“Kids Turn to Supernatural Stories” plus 2 more |
- Kids Turn to Supernatural Stories
- Mind Games: Veteran teacher imparts wisdom on kids
- Virtual farm games absorb real money, real lives
| Kids Turn to Supernatural Stories Posted: 02 Sep 2010 08:35 PM PDT Page last updated at 09-03-10 05:21 CDT Kids Turn to Supernatural Stories$Story.authorcredits.get(0).credit.text ; Alex Belcher COLUMBIA- A new list shows kids are reading more fantasy books. The "Rant and Rave" list published by the Daniel Boone Regional Library contains seven books. All contain fantasy elements. Courtney Waters is the Teen Services Librarian at the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City. She said there were 30 holds for "Mockingjay," a science fiction book by Suzanne Collins. The book is the third in the "Hunger Games" series. The book was the best selling book in the country during the last week of August according to USA Today. Waters said 30 holds is, "a lot," and added "That is along the lines of the later books in the Harry Potter series." This would be astonishing if it were a single event, but she said it is starting to happen regularly. "We just can't keep some of these books on the shelves," Waters said. Waters is not blaming the run of supernatural books on chance, she said the key is good writing. "People just want a good story, and right now, some of the best stuff is in the young adult and teen section." Deseraya Sparks said the reason she reads about fantasy to escape. "You can just sit and be somewhere else for awhile. I like that." Waters said she thinks the vampire craze has "peaked." She added the next new trend seems to be dystopian and apocalyptic writing. She noted with a chuckle, "It sure makes for some good discussions." Hit Count: 12 This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Mind Games: Veteran teacher imparts wisdom on kids Posted: 02 Sep 2010 07:19 AM PDT Eric Berthoud carefully positions chess pieces on a demonstration board hanging on a wall. He sets up a problem and turns toward his 20 young students. "What is the best move for black when the queen's there?," Berthoud asks."Knight to C6." "Yes! See, she got the answer. And she's only 6 years old. "That's the right move," he continues. "The knight comes out and attacks the queen. The queen's got to move." Many young players would see nothing but a mishmash of pieces on the chess board during this exercise. But others not only recognize the strategy, they think three and four turns ahead. "We've got some smart kids here," Berthoud says. This was the scene at South Fayette Township Library last month as students participated in a week-long chess camp. Berthoud, of Upper St. Clair, has been teaching chess at South Fayette Library for the past five years. For two hours each day, children engaged in one hour of instruction and then paired up to play chess using what they've learned. Berthoud has been playing chess for more than 40 years. He was born in Switzerland and served in the United States Air Force during the Korean War after he moved across the Atlantic Ocean. "When I was in the military, we played a lot of cards. And I thought there's got to be something better than that. You start with the same amount. You're not dealt anything," he said. He worked in the human resources office for Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel in California, Pa. for 28 years. "Originally, I started teaching chess to my kids, I have three boys. From there, I was invited into their school. I lived in the Mon Valley and worked in a steel mill." His weekly itinerary is filled with teaching chess at various local schools: Mondays at St. Louise de Marillac School in Upper St. Clair, Tuesday at Boyce Middle School, Wednesday in Ross Township and Thursdays at Peters Elementary School in McMurray. Private lessons are on his weekend agenda. "An old professor told me chess is basic physics: matter, space and time. Matter being the value of the piece, space being controlling the square, which is important. It gives your piece mobility, And time is also an element, we play with clocks in tournaments." During Berthoud's classes, students learn the value of pieces, how to set up moves and go in for checkmate. "I set up problems and ask the kids for the answers. Try to get them to participate." He began this particular lesson with a gridiron analogy. "If this was a football game, (the chess pieces are) on the bench. They want to go out and play. So, you've got to get them out of the back," Berthoud said. "And you can't move the bishop until you move the pawn. You all know that, right? The knight's the only one that jumps." And he sprinkled the session with tips for any player: • "Good players take their knights out. Usually, they're the first ones out." • "You've got to look ahead in this game." • "It's nice when you can give up your queen and get checkmate, but it doesn't happen too often. Maybe once in a lifetime." • "A good player doesn't send its pieces out for nothing unless it's protected." Berthoud is a major advocate of after-school programs for all types of pursuits, including chess. He recently taught a course at South Fayette Schools' Little Lions Academy for two weeks. "President Obama's idea is to try to get the schools available after school. The taxpayers pay for it, why not?" After many hours playing and teaching each week, there's still not enough time to learn all the intricacies of the game. "Compared to other countries in Europe it's not too popular here. Because it's a difficult game. It take time to learn. Everybody wants to learn things right away. Electronic games, they can do that quickly. It takes time to get good at it and it's competitive. "Even if you go to a tournament, you get paired against a better player all the time. It never gets easy," Berthoud said. