Data collection process All the relevant information was classified in a spreadsheet, according to the variables listed below. Table 1 Article breakdown by category. Table 2 Neuroimaging techniques used in the reviewed studies. Table 3 Studies providing structural data dealing with healthy, non-expert participants. Articles marked with a double asterisk. Table 4 Studies providing structural data dealing with VG experts or excessive gaming.
Functional data A articles provided functional data combined with VG use. Table 5 Studies providing functional data dealing with healthy, non-expert participants, without violent content. Table 6 Studies providing functional data dealing with VG experts or excessive gaming. Control FC : Frontal, occipital, and parietal lobes Xing et al. Table 7 Studies providing functional data focused on the violent contents of VG.
Low VGP Positive vs. High VGP negative vs. Discussion Due to the given amount of data provided in the reviewed articles, we decided to categorize all the information based on the cognitive functions which are associated with the neurophysiological correlates, rather than focusing on the main research goal for each study. Attention Attentional resources are one of the main cognitive domains in which VGs are involved and one of the most researched.
Visuospatial skills Visuospatial skills encompass processes that allow us to perceive, recognize, and manipulate visual stimuli, including visuomotor coordination and navigational skills, and VGs are predominantly interactive visual tasks.
Cognitive workload Brain activation patterns depend on the cognitive demands of the environment and also on the associated level of workload Vogan et al. Cognitive control During the course of a VG, the player can encounter many situations in which he has to use one of several possible actions.
Skill acquisition Several studies have attempted to determine which regions could act as predictors for skill acquisition. Reward processing Addiction VG addiction is understood as an impulse-control disorder with psychological consequences, not unlike other addictive disorders, especially non-substance addictions such as pathological gambling Young, Exposure to violent content Many articles use violent VGs in their designs as a way to study the effects of violence exposure, emotional regulation and long-term desensitization.
Flow Flow and boredom states during VG play have also been the subject of research using neural correlates. Gender differences Although some studies have already discussed the presence of gender differences in cognitive processes related to VG playing, the lack of studies dealing with this topic and providing neural data are notable.
Limitations The study of neural correlates of VGs entails a number of inherent difficulties. Conclusions The current work has allowed us to integrate the great deal of data that has been generated during recent years about a topic that has not stopped growing, making it easier to compare the results of multiple research groups.
Author contributions All authors had an equal involvement during the process of making this review article. Conflict of interest statement The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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Cortical thickness abnormalities in late adolescence with online gaming addiction. While many features had been completely new, there are a considerable amount of content and features recycled from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas such as certain game mechanics, some in-game models including cars, sounds and a few other miscellaneous details.
Bully has received generally positive reviews from critics. The game received ratings of 8. Critics generally praised the game's storyline, while they complained about particular stealth missions, as well as the camera. Critics also noted that the game is substantially easier than veterans of the Grand Theft Auto series Rockstar's flagship titles would expect. The Xbox version of Bully: Scholarship Edition was found to be unstable on some players' consoles, resulting in glitches, crashes and performance issues.
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Register Don't have an account? View source. History Talk The report in question described the case of a Romanian student of languages who, while studying abroad in Korea, used WoW as a tool for entree into Korean language and culture. These reports suggest that for some students, the motives for foreign language study may reasonably be speculated to include a desire to participate in MMO-based or other digitally mediated plurilingual communities, or reciprocally, their prior experience as a gamer may provide shared or sharable ground with speakers of languages that they are interested in learning.
A gamer posted the following discussion topic: "Does WoW [ World of Warcraft ] help you learn a foreign language? The author of this query provided the following discussion prompt [no corrections or alterations were made, save reduction in length].
Living in Europe and playing WoW has one major perk over the US, thousands of players from a dozen countries get to play together. When I joined my current guild I suddenly found out about this hidden multi-cultural and multi-lingual side to the game and as a result three of my best in-game friends are from Norway, Russia and the Netherlands.
All have fantastic English skills but it's still common for them to go back to their native languages in group chat or over voice. So I wonder, readers, do you regularly play with people from around the world? Have you learnt another language or improved your linguistic skills using the game? Do you play on a realm which doesn't speak your mother tongue? The comments were decidedly mixed, with numerous posters emphasizing the non-standard spelling and grammar that is common to almost all forms of synchronous chat.
However, the majority of contributors stated that despite the designated language of specific WoW servers English, French, German, Spanish, etc. For those playing regularly with international partners, the reported outcome was frequent opportunities for engagement in multiple languages that resulted in the naturalistic acquisition of a second or third language. Below are five brief excerpts from the forum, in unedited form save for reduction in length, that illustrate the plurilingual and intercultural opportunities for learning or maintaining additional languages from players' perspectives.
I've been playing WoW for the last 2. I was reluctant at first on vent [a voice communication tool used by WoW players] but as time's passed I've realised how easy it is to speak with people whose mother language is not English mostly.
