Flash Game Friday: Sky Garden

Sometimes, you actually have to do work at work, rather than pretend that you are a much beloved video game blogger, with users dedicate themselves to your every movement.  So, sometimes you have to work - and you're looking for a Flash-based distraction that will calm and relieve your stressful work life.

The graphics are simple, as is the gameplay.
Simple and calming.

Enter Sky Garden, a simple puzzle game with music that is so calming, it blends you slowly into a Friday afternoon coma.

The concept is simple: click every tree.  The tree releases a stream of water in all four directions as far as possible.  The streams built from clicking the trees will destroy any tree they touch, so the game casually introduces you to the strategy of using streams to block future streams.  Then, like any good puzzle game, new elements are introduced.  Seedlings require water to be born into trees.  Ice halts your streams' progress.  And lava slowly spreads, killing your trees.

I strongly recommend this game for its stupendous ease to pick up, play, and complete.

Flash Game Friday: Special Episode for Leaving Higher Education - First Person Grader

Today is my last day working directly for an institution of higher education, which has been the status quo for the past ten years - my enitre adult life!  To celebrate, I'm sharing this gem: First Person Grader.

More fun than grammar should be.

You are a starving graduate student with a mountain of debt, eagerly accepting a TA-ship with the hardass Dr. Paynuss.  The good doc sends you papers and you must grade them in order to fail students and get paid. 

While the premise sounds a little dull, the game is actually a blast to play and enjoy, and a great send off from my life of working for higher ed.

Video Games & College Education

With the exception of the breakout hit Oregon Trail franchise, video games are an art form developed primarily as forms of entertainment, much as novels, movies, and radio programs are.  But today I was challenged with the statement "video games are a crippling educational problem for college students."

Well, I work with college students, and I play video games.  But before I went on a rant that this statement couldn't possibly be true, I decided that I would actually research the topic.  Do video games represent a barrier for student academic success?

(Disclaimer: to be certain, compulsive video game behaviors do represent very serious barriers to academic and professional development in the same ways that compulsive internet use, gambling, or drug and alcohol addiction would.  I hope to address more habitual and casual forms of play in this analysis.)

My initial findings were not particularly endearing to my original thesis.  In A Study of Time Management, published in 2007 in CyberPsychology & Behavior, researcher Vivek Anand found an inverse trend in grade point averages with higher daily video game usage. 

Graph!

Anand did note that with the study group, SAT scores were highest among those students who played for approximately 4.5 hours, however "the p value for the correlation between a person's SAT score and video game usage was 0.618, which shows that they are most likely unrelated and thus have no correlation" (Anand, 555).

(In case you haven't been to a stats class forever, but are still reading this, here's what p means.)

However, I have some criticism to Anand's findings (which is easy, since I write a blog, and he is - you know - actually doing research).  The data presented does not indicate what types of video games are being played.  Due to the Skinner box mechanics of online gaming (and the online social environments therein), online games would represent a far different issue with GPA than offline gaming.

Also, results were not delineated by gender.  I, for one, would have liked to have seen whether or not the GPA correlation in gameplay was accurate for both genders, since Anand himself admits to having a higher percentage of male respondents.

If I had hoped a 2010 article in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence titled More Than Just a Game: Video Game and Internet Use During Emerging Adulthood by Laura Padilla-Walker, Larry Nelson, Jason Carroll, and Alexander Jensen would encourage me to think that gaming wasn't a huge concern to college students, I was wrong.  "Specifically, regardless of gender, video game use was linked to greater drug use, drinking behaviors, and lower relationship quality with friends and parents" (Padilla-Walker, et. al., 109).

Furthermore, "research suggests that time spent playing video games may also inhibit identity exploration," a complete antithesis to the notion that games can help facilitate identify exploration (Padilla-Walker, et. al. 110).

In fact, the entire article by Padilla-Walker and her team suggests that video games are bad news, not just for academic performance, but for the development of an older adolescent into adulthood!  Crud.


This article does not please me.

 Again - video games are not specifically delimited in this study, although there is a comparison between "violent" video games and non-violent games.  And, a nod to the research team, because unlike the Anand study, Padilla-Walker does an excellent job in exploring the differences between men and women.  The team went even farther to point out "another limitation [to the study] was the use of single items to assess video game and violent video game use ... future research should examine video game use in more detail by assessing specific games played, as well as other contextual factors" (Padilla-Walker, et. al., 112).

