A study conducted by Singapore’s National Institute of Education reveals that its youth rack up an average of 27 hours a week playing videogames.

The group has polled over 3,000 students during the course of the three-year study, which The Straits Times reports is still ongoing. Lui Tuck Yew, acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts was reportedly “quite surprised and a little bit shocked” at the number of hours spent gaming.

Lawrence Lee, a 16-year old World of Warcraft player, called four hours of gaming a day “nothing,” and compared the game to fledgling love:

It is the novelty, like getting a new girlfriend. You want to spend every minute with her.

Singapore has formed an inter-ministry committee to address “cyber-wellness” issues.

Read the entire scanned article at the Education Soon blog.

The Associated Press is reporting that eight teen gamers in Singapore joined a suicide pact last month. However, after watching two of their number leap from a ninth floor window, the rest backed out.

The teens were reportedly fans of a video game called Slayers.

Citing a report Singapore's New Paper, the AP writes:

According to a police investigation, 16-year-old Ku Witaya, a self-proclaimed Taoist medium, convinced his younger brother and six other boys that they had to die to become `slayers' who would kill demons in a World War III.

While we are not familiar with Slayers, a Wikipedia entry seems to indicate that games in the series are quite old:

Slayers is a series of over 50 light novels... Slayers is a Dungeons & Dragons inspired narrative...

Several Slayers role playing games have been released in Japan. Slayers was released by Banpresto on Super Famicom on June 24, 1994. Another game entitled Slayers was released for NEC PC-9801. Slayers Royal was released by Kadokawa Shoten for Sega Saturn on July 25, 1997. and by ESP Software for PlayStation on June 25, 1998. A sequel, Slayers Royal 2 was released on Sega Saturn by ESP Software on September 03, 1998 and on PlayStation on July 11, 1999. Slayers Wonderful [screenshot at left] was published by Banpresto for Sony Playstation on October 22, 1998...

There is more info in the Straits Times.

Yesterday GamePolitics reported on a study detailed in the current issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin which found that violent game players displayed aggressive behavior while those who player more prosocial games exhibited helpful behavior. The study actually encompasses three seperate research projects which took place in Japan, Singapore and the United States.

But a researcher from Texas A&M disputes those findings. Prof. Chris Ferguson, who has frequently studied video game issues, commented on yesterday's report which was authored by, among others, University of Michigan's Brad Bushman and Douglas Gentile of Iowa State.

Of the Bushman-Gentile study Ferguson told GamePolitics:

You know trouble is brewing right in the beginning as they start with the false premise that there is an established relationship between video games and aggression. The authors engage in what's called citation bias, which means they only cover research they like and ignore anything they don't like. This is just not good science. Since this literature review is so slanted, that worries me about how they collected and analyzed their data.  

In [one study] they note that there is a high correlation between prosocial exposure and violent game exposure. This suggests that these may be some of the same games that have both kinds of content! They then suggest that there wasn't a problem with multicollinearity (basically means if you include 2 predictors that are too similar it can screw up your results), yet they only say they had no VIF less than 10...yet even something as low as 4 or 5 is pretty high. So multicollinearity may have been a bigger problem than the authors try to suggest.  Therefore, there may be some serious problems with their analyses here.  

[Also] the authors say that prosocial exposure and violence exposure were very highly correlated and then claim they have completely opposite effects. That is just highly unlikely.

In [another study] the standardized coefficient between playing prosocial games and prosocial behavior... suggests that playing prosocial games had almost no overlap with prosocial behavior one year later. Here we have yet another example of a "significant" finding being touted even though it's so small you'd never notice it in the real world. They also assert causality from correlational data which they can't do no matter how they analyze it.

The final study is probably the best of the three, but it's also the most artificial. Indeed, a fair number of their participants express suspicion about what went on. These kinds of studies have a high risk of "demand characteristics" In other words, students will give you the results they think you want and they won't admit to it afterward. Also the resultant effect sizes are all pretty small.

So, at best, a mountain is being made out of a molehill here, and at worst there are some pretty serious flaws in all analyses. I do worry about the "tone" from this research group. They do not comprehensively cover the literature honestly, and appear to have a hypothesis that they favor from the get-go. That tone would lead me to question their objectivity and, as such, the quality of their analyses.