Having people from many countries wipes away the fear of looking really silly when trying to pronounce correctly ;.
Excerpt 3: I live in Belgium and I play most of the time on french realms that's my mother tongue but sometimes I go on an alt on a german realm.
I love this language but I don't have other ways to practice it … I master their language more or less and that can be very funny to go through a dungeon [a 5 person team event in WoW] when the 4 other members are talkative that's a good context to make you write and understand faster.
Excerpt 4: I've been learning Italian for about 4 years and once I finished uni, it became quite hard to meet Italians here in London … Luckily, I found an active [Italian speaking] guild … I was in that guild for a few months and communicated entirely in Italian. It really helped me to become more fluent. Excerpt 5: YES! My little brother learned his English through WoW. He is turning 12 soon, and about 1,5 years ago he got his first subscription for Christmas.
At first he could not understand a thing, so I had to sit with him while he played to translate everything that's how I got hooked on WoW , then I made him a small list with common words etc.
Now 1,5 years later he can play and communicate without a problem - and he likes to speak English IRL [ in real life ] just for fun. I myself learned a lot of new words Who said that you don't learn anything through games? Of course, it is important to note that these comments are self-assessments and hence need to be viewed with all the limitations associated with self-reporting. But the context — speaking to an audience of other gamers and not to a researcher carrying out formal interviews — also carries with it a certain unguarded and unmotivated tone that suggests the possibility of veracity.
This is especially the case since a number of respondents posted that they learned only substandard forms of written and spoken language. Here is one representative example that critiques the idea of language learning from game play, but which also makes evident the possibility of learning informal and in gaming settings, appropriately informal genres of communication through situated language use in MMOs.
Excerpt 6: You cannot learn a foreign language from a game. None of these can be learned by memorizing phrases like 'jeg er engelsk' [ I am English ] etc. You can augment your knowledge, yes, and if you are already aware of the grammar then WoW is an excellent way to extend your vocab especially in casual speech but to suggest that merely playing with Europeans is a guaranteed way to pick up a foreign language is both misleading and insulting to those of us who have put a lot of effort into doing so.
Otherwise, this comment correctly observes that formal accuracy is in no way officially supported by the game environment nor by most player communities in any structured way. The goal in MMO settings is to successfully and enjoyably coordinate complex, multiparty collaboration, most of which is done using interactive textual or voice communication.
Put another way, realizations of conventional grammatical accuracy may not be pragmatically appropriate in commercial MMO play, though this depends very much on heterogeneous local speech community norms. It is also the case, and a potential limitation to the transferability of "gamer language" to other contexts, that gamers often use a specialized lexicon for examples, see Steinkuehler, ; see also Blommaert, Similar to other recreational and professional contexts, however, participation in shared purpose activity generates attendant opportunities for many kinds of more general social discourse, from interpersonal and social conversations with strangers to serious friendships and romantic bonds, and these other social functions are often expressed in more general and transferable genres of communication e.
The questionnaire was targeted toward Dutch players living in the Netherlands and American players living in the United States in order to gain an international perspective of WoW gaming experience as it relates to language use and learning. The questionnaire was distributed through various social networks, emailed directly to Dutch and American players known by the authors, and posted to online WoW community websites with the encouragement for initial respondents to redistribute the questionnaire to other players.
On a scale of for experience, the Dutch had an average score of 4. In both groups, most participants had been playing for more than 3 years, between 1 and 4 times a week, for an average of 3 hours at a time.
These topics were then further explored through follow-up interviews with ten self-selected volunteer individuals who offered to talk with us further. Only a subset of themes will be addressed here, namely players' reported exposure to languages, their preference for various communication tools, what they liked most about the game, and their use of strategy and information websites that are external to the game. This primarily descriptive research addresses the need for empirical investigation of the linguistic quality of texts present in online commercially available games and aims to finely characterize the linguistic complexity of game-presented texts or "quest texts" as well as game-external informational and communicative resources that are widely used by players.
On the European realms, the WoW user interface is available in multiple languages: English, German, French, Spanish and Russian, whereas on the North American realms, the user interface options are restricted to English or Spanish.
In both groups, all participants reported that the official language of their realm was English. Americans reported encountering fewer non-English languages and with much less frequency than their Dutch counterparts. A list of the main languages that were mentioned by the American participants include Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and "Internet" linguistic varieties, sometimes called "l33t speak", which comprise an alpha-numeric "supervernacular" see Blommaert, that is widely used in a variety of mobile phone as well as Internet-mediated speech communities.
