Though playing video games is often called a child’s activity, a new study from the Entertainment Software Association has found that that perception couldn’t be further from the truth.

According to the organization, which represents the game industry, the average gamer today is 37 years old. Moreover, the average game buyer is 41 years old. Because of that, a greater number of parents are playing games with their children. The ESA said that 45 percent of parents play games with their kids "at least weekly."

Those statistics are quite important to the ESA and the industry as a whole. Over the last several years, the gaming business has been targeted by critics and lawmakers who say that mature-rated titles, like the Grand Theft Auto franchise, among many others, are too easy for children to buy.

However, in April, the Federal Trade Commission released the results of an "undercover shopper survey" that found just 13 percent of underage teenagers were able to buy mature-rated games that are designated as only suitable for those 17 and older. When children attempted to buy R-rated DVDs, on the other hand, 38 percent of them were successful.

To add to that and further make its case that the majority of kids are being kept away from violent or sexually explicit games, the ESA revealed today that parents are involved in the purchase or rental of games in 91 percent of cases. In addition, 90 percent of parents said that they are aware of the content in the games their children are playing.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board, which assigns ratings to video games based on their content, was also highly touted by parents. The ESA said that 86 percent of parents are aware of game ratings, and out of that group, 98 percent believe they are accurate.

Even so, that hasn’t stopped critics from taking aim at the industry and its ratings system. In September, James Steyer, the CEO and founder of Common Sense Media, an organization that touts legislating the gaming industry, pointed to his own firm’s study that found 72 percent of parents would support a law that bans the sale of "ultraviolent or sexually violent" video games.

"The results of this poll clearly show that not only do the effects of ultraviolent or sexually violent games weigh heavily on the minds of parents but also that parents feel that the video game industry isn’t doing nearly enough to protect kids from accessing the most ultraviolent games," Steyer said.

Regardless, the gaming industry continues to be big business. According to the ESA’s study, the industry generated $25.1 billion in revenue last year. Digital game revenue, including mobile apps and social games, hit $5.9 billion last year.

Gamers almost universally groaned when Ubisoft announced a new DRM scheme that requires its latest games, including Assassin’s Creed 2 and SIlent Hunter 5, to be connected to the Ubisoft servers to function. Everyone wondered, "What happens when the servers fail?" Well, we found out last weekend, when — surprise! — the servers temporarily went down, rendering legitimately-purchased copies of Ubisoft’s latest games temporarily unplayable.

Ubisoft’s initial excuse was that their games are too popular, and the overwhelming server loads apparently caused the downtime. Today, they reversed course and admitted that a DDoS attack had taken down the servers. Despite the fact that such an attack could happen again at any time, locking legitimate customers out, Ubi is sticking to its guns on the new DRM scheme for now. I hope that they take steps to secure their servers against another DDoS attack in the short term, and make a long term plan to drop this crazy DRM scheme altogether.

Johnny Chung Lee is the PhD student from Carnegie Mellon University who has been rocking Nintendo fanboy hearts pretty hard by making the Wiimote do some spectacular feats. We first saw him track his fingertips on the screen for a "Minority Report" type of interface. Then he created an interactive whiteboard. Now, he’s managed to create a headtracking simulation through the Wiimote, creating an amazing 3D window on the world.

The mod requires you to wear the sensor bar (or any IR-emitting headband, Lee makes some sweet goggles) and place the Wiimote by the screen (it’s hooked up to a laptop with a TV-out for this demonstration). Essentially, your head becomes the mouse peeking through a 3D room, and the gameplay implications would be incredible.

Anyone else thinking that Nintendo should pay this guy whatever he wants to make some awesome games? Or, you know, Sony and Microsoft could always grab him up, too. These ideas just use the Wiimote’s IR—technology that isn’t exactly cutting edge stuff.

Let’s face it, there are some skeptics out there when it comes to 3-D.  Some point to competing standards, others to the kitsch factor, and almost all point to the glasses. But not everyone’s a hater. In fact, Sony and Panasonic see the technology as a savior for their living room business. So will 3-D make it in the home?  Chances are it will, and here are five reasons why:

1. 3-D will become a standard feature. TV makers will put a premium price on anything 3-D in the next few years (much as they did with HD), as Alfred Poor points out in his new 3DTV report at GigaOM Pro (subscription required); but over time, the technology will become just another standard feature. Chances are in five years we’ll see $799 50-inch 3-D TVs from Vizio at Costco.

2. Invasion of the 3-D movie theaters. 3-D movies are bringing in higher per-screen revenues than their 2-D counterparts, and by the end of this year there should be 7,000 3-D screens worldwide. Hollywood has caught 3-D fever, and it’s logical to think the big focus on 3-D in the theater will migrate over time to the living room.

3. Those crazy gamers. Gamers have been enjoying crude 3-D effects since Wolfenstein 3-D, and more and more are being pulled into a new dimension with the latest 3-D technology.  Sony has stated that existing game catalogs will be 3-D upgradeable through software, which could build the library of content quickly and justify the cost of accessories such as glasses.

4. Cheap glasses. While active shutter glasses would set you back at least 50 bones today, prices will fall through the floor once they’re manufactured at scale.  Think four-packs at Wal-Mart for $25 in about five years.