Luckily, I did find an article from CyberPsychology & Behavior by Marko Skoric, Linda Lay Ching Teo, and Rachel Lijie Neo that found a strong causal link between the amount of time playing video game on weekdays and English scores, supporting the notion that Intensive English Language Institute (IELI) students may benefit from playing games in English.  So, I am not left wholly disheartened - only mostly.

The findings from the Anand and Padilla-Walker studies are both pretty directional into my understanding of one very important thing: we've got a long way to go in understanding how video games impact academic performance.  While neither study had great things to say, they were also both quick to establish that they are trailblazers in this area of research, and that without more studies, there could be no conclusions drawn.

If video games are a significant impediment to academic success (research seems to be leaning this way), it would behoove those of us who are assigned the task of removing barriers success to know a little more about them, and a little more on how we can employ harm reduction techniques to make education a priority, and gaming a recreational activity.

But until more research can be done, I guess we'll just wait.

Denton Square Donuts

This post is NSFD (not safe for diet).  Also, I am not attempting to occlude what is clearly SarahPlanet's domain in reviewing foodstuff.

This morning, Michael and I braved the Denton Car Show on the Square to try out Denton Square Donuts, a new store with a unique direction for the creation of breakfast pastries: to make them with edges.

My goal was simple: consume deliciousness.

Denton Square Donuts, Illy Coffee, Ancient Tablemats.

The Bacon Maple Donut, a well-cooked (nearly perfectly cooked) slice of bacon laid upon a maple glaze that affixed it to an eclair size puff pastry, was on both my husband and I's menus.  This featured item was not disappointing.  The bacon was nearly immaculately made, with the tiniest piece of chewy fat to remind you that hey: it's bacon.  The glaze was an excellent balance of sweetness to the savory of the bacon.  And the puff pastry held it together; an anchor of fluffy delight.

Perhaps I should have eaten the Bacon Maple Donut second, because the second pastry was hardly comparable.  The Apple Squared confection was exactly what you'd expect: apple preserves and some icing. Nothing memorable.

Hubby's second choice as the S'mores Donut, which promisingly was covered with marshmallows, chocolate chips, and golden grahams.  This had all the makings of wonder, but the icing concoction used to fasten these elements to the pastry was overwhelming.  Since he was unable to finish it, I took the last two bites and would really rather not have, honestly.  If only the stapler had been a little less toxic, I'm certain this would have come across rather well.

Our conclusion was that for the second or third week of Denton Square Donuts being open, it certainly is where a new business is: collecting a customer base, perfecting menu and processes.  At $2 a piece, I'd rather we just have gotten 4 Bacon Maple Donuts, based on this experience.  Truly, an $8 well spent.  Also, I was somewhat disappointed that the rogue in front of me in line claimed the final Apricot Brie, because that was what I'd like to have gotten. 

Flash Game Friday: Hyperpipe

Pipe Dream-esque games have always fascinated me.  Hell, I even liked the hacking in Bioshock (there!  I said it!).  However, I can barely get my mind around Hyperpipe, which no only wants you to connect pipes, but do so without leaving any pipes unconnected.

Far from being frustrating, the game is actually best played with a cup of coffee and some Whisperings PureStream piano happening in the background.  Kick it!

Flash Game Friday: Word Bacon

Do you love bacon?  I know you do.

Do you love word games?  Who doesn't?

Put them together and you've got Word Bacon, a fun little letter-replacement game made by a Redditor named seebs.  The objective is simple, you are trying to take one word and make into another by replacing letters.  Every replacement must construct a new word, so it's a tricky brain teaser.  At normal mode it's okay, but at "Holy Swine of Zeus" you might find yourself clicking the "Hint" button every round.

Definitely a contender for your Friday "productivity" time.  Give it a go!

Good Morning; Coffee and a Little Chess

I was browsing Reddit.com, enjoying a cup of coffee this morning, when a link sent me to a Chess Variants website.  On this website, there are over 100 types of variant chess games programmed into simple Java applets.  The computer A.I. isn't incredibly intelligent, but neither am I with only a half cup of coffee.

Try out Bughouse Chess, in particular.  When you capture an enemy piece, you can then place it anywhere on a second game board.  But the computer can do the same!  It gave me a headache, but a fun one!