In a segment that aired during Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto's show this week, Daniel Greenberg joined in to discuss Senator Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) bill to study the effects of violent video games on children. Greenberg is the IGDA Anti-Censorship Committee Chairman and game developer at Washington D.C.-based Media Rez.

The Hartford Courant is highlighting a story about a 12-year-old Newtown, Connecticut boy who has started a campaign to "stop playing violent video games." Max Goldstein, a 12-year-old student who attends Newtown Middle School, says that he decided to stop playing games like "Call of Duty" after attending the funeral of one of his brother's friends who had been killed during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shoot

The Federal Trade Commission announced today that it has updated its ten-year-old rules on children's online safety but came just short of adding changes that would sanction or hold responsible platform holders like Facebook and Apple, reports All Things D. The new rules hope to tighten privacy and sharing restriction rules for children who might use social networks or mobile apps.

New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman issued a press release today announcing that five additional companies including Gaia Online, NCsoft, Funcom, THQ, and one company that was not disclosed at press time, have agreed to participate in Operation: Game Over, an initiative to identify and remove registered sex offenders that live in New York state. These companies join Microsoft, Apple, Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Disney Interactive Media Group, Warner Brothers and Sony.

Nickelodeon has removed the SpongeBob Diner Dash app from Apple's iTunes after advocacy group The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) filed a formal complaint with Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The CDD said that the app starring the popular cartoon icon collected email addresses of children without getting parental consent.

The news media, quick to find a cause for why a lone gunman would kill his mother, drive to a local elementary school, and kill 26 people (20 children) before killing himself, has turned to the usual scapegoat: video games. While it is understandable that people want answers, Fox News wastes no time in trying to connect TV, Facebook, and computer games to the horrific actions of Lanza. As transcribed by Kotaku, a Fox News segment hosted by Megyn Kelly with guest analyst Dr.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and E-Line Media have revealed the participating sponsors and partners for the 2013 National STEM Video Game Challenge. For the third year, the AMD Foundation, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) will once again serve as key sponsors for the Challenge. New partners include the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Hive NYC Learning Network.

The Federal Trade Commission released a report on Monday that came to the conclusion that the majority of mobile apps aimed at children collect and transmit data that they shouldn't such as the device being used - and they do not disclose this fact to the parents. According to the report, around 60 percent of 400 popular kids’ apps made for phones and tablets running Android and iOS transmitted information about the device to the app’s developer or to a third party such as an ad network.

After dealing with a child sex scandal earlier this year, Sulake - the owners of the social teen hangout Habbo Hotel - had to make some serious changes and win back the trust of the community. With that controversy mostly behind them (the company changed much of how it handles communications within the virtual world and added other features that protect its young members), the company says that it wants to make Habbo Hotel a place where third-party developers can launch their own game titles.

Children that have anger issues can be helped by using video games and biofeedback to regulate their out-of-control emotions, according to research conducted by Boston Children’s Hospital. That research has been published in the journal Adolescent Psychiatry. Jason Kahn, PhD, and Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich, MD at Boston Children’s Hospital developed a game called "RAGE Control" because they saw that children were eager to play video games.

It looks like Foxconn is going to "take one for the team" in the controversy over under-age interns working at its factory in Yantai, China. This is the plant where Nintendo's Wii U is reportedly being put together, so Nintendo is very concerned about any public perceptions that it finds breaking China's labor laws concerning under-age workers acceptable.

Researchers in Canada say that children and teens who have electronic devices in their bedrooms are far more likely to be overweight because they are not getting enough sleep every night. The research is based on a survey of almost 3,400 fifth grade students in the province of Alberta, Canada. Researchers were trying to find out if there was a relationship between a child’s sleeping habits, the number of electronic devices in their bedroom, and their weight.

A new study by the Sleep Laboratory at Flinders University (a public university in Adelaide, South Australia) finds that teens who play video games for long periods of time have trouble getting a good night's sleep. The study conducted by masters student Daniel King (supervised by child sleep psychologist Dr.

Earlier this week we reported that Foxconn - the company that helps build many of the products that are popular in the West from companies like Apple, Sony, Samsung, Microsoft and Nintendo - reported that it found underage interns working in one of its plants in Yantai, China. Today we have learned that that plant is responsible for assembling Nintendo products.

