Vision Therapy

Posted on October 3, 2018 by computergamesaddictionsubayfrancisco

Are Video Games and Computers Bad for Your Eyes?

Blue Light Therapy Above: Patient wearing computer glasses designed to reduce eye strain and fatigue

By Anita Tieu, Doctor of Optometry Senior Intern

How are video games and electronic devices integrated into our lives?

With the numerous electronic devices available, video games have become a large part of entertainment for adults and children of all ages. Studies have shown that American children between the ages of 8 to 18 years old spend approximately 7.5 hours per day using electronic devices (4.5 hours per day watching TV, 1.5 hours per day using the computer and more than 1 hour per day playing video games).

How do video games and computers affect our eyes?

With the amount of time invested into using electronic devices, it is not surprising that 64-90% of users experience visual symptoms. Users may experience visual symptoms such as: eyestrain, headaches, ocular discomfort, dry eye, double vision and blurred vision. Factors contributing to these symptoms include: lowered blink rate, poor blink quality, reduced eye focusing abilities, reduced visual acuity and poor eye alignment abilities. In addition, a large proportion of the light emitted from computer screens, smart phones, iPads and other similar devices consist of blue light. Blue light has been shown to have damaging effects on the retina contributing to a higher risk of macular degeneration, a blinding eye disease.

Dry Eye

It has been shown that when engrossed in the use of electronic devices, the frequency and quality of blinks are reduce. Blinking is very important for replenishing the tear film coating on our eyes. The tear film plays an essential role in keeping our eyes well moisturized, healthy and comfortable. A poor tear film can result in ocular irritation, symptoms of burning and gritty eyes.

Blurred Vision and Headaches

Myopia (nearsightedness), hyperopia (farsightedness) and astigmatism are eye conditions that can often be corrected with prescription glasses or contact lenses. These eye conditions can contribute to blurred vision when using electronic devices and when reading. Accommodation is the ability to focus on near objects. When accommodation is inaccurate, meaning that if one’s eyes are over focusing or under focusing, this can also lead to intermittent blurred vision and can also contribute to headaches. When playing games on devices such as iPads, hand-held gaming electronics and smart phones, our visual system has to work to maintain focus for the one particular distance for an extended period of time. Much like holding up a light weight with one arm where it initially may feel easy, and as time passes by, the muscles in our arms begin to fatigued and become strained. This phenomenon can be applied to the visual system, where exerting such effort for extended periods of time can lead to eyestrain and headaches.

Ocular Alignment

Our eyes have a natural tendency to converge when viewing objects at near. In order to maintain clear, comfortable, singular vision, good eye teaming skills are required. Poor eye teaming skills can result in discomfort of the eyes, head tilt or head turn, and double vision when reading.

Damage Caused by Blue Light

Blue light has been shown to cause retinal cell death which in turn contributes to a higher risk of acquiring age-related macular degeneration, an irreversible vision loss. Ocular protection from blue light is as much as important as protecting our eyes from UV light. In addition, blue light has been shown to affect circadian rhythms. Exposure to blue light before bed may disrupt sleep at night.

Tips to make video gaming more vision friendly

1. Follow the 20-20-20 rule. Take a break from the media device every 20 minutes by looking at an object greater than 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

2. Change the position of media device so that the viewing angle is slightly downward to increase eye surface coverage.

3. Visit your local Optometrist for your most up to date glasses prescription and for a thorough assessment of your eye health. Futher assessment with a Developmental Optometrist may be required if glasses and eye drops do not relieve symptoms. Developmental Optometrists can prescribe a program of eye exercises (vision therapy) to eliminate symptoms of eye straing, blurry and double vision.

4. Reduce the amount of glare and blue light by having a glare reducing screen or by having a good quality anti-reflective coating on your glasses. Some optical companies even design blue-light blocking lenses for gaming purposes.

Sleep junkies

Posted on October 3, 2018 by computergamesaddictionsubayfrancisco

THIS IS HOW VIDEO GAMES CAN SCREW UP YOUR SLEEP

MCKINLEY CARBONEUPDATED ON 04/10/2018BLOGTECH & GADGETS

Kotaku

Are you an avid gamer? Find it hard to switch off the Xbox or Playstation at the end of the night? Well it’s a common problem. Video games are one of the many reasons why America is becoming a sleepless society.

