble along, letting you play Q3 at a crippled 3 frames per second or anything. The Raspberry Pi can handle Q3 at 1080p and 4x anti-aliasing while still churning out a respectable 10-30 fps. That may not sound like much, but most Q3 players will tell you that you don’t want that anti-aliasing weighing down your frame-rate anyways, and with more modest settings, the Pi can run Q3 at very playable speeds. For a tiny computer intended mainly for Internet and text-processing, that’s not bad at all.

Read on after the break for a video of the Rasberry Pi in action.

Over the years, it’s become easier and easier to play video games with your friends. It’s relatively easy to take it for granted nowadays, but back in the Stone Age, you used to have to be in the same room in order to game with people. The horror! In hopes of reminding you of that horror and making you appreciative of the fact that you can now swear at strangers over a headset, the folks at Rounds put together an infographic that will remind you of every step along the path, from playing Pong on the couch with your annoying younger brother to playing Modern Warfare with someone else’s annoying younger brother who lives on the other side of the country.

Check it out after the jump.

Because modern humans must be entertained every moment of their waking lives, SEGA has developed a game system for urinals. A member of SEGA’s R&D staff mentions in the video above that this game is especially interesting since instead of interacting with fingers or hands, players will use their urine. The game system contains microwave detectors, with which it measures the speed of the urine and thus the volume. In SEGA’s explanation, it seems that the player who produces the most urine win the game. Other, more competitive games are being developed in which players will square off against previous urinal players.

The game is expected to go on sale soon, but so far only appears to be in a male configuration. Sorry, ladies. You’ll have to wait before taking full advantage of toilet-gaming technology.

(via Topless Robot)

Imprisoned for “illegally petitioning” the government over corruption in his town, the former Chinese inmate known as “Liu Dali” has told the U.K. Guardian that in addition to back-breaking manual labor he and other prisoners were forced to play video games for hours on end. Not as a form of punishment or leisure activity, but because their overseers had assembled a massive “goldfarming” operation, wherein they exploited prison labor to earn money playing online games. From the Guardian:

“Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”

While the idea of prisoners being forced to play video games may seem chuckleworthy, and it certainly is absurd, it is no laughing matter.

Two of my biggest fears (showing just how in check my priorities must be) are losing use of my eyes or hands, thus severing me from my gaming habits. Terry Garrett is blind, but he can still game, and luckily, he is still able to play some fairly good ones. Losing his sight when he was 10, his brother brought home the classic puzzler-platformer Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. Garrett attempted to play, though he was frustrated due to his lack of sight. Eventually, he honed his hearing and learned what each and every sound effect meant related to gameplay. Now, he can beat Abe’s Oddysee without his sight, using sound alone. Though anyone who has played Abe’s Oddysee will know that beating it with the use of sight is an accomplishment by itself, and beating it without is an extremely impressive feat, Garrett also plays other games that one would assume requires sight in order to succeed: He plays Wii Sports due to the game’s haptic feedback and he is able to play Rock Band by using a trial-and-error button-mashing tactic to learn the song note charts.

Garrett is currently trying to beat the historic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. He didn’t just turn the game on and cleanse the Deku Tree, though, he carefully listened to the sound effects as his friends played the game and asked them questions, as well as researched the game through text and video walkthroughs. Garrett has trouble with precise aiming, for instance, with the Hookshot, and almost as if a cruel gaming meme joke, he currently can’t make it beyond the infamous Water Temple without outside help, though one can only assume he’ll eventually tackle Nintendo’s unholy creation in due time.

Though he currently can’t play games with too much audio stimuli or precise aiming, both of which are staples of many first-person shooters, Garrett is an inspiring story, and has quite possibly alleviated some of the fears that wake gamers up in the middle of the night in a deep sweat after dreaming about receiving their preordered copy of Portal 2 after losing use of their eyes.

(Wired via Neatorama)

A new study from the University of Rochester in New York, that will be published in the upcoming journal Current Biology, has proven something most gamers know, but other people may not: gamers make equally accurate decisions faster than non-gamers.

The study focused mainly on action games, most likely because that genre of gaming consists of the quickest stimuli and results in the most negative outcome (usually death), finding that gamers develop a higher sensitivity to their surroundings compared to non-gamers. The authors of the study say gamers’ fast decision-making comes from gamers having a faster probabilistic inference, which is the process by which the brain forms and refines probabilities, due to the nature of the stimuli in their games.

Zero Lives blogger Das Chupa has a son who’s going to be “out of beta” in a little over 3 months, but he’s not a fan of parents with “crap bumper stickers about their six year olds making the honor list.” We think that you’ll agree that his old-school gaming-inspired sticker designs are far more original:

Our journey begins long, long ago, in 1972. The console was the Magnavox Odyssey, and at the time it was a major breakthrough in home gaming. But 38 years later, the Odyssey is one of over 450 gaming consoles, computers, and handhelds. The video below, compiled by Eliot Hagen of Elder-Geek, documents this long, crowded history. I don’t care how avid a gamer you are or how much you think you know about the industry, there will be a whole bunch of consoles in here you’ve never seen before. And frankly, if there aren’t, that could be very worrisome, and you should put down the computer and go outside. It’s a beautiful day/night/whenever it is right now.

So if you want a 23-minute, insanely comprehensive history lesson on gaming hardware, watch the video below. Let the music and the pictures envelop you in a comfy, nostalgic aura and take you on a journey through time and space.

President Obama has been historically a bit down on video games, readily associating them with bad parenting.  In spit of this, Joystiq reports today that Obama’s fiscal commission has been communicating with Microsoft about creating a budget balancing game.

That is: Not a game that would teach people to balance their own budgets, but a game that would let others attempt to balance the federal budget, to promote public awareness of how difficult it is.  Commission co-chair Erskine Bowles said: “What you could get is support among the populace for the exceptionally unpopular things you need to do to solve this problem… [the game could] go viral.”

Joystiq points out that it wouldn’t be the first game built around balancing the United States federal budget, nor would it be the first game that tried to educate you about something decidedly un-game-like.  We list ten of the best, worst, and weirdest, after the jump.  Some of them you can even play in your browser: like, right now!