An editorial in the UK edition of Huffington Post penned by Andrew Cole-Bulgin, Joint-CEO of Komixx claims that video games are "stunting children's imagination and inhibiting their ability to play together." The head of the children's television company says that he comes to this conclusion based on research the company conducted related to Toby's Travelling Circus, a new television program for children under the age of five.

The experiment continues over at the Indie Game Stand, where every 96 hours a new indie game is highlighted and put up for sale at the cool price of "pay-whatever-you-want." This time out it's Digital Eel's excellently trippy first person real-time spatial navigation game Brainpipe.

The Associated Press (by way of syndication in the pages of Time's Techland) reports that China-based electronics manufacturer Foxconn has admitted that underage workers are part of its massive work force in the country. Foxconn, which has had a hard time this month keeping production flowing at its plants due to riots and labor disputes, assembles a variety of electronics for Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and others.

Not exactly the press you want, a new article at Gamasutra features Team Ninja director Yohei Shimbori talking about how fans wanted female characters in Dead or Alive 5 to have bigger breasts.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has launched an educational Facebook app contest today with 30 prizes worth a grand total of $2.5 million. The 'College Knowledge Challenge' kicks off this week with an "edtech hackathon" at Facebook’s headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park.

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has put up a form that interested parties can sign onto concerning some changes that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has planned for the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

A new video from members of Microsoft's Xbox Live team throws its support behind GaymerCon, the first GLBT friendly gaming event to take place in early 2013 in San Francisco, California. Obviously organizers of the event are glad to have the support of Xbox Live.

You can watch the video to your left. At the time of this writing the GaymerCon Kickstarter has managed to raise $75,000. The Kickstarter campaign ends Friday, August 31 at 11:43 pm EDT.

According to new research from NPD Group, hand-held consoles are still more popular than the iPad, despite Apple's popular tablet device making in-roads with children because of its ease-of-use and large library of games and apps. According to the data released by the retail research firm, children ages 4 - 14 still spend most of their gaming time with dedicated gaming machines. Tablet devices did have gains from 2012 usage though: according to NPD tablet usage was up 10 percent of 2011 numbers.

The Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) has revealed the winners of its 2012 scholarship program. The trade group that represents retailers in the United States (and was the lead in Brown v. EMA) has awarded five students $1,500 a year for up to four years who are entering college as freshmen.

Apparently the troubles are behind Sulake's Habbo Hotel, because the popular virtual hangout for teens is opening up to teens in Turkey. The new destination for Turkish teens is located at www.habbo.com.tr. The site, like every other region supported by Habbo Hotel, is free to play.

Australia New South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione is taking a lot heat for comments he made recently blaming the rise of teen knife-related crimes on playing violent video games. Scipione recently told The Daily Telegraph that teens were being desensitized to violence by playing violent video games that reward them for "killing and raping people." Obviously a tired trope related to Grand Theft Auto spewed by politicians.

GaymerCon the first-ever all-inclusive fan gaming event that promises a friendly and fun atmosphere for gamers and geeks to get together for two days in San Francisco (August of 2013), has managed to surpass its funding goal of $25,000 in just a few days via a Kickstarter campaign. With 25 more days to go, the GaymerCon Kickstarter has managed to generate $28,471 (as of this writing) in funding from 560 backers.

You may recall our interview with Matt Conn (Episode 5 of the Super Podcast Action Committee) of GaymerCon, the first-ever gaming event that caters to the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) community set to take place in San Francisco in 2013.

While details are still a bit sketchy, an Oakley, California teen has been arrested for attempted murder after an altercation while playing a video game online turned to real-world violence. The incident occurred on Monday afternoon after two friends - an unnamed twenty-year-old man and a seventeen-year-old boy got into an altercation. According to Jimmy Lee from the Costa County Sheriff's Department, the two men were playing an unnamed video game online, which led to an argument about something.

In the wake of Sulake's problems with Habbo, Disney has decided to spend $4.7 million on an internet safety campaign for its popular massively-multiplayer online game for kids, Club Penguin. The announcement was made by the game's co-founder Lane Merrifield today. The internet safety campaign hopes to target more than 100 million children and parents around the world who use Club Penguin.

South Korea's new "Shutdown Law" was supposed to keep teens from gaming during a six hour block every night to focus on "more important things" like studying, but two groups have already filed lawsuits that question the legality of the new nanny state law concocted by lawmakers in the country. A group of game makers doing business in the region including NCsoft, Neowiz, and Nexon, have filed a lawsuit claiming that the Shutdown Law is unjust and unfair to them.