But that doesn’t mean you should give up your gaming habit. In fact, believe it or not, playing video games can actually be beneficial for your brain, psychologists have found.

However, gamers everywhere, whether you’re into Minecraft or Metal Gear Solid, should be wary of the consequences of too much late night screen action. So here’s a look at how gaming can impact on your sleep patterns.

Video games and sleep: the research

There’s only a limited amount of research on the effects of playing video games on sleep. Typically these studies are aimed at children and teens because they are more likely to take part in gaming before bed.

A 2012 study held by Flinders University found that participants who played video games for 150 minutes or more at night experienced a delay in falling asleep of 39 minutes, according to their sleep journals. They also lost an average of 27 minutes in total sleep loss during the night.

The researchers also found that playing games caused a drop on the amount of time spent in the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep – a loss of 12 minutes for those who spent over two hours playing games. Dr Michael Gradisar who supervised the study said:

“This may not seem like a significant reduction but REM plays an important part in helping us remember content we learnt that day so for adolescents in their final years of school who are revising for exams, winding down at night with a video game might not be the best idea”

Another study in the journal Pediatrics looked at the effects of evening TV and video games in 612 pre-school children between the ages of 3-5. The results showed that 28%of the children who watched TV or played video games for at least 30 minutes after 7 p.m. had sleep problems most nights of the week. Of the children who had screen time before 7pm, only 19% reported sleep problems.

A much earlier study published in 2003 in the Journal of Applied Physiology, also found that performing exciting activities, like video games before bed, can actually cause your body to produce less of the “sleep hormone” melatonin. Melatonin is used to regulate sleep cycles and is produced in the pineal gland in the brain. It is likely, however that this effect was mostly due to the effect of blue light emitted by screenswhich has been shown to affect melatonin production.

Active or passive: video games, TV and social media

It’s quite common for people to fall asleep in front of the TV at night. Watching a movie or television show is a passive experience. It doesn’t require you to interact with the screen, other than pressing the remote to change channels.

Modern video games on the other hand often have extensive built-in interactive components. Strategic multiplayer shooter games like Call Of Duty even allows you to talk through headsets to fellow game players. This adds a social reason to continue game play into the night.

Hence gaming has a lot more in common with social media than watching TV or movies. The two-way stimulation from games, Facebook, or instant messaging can be almost impossible to resist at times. This can be a significant challenge to sleep, especially considering that 90% of 18-29 year olds are known to take their smartphones to bed with them.

Lucid dreaming and video games

Jayne Gackenbach is a psychologist and an expert on how gaming affects dreams. A lot of her studies are focused on the cause and effect of video games and how they can affect dreaming habits. Because video games and dreaming are both a form of alternate reality, there are very clear correlations between playing video games and our dream lives.

Gackenbach found that avid gamers were more likely to be able to control their dreams than people who didn’t play video games.

It is difficult to know if these enhanced lucid dreaming abilities help or hinder the sleeping experience, but they are an interesting component in sleeping habits of hardcore gamers.

Summary

Although it’s difficult to tell exactly how video games affect our sleep, common sense tells us that any over-stimulating activity before bedtime is likely to disturb our night’s rest.

The Celegraph

Posted on October 3, 2018October 3, 2018 by computergamesaddictionsubayfrancisco

Meet the gamers willing to spend hundreds of thousands living their video game fantasy

Self-made millionaire Jon ‘NEVERDIE’ Jacobs pulls up outside his opulent nightclub in an extravagant roadster and heads straight to the dance floor.

His highly sought-after music venue, Club Neverdie, once formed part of a substantial property portfolio comprising of a luxurious 1,000-apartment complex, a modern shopping mall and mega sports stadium.

But what makes these valuable assets unique, is that they exclusively exist in a virtual world, albeit one of real-world financial opportunity where rare goods are routinely exchanged for huge sums.

The entrepreneur purchased the virtual nightclub in the online game Entropia Universe for $100,000 (£75,000) after remortgaging his real life home and then began filling it up with legendary and rare items to entice other gamers to visit.

Mr Jacobs would later sell his space resort, built on a virtual asteroid orbiting a distant planet, for a combined $635,000 (£480,000), setting a new world record for the most valuable virtual item ever sold between players, pocketing an enormous profit in the process.