Bottom line  - I doubt you'd see prosocial games solve the world's ills anymore than violent games have caused any outbreak of youth violence. 

Government censors in Singapore have cleared Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, despite the game's well-publicized snippet of male nudity.

The Straits Times reports that Singapore's Media Development Authority reviewed the game:

Mr Ernest Khoo, head of video games and media content at MDA, said that whether full-frontal male nudity is allowed depends on the context in which it occurs.

In this expansion pack, he said, the depiction is 'non-sexual and can hence fall within the M18 rating', which is also the rating given to the original GTA IV. He added that with the M18 rating, only those 18 years old and above will be buying the game and its expansion pack.

Going by the video game classification system MDA introduced last year, games for online download do not need to be sent for classification before sale here.

Okaying GTA IV L&D is another indication that Singapore has loosened its approach to game content since briefly banning Mass Effect in 2007.

A member of Singapore's Parliament has questioned why Grand Theft Auto IV is permitted to be sold there.

As reported by The Electric New Paper, Christopher de Souza (left) suggested that underage players would get their hands on the game and questioned how the life of crime portrayed in the game fit in with government efforts to discourage drug use, crime and gangs:

The question ought really to be if this game should enter the market in the first place.

By way of response, Minister for Information Communications and the Arts Dr Lee Boon Yang pointed out that GTA IV's rating was consistent with that found in the United States, U.K., Australia and Japan:

When rating the game, the MDA [Media Development Authority] took careful consideration of the content, themes and storyline found in the game, recognising that adults are better equipped to discern fact from fiction.

Singapore's The Straits Times reports on an in-development game in which players use the "cheery pink power of bubblegum" to fight government oppression.

Gumbeat is a Flash game being developed as part of a cooperative effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and digital media students in Singapore. So how does Gumbeat play? From the report:

...the heroine chews on candy and blows them into big pink bubbles beside unhappy citizens in the unnamed country in which the candy is banned. This cheers them up enough to entice them to join the protagonist in a revolution, mustering enough angry citizenry to overthrow the oppressive government.

 

This is the aim of the game, said National University of Singapore undergraduate Sharon Chu, who presented her team's game to reporters earlier on Tuesday... The game was made to show that games with serious-themes like say, 'political oppression', can be fun, said Ms Chu.

Chu left the issue of whether the repressive country in question was Singapore up to the "player's interpretation." GamePolitics readers may recall that Singapore's government banned Mass Effect for a time last year over a brief lesbian love scene.

Singapore may have banned Mass Effect last year (and later un-banned it), but gamers there do not want to see a Grand Theft Auto ban.

As reported by the Electric New Paper, gamers in Singapore are concerned that last week's cabdriver murder in Thailand may prompt a video game backlash:

'It's a game, it's just for fun,' said student Julius Wong, 20, who completed [GTA IV]... 'What makes the game popular is that you get to do things you don't normally get to do in real life.' Playing the game was 'stress relief'.

 

Student Poh Koon Kiat, 23, was also against a ban, saying it would be a knee-jerk reaction. 'I don't think games affect how I act in real life,' he said.

ENP reports that GTA IV was a huge seller in Singapore, with 20,000 copies sold during its first week at retail. Local distributor IAHGames said it was unaware of any move to ban the game.

Attention from investigators has driven video game pirates away from Singapore's town center, according to the Electric New Paper:

[Some] shops appeared more suspicious of potential buyers. To convince them, you'll have to strike up a conversation - or even buy a few original games - before they'll show you the pirated ones. Only one of the four shops... that we visited was willing to let us examine the cart before we bought them. Others insisted that we buy them.

The ESA, which represents the interests of video game publishers in the United States, maintains a presence in Singapore. From the report:

Mr Cyril Chua, counsel for the [ESA], said that checking on shops in heartland estates is more difficult than investigating stores in central locations.

 

'They often sell pirated wares only to regular customers,' he said.

 

Another problem is that pirated games can now be downloaded from the Internet, then installed on ame consoles by the users themselves.

 

'Piracy over the Internet is more difficult to track than retail piracy,' Mr Chua noted.