New research coming out of Australia suggest that playing active video games or banning traditional games outright does not help children who live sedentary lifestyles. Traditional and active play games make little difference to how physically active children are throughout the day, says Professor Leon Straker from Curtin University's School of Physiotherapy and Exercise Science.

Robin Hunicke, the game designer and producer responsible for creating Journey at thatgamecompany, has been hired by the University of California Santa Cruz as Associate Professor of Art & Game Design. Hunicke will officially join the faculty in January 2015 and be in charge of leading the new undergraduate program in Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz.

The American University School of Communication is using a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for a new program to train journalists in game design, Gamasutra reports.The grant money will be used to fund a "Journalism Leadership Transformation" pilot program with six fellowship positions: three for working journalists, and three for journalism students.

GitHub revealed that it will give free access to a suite of development tools that small-scale game makers may find useful. The only catch? You have to prove that you are a student.

The offer is part of the GitHub Education initiative, and is available to students over the age of 13 and currently enrolled in an academic program. If you can do that, you can get access to project development help and tools like the Crowdflower crowdsourcing platform, a hosting plan with the DNSimple DNS management service, and free access to Unreal Engine 4.

Penn State University's library now features a massive collection of video games, according to a report in the school's paper.

The collection was added to support the university's game development minor, an 18-credit program track that includes courses in game design and gaming psychology. Matthew White, assistant professor of game development, is the man responsible for selecting the games in the collection.

If there was ever a seemingly unflappable group of individuals it is America's librarians, who take the privacy of their patrons very, very seriously. Since the introduction of the Patriot Act the group representing our nation's librarians has been fighting to protect its patrons from government intrusion.

The New York Academy of Sciences will be keeping an eye on players of the upcoming online science education game Galxyz when it launches in 2015. The inspirations for developing an online educational game for children that teaches STEM education (for kindergartners to 12th graders) came from a father watching his young daughters quickly getting bored while playing science education games. He wanted to create something a bit more challenging, and ultimately more effective.

Several major publishers doing business in the United Kingdom have teamed up with the British government to fund a whole new generation of game designers, according to Gamasutra. Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Ubisoft Reflections have teamed up with the British government to back The Next Gen Skills Academy, which will fund video game developers, visual effects and animation professionals.

Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe has donated $31 million to his alma matter, the University of Maryland - the largest single donation ever received by the university. According to the AP report detailing the donation, the money will be used to back a scholarship and for the construction of a new computer science building that will bear Iribe's name.

According to statistics released by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) this week, around 390 academic institutions across the country are now offering video game-related certificates, undergraduate and graduate degrees.

As the ESA points out in its release, that represents a 50 percent increase over the 254 schools that offered video game-related education in 2009. While there are schools all over the country that are now offering these types of courses, California had the most with 73 schools, followed by New York with 26, and 24 each in Illinois and Texas.

A researcher from the University of the Sunshine Coast (Queensland, Australia) is investigating the theory that video games can empower girls by promoting positive female identities and deliver affirmative outcomes in the lives of teenage girls.

International PhD student Katryna Starks from Los Angeles said her thesis "Game Chang(h)er: Exploring the video game design elements that may impact the agency and identity of adolescent girls," focuses on female gamers, a demographic that is not fully catered to in game design.

An appellate case in court this week brought by former NFL players over the use of their likenesses in video games created by Electronic Arts could make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to William Ford, a professor who teaches intellectual property law at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago.

Children in Sweden are learning English by playing western games - most notably Blizzard's popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. This is according to a new study (PDF) by Swedish academics Pia Sundqvist and Liss Kerstin Sylvén.

A new study finds that MS patients who used the Wii Balance Board five days a week to play dance and snowboarding games had better balance. According to the lead author of the study Dr. Luca Prosperini (a neurologist at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy), this type of therapy is useful because there are no drugs on the market that restore or improve balance for those suffering from the disease.

VentureBeat today announced its "big speakers" for its annual games industry focused GamesBeat event. GamesBeat 2014 takes place Sept. 15 and Sept. 16 (at the Parc 55 Wyndham Hotel) in San Francisco.

Earlier this week, a new study began making the press rounds (we caught it at news.com.au) that linked the play of particular video games to teens' propensity for risky behavior.

And no, this one is not from Craig Anderson, Brad Bushman or Douglas Gentile!

The UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s Professional Programs unveiled a new academic course dedicated to the study of video game development. The course, "Interactivity: A Course in Video Game Design and Development," will be taught by video game scribe Marianne Krawczyk (best known for her work on the God of War and Prince of Persia series) and Sony Computer Entertainment’s Senior Manager of Internal Production, Whitney Wade.

A new study from Oxford University suggests that playing video games for one hour a day can have a positive impact on child development. That same research concludes that playing more than one hour a day - or as researchers call it, "high levels of video game-playing " - is only "weakly linked" to behavioral problems in the real world.

New research published in the Journal of Communication comes to the conclusion that some people who try to use media like video games and television to relieve stress instead have feelings of guilt or of "being a failure."

The Raspberry Pi foundation has announced that it has upgraded its cheap micro computer to a new version called Model B+. Described as the "final evolution" of the first-generation Raspberry Pi, the new hardware comes with two more USB 2.0 ports, a microSD card reader and 14 more GPIO pins for a total of 40 on the board.

The BAFTA Young Game Designers competition has its first female winner: 16 year-old Rhianna Hawkins, who won the Game Concept Award for her concept game, Tomatos Role. The other big winner of this year's honors was 15 year-old Adam Oliver, who won the Game Making Award for AlienX after reaching the final stages of the competition for the third time. Oliver made the final ten for the Game Concept Award in 2010 and 2011.

Le Game Jam hopes to produce an awesome game based on the upcoming Tour de France event next month. Indie game developers taking part in the game jam have just 48 hours to create a Tour de France-themed video game at a unique joint event in Leeds and Sheffield, England before the great race next month. Teams from Leeds Metropolitan and Sheffield Hallam universities will be among those competing.

Nintendo has made four student games available for free on Wii U eShop in Japan. All of the games were built by teams of students in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan.

A study of online Call of Duty players found that women who sent out friend requests were more likely to be accepted if they behaved in polite and positive manner during play. Those women who talked trash during matches were less likely to have a friend request accepted. On the flip side, males who talked trash during online play sessions were more likely to have a friend request accepted than those who were polite or remained quiet during a match.

The V&A’s first ever Game Designer in Residence, Sophia George, today launches the annual game design competition for students, Dare to be Digital. George started her career on Dare to be Digital, winning in 2011 with her family-friendly puzzle game Tick Tock Toys. The Dare to be Digital competition is an annual affair hosted and run by Abertay University.

Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) today announced the winner of the 2014 Gamers in Real Life (G.I.R.L.) Scholarship. In its seventh year, the scholarship program encourages women to pursue careers in the video game industry in areas of development and design. This year's recipient is Erin Loelius of Manasquan, N.J.

The Entertainment Software Association has announced the five finalists for the E3 College Game Competition, a contest that recognizes the best college-level talent in game development. Finalists schools include Lawrence Technology University, Savannah College of Art and Design, the University of Denver, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Utah.

The Los Angeles Mayor's office and the Los Angeles Unified School District recognized over 150 students today who were certified through the Digital Living Project. The program focuses on online privacy and safety, cyberbullying prevention, and introducing students to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) based careers.

Out of 15 countries assessed in a new study, children in Scotland were at the bottom of the rankings when it came to physical activity and at the top of rankings for spending too much time on screen-based leisure activities including watching TV and gaming.