Jon 'Neverdie' Jacobs — Dancing in a fantasy world: Jon ‘Neverdie’ Jacobs sold his virtual space resort for $635,000 (£480,000) CREDIT: YOUTUBE

British-born Mr Jacobs has witnessed the popularity of the virtual goods market explode over the past decade, with online trading enjoying exponential growth. Today, it is estimated to be worth billions of the gaming industry’s total revenue, largely driven by the free-to-play mobile games market offering players in-app purchases.

However console and PC video games have also been capitalising on this growing market.

For instance, the wildly popular game Fortnite: Battle Royale is free to play, with its developers Epic Games making money from players purchasing season passes that unlock items and progress quicker, or buying skins, new weapons or ‘emote’ dance moves for their character.

The growing revenues demonstrate the increasing willingness of gamers to spend real money on their virtual characters in online worlds. Players of popular games such as Fortnite tend to be convinced to pay in-game as the items cost smaller amounts and are called microtransactions.

Also many mainstream games operate a ‘closed loop’ system, where items can only be bought from the developer and players cannot then sell or trade them with each other.

Yet some more niche game operate a freer in-game economy where items can be bought and traded among players, with rarer items fetching vast prices.

A profitable career

Some players like Mr Jacobs have turned mastering the art of trading in virtual goods into a tremendously profitable career, while other gamers boasting high disposable incomes will happily spend thousands of dollars on items to accelerate their progress instead of ‘grinding’ – performing repetitive tasks for many hours to advance in a game.

A virtual castle in fantasy game Shroud of the Avatar, advertised as a “prime piece of real estate”, recently sold for $6,000 (£4,500), while earlier this year an ultra-rare sniper rifle sold for $61,000 (£46,000) in multiplayer first-person shooter video game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

This Souvenir AWP Dragon Lore sold for a record $61,000 (£46,000)

In the epic space war game EVE Online, wealthy players are rumoured to have dropped upwards of $50,000 (£37,000) to purchase a fleet of powerful spaceships for their alliance, while another wealthy Chinese alliance commander confirmed spending $70,000 (£53,000) on the game to a player who spoke to the Telegraph.

“I know quite a few people who will spend $3,000 (£2,200) on a Titan (the game’s largest spaceship),” he added. “There are also others who would drop $5,000 (£3,700) to $10,000 (£7,500) on this game, but when you consider how large the playerbase is, it’s a very small minority.”

While Real Money Trading (RMT) for items is forbidden in EVE, players do spend real money on items called PLEX, which can then be traded for Interstellar Kredits (ISK), the title’s in-game currency, for purchasing cosmetics and services.

“We do have some people who will spend thousands of dollars on buying PLEX from us to build a big-ass ship that’s worth a couple of thousand dollars in the game,” one virtual trader told The Telegraph. “And the next month get into a battle, have it blown up, then have to build another one.”

In EVE Online, players go into battle in virtual space CREDIT: YOUTUBE

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addiction in Nottingham Trent University’s Psychology Department, believes some gamers are willing to spend real money as rare virtual items can be seen as “life-affirming”.

He suggests the motivation behind players purchasing vanity items includes trying to “stand out from the crowd” and “wanting to impress friends or improve gameplay”.

“For most people who are buying virtual assets, it enhances the gameplay. People feel better and have a higher self-esteem as a result of it,” says Dr Griffiths.

“Gamers know what they’re buying, they’re not being forced into it,” he adds. “Their attitude is, ‘It’s my money, I can do what I want. I’m not going beyond my disposable income.”

The virtual goods millionaire

Club NEVERDIE entrepreneur Mr Jacobs entered the record books when he purchased an asteroid space resort for $100,000 (£75,000) in 2005, in the sci-fi massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Entropia Universe, which uniquely boasts its own real cash economy.

Players can deposit real cash to purchase the in-game currency, Project Entropia Dollars (PED), which in turn can be used to buy high-end items such as healing kits, rifles and spaceships, some of which are then regularly traded between players for six-figure sums.

Mr Jacobs explains that while these numbers might seem “insane” to non-gamers, players see the items as “tools for making money” and can be “very profitable” for their owners, however critics argue that making a profit in the game is unattainable for the average player.

“When everything you do costs something, then everything that you find, that can be used, has more value,” says Mr Jacobs.

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The space resort deal was a no-brainer for the gaming millionaire, who many years earlier had predicted the boom of a virtual reality economy. It would prove to be a shrewd move by Mr Jacobs, who quickly turned a healthy profit by taxing players for using his asteroid’s resources.