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Virtual farm games absorb real money, real lives Posted: 02 Sep 2010 08:40 AM PDT  Ngmoco's "We Farm" virtual farm game for the iPad. (Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)Last century's cash crops included tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane. Now we have magic cauliflower and super berries, too--and even though they can't be sold at market, some people still toil from dawn to dusk cultivating them. People spend not just real time but also real money growing these crops in virtual farming games that combine the allure of both games and social networking in what is usually a cute and deceptively simple package. They can be addictive: many users come back at least once a day to micromanage their farms and deal with other users' requests. On average, the users of these types of games are spending anywhere from a few minutes a game to the greater part of an hour. Indeed, one individual who CNET spoke with said that it's all she does between waking up and going to bed--and that's every every day of the week. The companies behind these titles are raking in millions of dollars from people who toil on land that doesn't even exist, and that number continues to grow. A research report from eMarketer in June said social games generated more than $725 million last year in the U.S. alone and projected three times that revenue in 2011. One of the most popular social-gaming titles is FarmVille, a game designed by San Francisco-based Zynga that users can play in Facebook and on iPhones. More than 63 million active users each month spend an average of 15 minutes a day in the game, Zynga told CNET News. Typical activities for these users involve planting and harvesting crops, reorganizing, and helping to tend friends' neighboring farms. The game can be played for free, but players can get an edge by paying. Farm cash and farm coins can be purchased for anywhere from $1 to $50 in real money via credit card, PayPal, and Facebook's Credits currency platform. With the virtual money, people can accelerate play or purchase goods that otherwise would take longer to acquire. It's only for the most involved, though. "The large majority of our players never pay anything to play our games," Zynga told CNET, and that those who do account for only a "small percentage." One of those players in the small percentage we'll call Katie S. She told CNET her daily FarmVille routine consists of waking up around 10 a.m. and proceeding to play the game until well past midnight, though her sessions can often go longer. "I've been known to stay up all night until at least 5 or 6 a.m. if a new feature is out, and I'm excited about it," she said. Since beginning to play the game last August, she's reached an unusually high level 111 in the game--40 levels beyond where the game offers incentives in the form of newly unlocked features. And she's spent about $2,000 on in-game currency expenses--roughly $100 a month. "I justify this as being my only source of entertainment, and I'm forgoing movies and dinners out, so it's OK," she told us. Before playing FarmVille, Katie said, she spent 18 months playing Zynga's Mafia Wars game before quitting cold turkey. "I realized I hated it. It wasn't cute. It wasn't even fun--just addicted clicking," she said. Katie also said that she plays a handful of other online games including PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz, which can also be played on Facebook and as of April had an average play time of 43 minutes a day by its users. Not the only farm in town More staggering than these numbers is the size and economic force these virtual worlds now command. "If you assume the world of We Rule has a sense of real-world scale to it, people have laid enough roads to wrap around the Earth three times," Ngmoco's vice president of marketing Clive Downie said in an interview.  Players of Ngmoco's We Rule game can purchase virtual game speed-ups with "Mojo." The company told CNET that one user spent more than $12,000 on Mojo purchases. (Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)We Rule users have invested several million real-world dollars in virtual currency called Mojo, Downie said, and the combined wealth and spending of We Rule users continues to grow. Estimating the worth of one piece of Mojo at around 20 cents, "the active Mojo in the system right now is worth well over $6.8 million," he said. Downie was eager to point out that the company gives Mojo away for free as players ascend to higher levels and attain various promotions, just as Zynga does with its FarmVille players. Mojo is also sold in-game; its price per unit can vary based on how much of it a player is purchasing at a time. This lands anywhere from 99 cents for just five units, all the way up to $49.99 for a "vintage" bottle that contains 800 Mojo. In We Rule's sister game called "We Farm," which was build using the same engine and employs similar game techniques, its Mojo equivalent "Gro" can be purchased in bulk at up to $99.99 as an in-app purchase. So what's the most someone has spent on Mojo? Try more than $12,000. "We're very grateful to those people, obviously. We don't sit and laugh about that and say, 'Ha ha, aren't we lucky?' That's serious business. We're providing a serious piece of