Fox Valley Technical College, an institution based in Oskhosh, Wisconsin (USA), is using a first person-simulator game to help criminal justice students. The machine covers a wide range of scenarios a police officer might see on patrol, including domestic violence cases and missing children. It provides students a hands on way to practice the techniques they’ve learned in class before they applying them in the real world.

Chris Matheny, vice president for instruction at the school, told the The Northwestern it gives students a unique perspective.

This console generation we’ve learned that games do not have to be a sedentary hobby. The Nintendo Wii is being used for everything from stroke rehab to helping athletes lose weight. Now a prototype game created by University of Utah students and faculty is helping young cancer patients keep their spirits up.

With the fear of child obesity steadily on the rise in California, Anthem Blue Cross and the Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo joined forces to improve the health and physical well-being of children in California.

The idea for the project started when Dr. Harvinder Sareen, director of clinical programs for Anthem Blue Cross, visited the Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo with an idea according to Bill Locker, CEO/President of BGC of Camarillo.

“She asked about the idea and we said we were very interested. We then did some research on exergaming and thought it would be a great program for our kids…

A study commissioned by NBC Universal and conducted by brand monitoring firm Envisional says piracy is rampant on the Internet.

By Envisional’s estimate, 23.8 percent of global Web traffic involves some form of “digital theft.” Well-known file sharing application BitTorrent is used for 11 percent of that digital theft, Envisional’s study says. In the US, those numbers are 17 percent with BitTorrent used for 9 percent.

Being a gamer is quite an achievement regardless of any stigma that society might put on games. We have a way to fill our unused time. We have a means to relax that some people either neglect or hold with some level of contempt. But does gaming fill any actual need that isn’t filled by society? Can gaming be used to make not only our own quality of life, at least in terms of happiness, but the world itself better? That, simply put, is the premise of Jane McGonigal’s book Reality Is Broken.

The National Parenting Center has given its seal of approval to both PlayStation Move and Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360. The NPC conducted two months of testing looking at categories including price, age appropriateness and interactivity to make holiday shopping suggestions. The group fell in love with Sony and Microsoft’s entrants into the motion control era.

Now that everybody’s going back to school, you’re probably going to have to endure boring courses and lectures about things you will never actually use in real life. But at Wabash College in Indiana (US), freshmen get to play Portal as a class assignment.

The Nintendo Wii has proven useful in the past in different areas aside from video games and entertainment. Its motion controllers and friendly interface have made it a surprisingly effective tool for rehabilitation and Wii Fit has managed to push people of all ages off the couch. In another surprising use for Nintendo’s console, sports medicine may be benefited in one its most important areas. The treatment of sports injuries.

The average gamer supposedly consists of young adult males ages 18-34, but a recent report by research firm M2 indicates that children, particularly in the “tween” category, are increasingly playing. The report defined tweens as children ages 8-11, while teens were defined as children ages 12-15.

As time passes and computer power increases, more and more tasks are performed by machines. A computer’s ability to do huge calculations in no time and also to perform with precision time and time again make them ideal for a number of areas where humans wouldn’t be up to the task. Even though we are clearly surpassed in certain situations, the human mind is still an awesome tool which can perform with amazing results in certain situations

One of these situations has been adapted into a game and is already proving a huge success.

The game is called Foldit and it deals with the internal structure of proteins, some of the most important building blocks of life. The game was developed at the University of Washington (US) and in it, players try to solve different puzzles that represent how a real protein molecule would behave. By manipulating the structure of these molecules, players earn points for discovering stable configurations.