On the asteroid players could hunt animals and mine resources that they could then sell onto other players.

“I put my house on the line, it was $100,000 (£75,000) at the time,” he recalls. “I ended making between $200,000 (£150k) to $250,000 (£190k) a year from the asteroid…”

Mr Jacobs, better known in the gaming community as NEVERDIE, his avatar, became obsessed with video games from an early age when his father presented him with a Sinclair ZX81, the first affordable mass-market home computer, declaring to him: “This is the future.”

Live forever: Jon Jacobs and his ‘NEVERDIE’ avatar CREDIT: JON JACOBS / PROVIDED

He soon traded it in for an Apple 2E computer, embracing an online fantasy world of dungeons and dragons, recalling: “I fell so in love with it. I was like, ‘Oh my God, should I be doing this for a living?’”

As a penniless and struggling actor, Mr Jacobs would stay up all night playing MMORPGs “all through the Eighties to the mid-Nineties” leading to an epiphany about the immense potential value of a virtual goods economy.

“I said to myself, ‘God, I wish the gold was real’,” he remembers. “And as I said it, I literally had an epiphany. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, it could be real!’”

He added: “Instead of playing for free, I thought every time you died you could come back to life, like in an arcade game when you put in another quarter.

“I just did this calculation based on how many times people die and I thought, ‘Oh my God! This would be worth billions and billions.”

Soon Mr Jacobs would be personally making millions through buying and selling virtual treasures in online fantasy game Entropia Universe.

Players battle Zombie KONG in ROCKtropia, a virtual music world in Entropia CREDIT: JON JACOBS / PROVIDED

“I played it with a vengeance and ended up being a bit fearless in acquiring items,” he says. “I managed to get the first great set of armour, I had the best guns, items worth around $25,000 (£18,000) in 2003. So my avatar was now, net worth, bigger than me.

“Land prices in Entropia Universe went through the roof, armour prices hit a peak before the global crash, people were paying $35,000 (£26,000) for a healing kit.

“Today people are still paying thousands and thousands of dollars for guns. Healing kits are still trading for $15,000 (£11,000). That economy has sustained that well.

“Buying and selling virtual items has always been fun for me. I love the thrill of exploring and finding a great item.”

He learnt a harsh, but valuable, lesson during the formative stages of his career when he spent $1,000 (£750) on a magical wand, quickly realising it only had ten charges: “Basically I had paid $100 (£75) per life,” he said.

Mr Jacobs would later spend $10,000 (£7,500) for a virtual egg to display in his virtual nightclub, eventually selling it for $70,000 (£53,00).

“So I sat on the egg waiting for it to hatch because I’ve got a virtual nightclub and an asteroid,” he says. “It’s like having the Hard Rock Cafe and filling it with rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia. Or having a Jurassic Park and that was my T Rex.”

Growing frustrated in his attempts to expand the virtual goods market, Mr Jacobs soon started thinking of the bigger picture.

“We had this incredible virtual goods economy – that I’d been making my living from, and I could have been making a million dollars or $2m (£1.5m) a year – but it couldn’t grow because the player base was so fragmented across disconnected virtual worlds and games.”

His next project is to join together these detached virtual universes which exist in different games, allowing players to transfer their online avatars and digital currencies cross-platform using a cryptocurrency ‘teleport’ token and blockchain wallet.

“The future of virtual goods is enormous,” predicts Mr Jacobs. “I personally believe it levels the playing field for people all over the world to participate in a global economy.”

The virtual goods broker

Marcus Eikenberry, known by his online moniker Markee Dragon, is regarded as a real money trading (RMT) trailblazer who over the past two decades has built a reputation as a trusted broker of highly coveted virtual assets.

The 47-year-old, who runs trading website markeedragon.com, has been involved in RMT since its genesis, profiting from the transformation of an unregulated trading market into a multi-billion dollar industry, then losing tens of thousands when the developers of the various games he was making money from clamped down on the system.

His rollercoaster career as an online goods merchant; trading in top of the line spaceships, high-end real estate, gold and rare trinkets in the virtual world, has encompassed the high of making his first million to the lows of filing for bankruptcy, twice, losing $250,000 (£189,000) in one day and being hit with a $6m (£4.5m) lawsuit from video game giant Blizzard Entertainment.