5. Kids. 3-D’s secret weapon, really. I have to wonder how many 3-D skeptics are child-less. Just as tens of millions of parents came down with Wii tennis elbow in recent years, so will they be donning 3-D glasses in the future.

3-D in the home will continue to be a source of both skepticism and excitement in the coming years. But make no mistake, as both the DVD and HDTV gravy trains continue to slow to a crawl, TV makers and Hollywood are seeing an extra dimension.

See the original article at GigaOm.

The idea that somebody could program a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator completely in Javascript just blows my mind.

For those that don’t know, Javascript is a language of sorts that’s built into your browser. It’s usually used for doing such mundane tasks as button roll-overs, making simple screen transitions, verifying that you entered a valid e-mail address, etc. I don’t think that using it as a full-blown processor environment was ever part of the original conception.

You’ll want to use Google Chrome for this – competitor browsers aren’t quite fast enough to play this yet.

Yeah, there’s no sound on this emulator but for a quick arcade fix it’s pretty good. There are lots of other ways to play games like this, just use Google or Bing to find them.

Try the emulator here.

It’s cool enough to build your own MAME (multiple arcade machine emulator) cabinet – imagine having thousands of classic games ready to play. Mix in a little monster-movie magic and some steampunk styling and you have yourself a fantastic toy, albeit a pretty large one.

The only thing I can think of that it’s missing are some Tesla coils – now that would be a show-stopper!

See the project at Frankencade (via Gizmodo).

Along with the usual news and excitement of the Game Developers Conference, going on this week in San Francisco, a speech by gaming guru Jane McGonigal stands out for one reason: She challenged game designers to actually make gamers happier.

McGonigal, the self-described "game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being" and one of the 20 Most Important Women in Gaming, planted the seeds for GDC speech on her blog Avant Game. "Reality is broken. Why aren’t game designers trying to fix it?" But if you think the argument is just another run-of-the-mill criticism of the violence, tension and attendant gore that pervades most videogames, then you’re going to be sadly disappointed.

Instead, McGonigal has a set out a sequence of design challenges to future gamemakers run to the heart of what a game could be about: entertainment, boosting human happiness, and having real-world impact.

She explains that games can "fix" broken reality by making artificial reality "happier, smarter, more engaging, and more resilient." Given that some of McGonigal’s previous projects have involved "World Without Oil"–a simulation intended to brainstorm and thus potentially avert a future post-peak oil crisis–McGonigal also foresees that over the next decade, game designers will become the "architects of extreme-scale collaboration" In particular, it’s an important part of future games design to create "diverse massively-multiplayer communities [that] tackle real-world, open-ended problems." It’d be nice to think we could game our way to a solution to the world’s issues, wouldn’t it?

Here are McGonigal’s five challenges: 

1. If you could: Make one person measurably happier. Who would it be, and what game would you make for them?
2. If you could change: What one person does every day, or how one group thinks about one thing. What would you change, an how would your game do it?
3. If your game could get: 100 people to do one thing online. What would it be, and what would it add up to?
4. If you could make a game by: Embedding one micro-controlled board or one sensor in one physical object. What would it be, and how would you play with it?
5. If you could make a game that: Connects two unlikely communities to do one extraordinary thing together. Who would it be, and what would they collaborate on?

It’s inspirational stuff, a pleasant intellectual contrast to the mindless hard-fragging first-person-shooter games we’re all familiar with. And its hard to argue with. The challenges are typified in McGonigal’s online global game "Top Secret Dance Off," which challenges participants to complete dance "quests" and e-mail in digital footage of themselves in action. The game relies on the principle that "dancing together = happy … humiliated together = even happier." Check out the compiled video of some entrants for the recent Dance Quest 3: Dance In a Crosswalk. It’ll make you smile.

Original article: Fast Company.

When Acclaim Games publicly unveiled its Rockfree project, a free-to-play, web-based riff on the rhythm genre, last November, it did something unusual. It invited gamers to play an early version of the game so they could weigh in on the project as it was being developed.

That may not seem like a drastic move to the beta-shrouded web world, but for game makers it is another sign that the long-standing barrier between the game maker and game player that was set up to protect the profitability of projects is crumbling. One unintentional slip — or one public demo gone wrong — had always been enough to ruin a game’s prospects. As the video game marketplace grows ever more crowded, however, community engagement is increasingly being viewed as an invaluable tool. Just as the industry’s behemoths waited for startups selling virtual items to succeed before adopting such a business model, the old guard is slowly moving to engage directly with its communities.

Read the full article at GigaOM

Amazon.com is jumping into the digitally distributed games market with its straightforwardly titled, um, "Amazon Game Downloads." The service begins its beta today and offers 500 casual titles for under $10 each. During the initial launch week, full versions of Jewel Quest 2, Build-a-lot and The Scruffs will be available to download for free.

Read the full article at Joystiq

We’ve seen colleges, in an effort to coolify their stuffy catalog, offer classes that use video games to explain academic concepts, applying a chocolate coating of gaming fun to help the pill of education to go down easier. What we like about a new StarCraft class being offered at UC Berkeley is that it’s just that: A class to help you be better at StarCraft and enjoy playing it more. Really.

From the course description: “What may look like complex topics are just ways we want you to think more deeply about the game to derive a greater satisfaction from playing. Furthermore, this understanding should have applications in real life, to further synthesize new information from limited inferences.”

Read the full article at Joystiq.