Right now, all across the planet, millions of people are engaged in a struggle with enormous implications for the very nature of life itself. Making sophisticated tactical decisions and wrestling with chilling and complex moral puzzles, they are quite literally deciding the fate of our existence. Or at least they are pretending to. The video [...]

Doctors can’t inject cancer patients with intelligent nanobots programmed to launch surgical counterstrikes against the disease. That didn’t stop a team of medical researchers and software programmers from developing a video game several years ago that helped young patients imagine such an empowering scenario. Based on the success of that project, the team recently launched [...]

In March 2010, police in South Korea arrested a husband and wife in a tragically ironic case that gained international notoriety—the couple let their three-month-old daughter, Sarang, starve to death in their apartment while they spent up to 12 hours a day nurturing a virtual daughter as part of 3-D fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing [...]

Xbox Live gamers paused from their usual Wednesday night online multiplayer battles against interstellar invaders and zombies to weigh in on the first presidential debate. Xbox users, jacked in through their Internet-connected consoles, are in a better position than most people to answer a quick poll, and Microsoft, which delivers gaming and other entertainment via [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 7-2 ruling Monday (pdf) that California cannot regulate the sale or rental of violent video games to minors is the latest chapter in the long-simmering debate over the impact of aggression in the virtual world on children’s behavior in the real world. The high court’s ruling is based on law and [...]

Earlier this week, the Guardian newspaper based in London told the story of a former prisoner at northeast China’s Jixi labor camp who spent his days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines and his weary nights forcibly playing World of Warcraft (WoW) for hours on end to build up virtual currency [...]

What happens when a studio, specializing in medical illustration, animation and interactive apps, sets out to make a Christmas card? You get The Santastic Voyage, a video game where you shrink down, zip through Saint Nick’s bloodstream, zapping the West Noël Virus and Bah Humbugs in order to save Christmas. InViVo Communications finished the candy [...]