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It was back in 1997 when he began trading items between players deeply invested in shared fantasy world Ultima Online, a PC title that was fundamental in popularising the MMORPG genre, later followed by the hit fantasy adventure title World of Warcraft.

“Basically no one knew what RMT was back then,” he says. “Nobody had any name for it at the time. Somebody mentioned that they saw an Ultima Online sword on eBay for like $20 (£15). I thought ‘I could do that’, did some tests and the rest is history.

“Back then, it was so new that it was like, ‘I have some of these items that people might be interested in paying cash for, I’ll put them up for sale and see what happens.’

“When there’s a lot more demand than supply, it got the interest of a lot of people who started working a lot of hours of gameplay with the sole intent of acquiring items in the game that players would want to buy.

“I never got into grinding or farming to get that stuff, that was never my part in it, but a lot of people did that and certainly in the very beginning of it, we openly purchased items from these people that we turned around and resold.”

Virtual goods broker Markee Dragon has been in the business for two decades CREDIT: MARKEE DRAGON / PROVIDED

The popular YouTube and Twitch personality explains “player-to-player fraud back then was enormous” and was one of the primary drivers behind gamers seeking out his services.

“Why sell something to us for $10 (£7.50) when they can sell to someone else for $20 (£15)?” he asks. “Well, it’s because they kept getting scammed and losing their money. People would sell to us and buy from us because they had that safety.”

Markee has sold “millions and millions of virtual products” during his career, making around $150,000 (£113,000) per month in gross sales at the height of RMT. He recalls it “got really crazy” when he was making $500,000 (£380,000) a year in sales of virtual gold and game codes in Ultima Online.

He believes the main appeal for players purchasing items is simply “time versus money”.

“Many of our customers are professionals, or they have a lot of money,” he says. “You can pay $10 (£7.50) for something that you’d have to work four or five hours in the game for.

“A lot of customers are willing to spend money to accelerate time, a few bucks a month, while we have others who are willing to spend $1,000 (£750) a month to build an empire of wealth in whatever game.”

Some players are willing to shell out even more on coveted items says Markee, who re-sold a one-of-a-kind virtual castle for $6,000 (£4,500) in online fantasy game Shroud of the Avatar in April, his most expensive RMT sale to date.

“That is one of the few items that are nearly unattainable within that game,” adds Markee. “That was sold to someone who we had never encountered before, there was a lot of background work to make sure they were not a thief.”

However, since 2010 game developers have been actively clamping down on trades made outside of the game’s ecosystem, instead developing their own authorised trade markets and auction houses.

“So the tide had turned from, ‘RMT – what is this? This is cool. People are making money off of this.’ To lawyers saying, ‘This is a threat, you got to stop it’ and games companies cracking down on it.

“We got up to the point where things were almost out of control,” he adds. “I could see the writing on the wall with RMT, the companies were doing everything they could do combat it.”

In a rapidly expanding virtual goods market, Markee today works directly with developers in games like Shroud of the Avatar offering Trusted Trader services, due to the negative connotations of RMT.

“We’ve figured out how to support it without damaging the market and are giving a legitimate outlet for these activities that are going to take place, whether game publishers like it or not,” he says.

“We’re a nice shining light in the dangerous area of RMT.”

The future of virtual goods

The virtual goods economy will in the coming years “rival the real world economy on a global level”, predicts Mr Jacobs, with trade deals equivalent of multi-billion dollar agreements seen today between China and the US taking place between companies.

“There’s currently a multi-billion virtual goods market,” he says, “even in stupid virtual goods like skins, that don’t have much value, but it’s not, in my opinion, the holy grail.”

He foresees a future where “virtual goods are manufactured with virtual resources that are harvested across multiple games, just like in the real world”.

To do this, Mr Jacobs has created the first interoperable avatar wallet on the ethereum blockchain which gamers can use to trade virtual goods game-to-game.

“The NEVERDIE wallet I’ve created means your avatar cannot be stuck in one developer’s game,” he says. “So if it goes out of business, instead of wasting all those hours, you can use your skills in another one.”

“I’m trying to create a system that I know will last, because my avatar NEVERDIE is still alive, today it’s like 16 years old and I don’t want it to die.

“The numbers can be way, way bigger than this. There’s a lot of money to be made. There are livings to be made. But we’ve got to connect the virtual universes.”