Multiple American participants answered "none" to the question of encountering non-English languages. The majority of the American participants used English only, though three participants also reported using Spanish. Table 1, below, lists languages that were actively used by the questionnaire respondents. Note: Several participants gave more than one answer to this question, thus the combined percentages reported here exceed We earlier noted the many reports of individuals choosing to play WoW on various L2 realms in order to learn other languages discussed above, see also Thorne, , ; however, none of our participants reported playing WoW explicitly for this purpose.
The expectation that on a European realm communication will occur in numerous languages is, for the majority of the Dutch participants in this study, largely reduced to the use of only two languages — English and Dutch. In a surprising finding, These five reports of co-present voice communication came from players who are in intimate relationships and who play WoW with their partners.
Among the American sample, there was only one report of co-present play. There were a variety of responses to this question, but the social dimension of game play was the most highly ranked. To illustrate, one of the Dutch participants reported their favorite WoW activity as:. I like the interaction with friends. My spouse and I are in a guild where everyone knows someone else in real life, stemming from a small group of college friends - we use the game as an excuse to hang out from a wide variety of post-graduation locations.
See Table 2 for an overview of the various answers that were given by the participants. Table — What participants like most about playing. What do you like most about WoW? See Figure 1 and Figure 2 for an overview. Figure 1 — Playing WoW with others, alone, or in a mix of both conditions Dutch participants. Figure 2 — Playing WoW with others, alone, or in a mix of both conditions American participants. Even though both of these numbers are very high, the American participants appear to be considerably more guild oriented than the Dutch.
This might indicate that some of the Dutch participants prefer to play the game in more loosely structured groups. Of the American participants, all reported membership in a primarily English-speaking guild, with Dutch players reported interacting primarily with friends and guild members For the Dutch participants, most communication with friends occurred in Dutch, whereas most communication on guild communication channels visible to all members and with strangers was reportedly carried out in English.
This is not surprising given that, contrary to the Dutch participants, the designated languages of WoW realms are restricted to English and Spanish on North American realms. A practical implication of this finding, however, is that North American residents would need to subscribe to the European or other language-designated WoW realms requiring a different software installation if they wish to play with large populations speaking languages other than English and Spanish.
Figure 3 — Who players communicate with in WoW : Friends, guild mates, strangers. WoW players look up information on the background story of the game, how to complete certain assignments, how to optimise their characters, for assistance with strategy, and much more. Interestingly, all questionnaire respondents mentioned viewing the external sites in English, despite the fact that WoW strategy and information websites are available in a large number of additional languages.
For this reason, we propose that external websites are an integral part of the WoW gaming experience.
This observation is borne out in the following transcribed portions of the interviews note that all names are pseudonyms generated using the name generating function within WoW. I use quite a few external websites, and I have all of them open while I am playing the game, so that when I need to I can immediately look stuff up [translated from Dutch].
I never play full screen, I always play in a way so that I can just reach my desktop and can immediately access my browser. I will just put myself in a safe town, so nothing can happen and then I will calmly start reading and looking up things [translated from Dutch]. In this sense, regular WoW play involves the use of a complex and articulated set of semiotic resources and tiered discourses that include the texts and interactions of the game itself as well as game-external websites, topical blogs and community forum sites.
The question asked here is, what is the linguistic nature of these texts? To our knowledge, a descriptive linguistic analysis of the high frequency text types that WoW players are exposed to has not been carried out. All texts examined here were in English, with the presumption that this information would be relevant for L2 learners of English and potentially would also be generalizable to analogous texts in other languages.
Thorne et al. Each of these measures comes with certain limitations, particularly as a result of conflating sentential variability to mean scores, but each also provides a useful vantage point from which to conceptualize and analyse complexity. A synoptic account of the findings is that representative samples of quest texts and external websites, analysed at the level of individual sentences, reveal mean average complexity measures approximate to a secondary school reading level suitable for students aged years.
Closer analysis, however, revealed a polarized distribution of sentences that clustered in two areas — those that are short and syntactically simple, and those that are long and highly complex.
The graphical representation of the distribution of sentences for each corpus type showed a right skewed or complexity weighted "U" pattern. This indicates that there is considerable variability in sentence complexity levels within the texts, with the most complex levels of sentences occurring with greatest frequency.
This secondary distributional analysis illustrated that in quotidian game play, gamers encounter a high proportion of lexically, syntactically and structurally complex sentences interested parties are encouraged to see Thorne et al. To summarize the primary problematic, conventional forms of literacy, typified by the hallmark practice of independent reading and writing of linear texts, is argued to stand in sharp contrast to many information and communication practices associated with new media.
As sections 6 and 7 attempted to illustrate, online gaming environments such as WoW form semiotic ecologies that include both exposure to complex written language and real-time communicative engagement in event driven scenarios. Many critiques of sociable media focus on their hyper-social and often frenetic pacing as potential problems.