entertainment for people, and that's why we're passionate each and every single day," Downie said. Spending that much money on any game raises a question of longevity--how long will these titles exist, especially when they rely so heavily on a server farm that might share its CPU cycles and capacity with future titles. Downie offers reassurances: "We are dedicated to this game as not just a forerunner in the freemium space, but also as a foundational franchise for Ngmoco,"he said. "I hope we're never done." Hobby versus addiction "The best example of this is on WowDetox.com," author and addiction and recovery consultant Ryan G. Van Cleave told CNET. "The first entry on there is someone who missed his son's fifth birthday because he was on a guild raid. He spent all day playing WoW [World of Warcraft] and admits that he was more excited to play it than he was for his kid's birthday." WowDetox is a place for recovering World of Warcraft addicts to share their stories with the same kind of openness and support you'd find at a drug counseling group. To date, there are now more than 45,000 such stories left by users. And while WoW differs from these social-farming games, in Van Cleave's opinion, they're not all that different. "In my mind, these games pose a bigger problem, because of that sense of community and belonging that they bring. Those are the games that are the most addictive," he said. Van Cleave, who recently wrote "Unplugged: My journey into the dark world of video game addiction," says that part of the allure of any game--but especially social games--is that people live unexciting lives. "The technology is so impressive too,. We're darn near virtual reality, which you can see with 3D movies in the theaters, and today's games are keeping up with that," he said. "The experience with games is similar--we have this dopamine flowing through our bodies, and we're seeking future instances of that rush. But you never get it like you do those first couple of times." If that sounds like something you'd hear from a drug addict, it's because some of the symptoms and habits people develop with game addictions are shared. "The early warning signs of game addiction are behavioral," Van Cleave said. "If a person is kept from gaming, they become irritable. And just like an old lady who gets behind the wheel of a car and drives like an animal, you get these good kids or adults who play video games and exhibit destructive behavior."  A screenshot of part of Katie's FarmVille masterpiece."I like to collect one of each animal, and I'm trying to master all of the crops and have 47 of 70-something done so far," she told CNET. (Credit: Screenshot provided by Katie S.)Van Cleave explained that one of the biggest warning signs is when someone lies about how much they game. "With so many levels of deception and lying, you're in way deep," he said. That's harder with social gaming, where user activity is largely public; games like FarmVille show players' actions inside the Facebook news stream. Users can play the title with some level of secrecy, though they have the potential to reap much larger rewards by sharing those experiences with other users. "I suppose you can play without your friends' help, but it would be seriously slower play, and without much of the cool features that you just absolutely need help from others to complete," Katie had said over our e-mail exchange. "Some people are just so concerned about keeping their Facebook [profile] private, and with just friends, but just get so frustrated because they can't level up or get anything done, and end up adding tons of strangers." Katie said one of the main reasons she keeps coming back is for the friends she's made. Before FarmVille they'd all been strangers, but now they rely on her for help maintaining their own farms. "They can be entertaining at times, too," she said. Another factor is how much she's already invested--both in time and money--and that she simply likes to "be the best" at games. Katie explained that her family has been supportive of her playtime. For instance, her husband brings dinner to her while she's still on the computer when he gets home from work. She's also got extra time on her hands while searching for a teaching job, which she fills not just with FarmVille play, but administrating a handful of fan and how-to sites, including an entire Farmville page on the how-to site Wonderhowto.com and one for Zynga's sister game FrontierVille. She also began her own FrontierVille site that she plans to help roll into a published eBook. These exploits arguably fall into line with something Van Cleave had said about how people can be heavy gamers and still find balance. "I know plenty of people with other activities and interests, their health, family, friends, and work, and who game 10 to 25 hours a week. And on top of that, they're good parents, they have a good job. That sounds pretty healthy to me," he said. But that doesn't mean it works for everyone. "It's really going to be the person and the dangers. The hard thing going forward is to get society to the point where people get the courage to come out and say they have a problem and not get laughed at," said Van Cleave. Katie says she might one day give up her FarmVille kick, but not just yet. "I've had a few friends say 'bye' to the game so they could get back to 'real life.' I'm wondering when I'll get there," she said. "But with the blogs now, too, I'm in it for quite a while longer." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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