It is relevant to note, however, that interactive and socially situated engagement, whether in face-to-face settings or Internet-mediated environments, constitute the essence of human communication. The conversation analyst Emanuel Schegloff 54 describes everyday forms of face-to-face conversation as the "primordial environment for the ontogenetic and phylogenetic use and development of natural language". The linguist Stephen Levinson makes a related point when he describes the "brief action-response intervals and very short sequential patterns" a concise descriptor of much social media use that form the interaction tempo to which human memory and attention have become phylogenetically attuned.
In reference to general language learning processes and purposes, we call for a balanced approach that acknowledges the importance of both conventional literacy expertise and the development of dispositions that enable semiotic agility see Prior, in sociable media environments.
Conventional notions of literacy represent a specific and culturally unique type of cognitive-communicative-interpretive practice, one that remains critically important to success in many modern workplaces, not to mention the many aesthetic pleasures it makes possible.
For their part, sociable media, while diverse in genre and purpose, can arguably be represented as supporting real-time "context of situation" communication e. If the developmental goal is enhancing the capacity to deeply interpret linear texts — read linear texts. If the developmental goal is to enhance the capacity to build and manage interpersonal relationships in sociable media environments — this should be the focus. The argument we have developed here is that qualitative shifts in contexts, purposes and genres of communication associated with new media necessitate a discerning-and-inclusive proactive vision of educational practice, and one that is responsive to the emerging contexts of first and additional language learning and use.
In player-to-player online discussion forums, posters described numerous language learning experiences and positive linguistic outcomes, often emphasizing the social dynamics of collaborative play and community formation Thorne, as key elements.
Additionally, all respondents reported using external strategy and informational websites as an integral part of playing the game. In contrast to the unsolicited player accounts discussed in section 5, the questionnaire respondents reported less exposure to multiple languages and fewer realized opportunities for foreign language learning.
This was especially the case for the American gamers. Additionally, the respondents, on average, were highly skilled gamers whose experience may not represent that of novices. The applicability of the questionnaire results to other populations, therefore, should be understood as tentative. Finally, future research on language learning in multiplayer gaming environments should expand to include other MMOs and player populations, continue to explore real-time interaction during game play, and more formally assess the language proficiency outcomes associated with gaming and related sociable media activity.
Further, numerous studies have indicated the importance of reading and quality of input for the acquisition of linguistic structures, vocabulary, and genre-specific text conventions e.
Catalyzed by questions regarding the quality of the semiotic environment of online game worlds, section 7 described research that sought to finely describe player-designated high frequency texts using linguistic analysis. Game presented and game-external texts are central to game play in World of Warcraft and illustrate multiple genres, include a high proportion of complex structures, and show features of interactive and interpersonally engaged e.
Especially in combination with player-to-player communication, which was beyond the scope of this article to discuss, WoW would seem to present a diverse and linguistically complex environment for L2 learners of English.
Our exploration of WoW realms in other i. This supposition is supported by the unsolicited player accounts that were described in section 5. To take one example, Steinkuehler and Duncan have demonstrated that WoW discussion forums foster "scientific habits of mind". Thus in addition to its relative linguistic complexity, the cognitive and reasoning content of game-external website resources exemplify scientifically oriented forms of play, all within the context of a high sociability environment.
But then families, neighbourhoods, communities and workplaces, are not engineered environments for language learning either. This is to say that people have the potential to learn in many activity settings though efficiency, economies of scale and developmental outcomes may differ.
Formal schooling can be a powerful contributor to development, but so too can lived experiences such as those described as informal learning Sawchuk, , interaction in online gaming affinity spaces Gee, , and via language socialization in a wide range of sociable media environments e.
If a player wishes to use or learn an L2, the evidence reported here suggests that online gaming, as a form of sociable media, presents a rich and diverse semiotic and social ecology within which to do so. However, the amount of exposure to, and interaction in, additional languages will depend greatly on what the player wishes to do and to achieve in the game. The implication for language education is that Internet-mediated engagement is no longer a proxy activity or practice environment, but is itself the real thing — the medium through which we perform relevant social identities and through which we engage in a wide array of life activity.
This suggests that mastery of conventional literacy and genre norms as well as emergent and evolving sociable media communicative and cognitive practices are each developmentally useful, and perhaps also necessary, to achieve full participation in many educational, professional and recreational settings.
Viewed from this functional perspective, constructed binary oppositions of canonical vs. An alternative formulation is to frame competent linguistically mediated performance as the capacity to skilfully navigate interpenetrating mediated and non-mediated communicative and cognitive practices that are enacted along continua such as formal and informal registers and monolingual or plurilingual semiotic choices.
A powerful rationale for this move, as described by digital cultures researcher danah boyd , is that "digital networks will never merely map the social, but inevitably develop their own dynamics through which they become the social". Atkinson, D. Applied Linguistics , vol. Barton, P. Parsing the Achievement Gap II. Bax, S.
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