The Sun reports that seniors can’t put their Wiimotes down.
Residents as old as 103 have ditched knitting and bridge after getting hooked on the console.
Jayne Naylor, director of the Sunrise Home in Birmingham, said it took off after a chef brought in one of the motion-sensitive consoles which mimic sports like tennis, bowling, and boxing.
Britain hasn’t banned a game since 1997, but now the country’s ratings board decided to ban sales of “Manhunt 2″, a game developed by the “Grand Theft Auto” makers Rockstar Games. The game’s main character is mental institution patient who wants to escape and kills everything that comes across his way out. As said, this is the first game Birtain has banned since not allowing sales of “Carmageddon” in 1997 (Carmageddon is a game in which players have to drive vehicles over pedestrians). David Cooke from the ratings board said they decided to ban the game, because it was “distinguishable from recent high-end video games by its unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in an overall game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing”. Rockstar spokesman Rodney Walked, on the other hand, said they wanted to create a game that is more like a horror game similar to the Saw-like gory movies that have been released lately. He continued saying the board’s decision was censorship, because they had taken away the right of the public to decide for itself.
I found an interesting article in the New York Times today that featured the life of a Chinese “Gold Farmer”, a man who plays video games for a living. The article, written by Julian Dibbell, is about Li Qiweng who plays video games 12 hours a night, seven nights a week. Yes, that’s more than 80 work hours a week! Li played the online fantasy game World of Warcraft, which is played by more than 8 million people worldwide. Excerpt from the article:
Every World of Warcraft player needs [those] coins, and mostly for one reason: to pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the points to reach the next level. And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.
At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20.
The New York Times says there are an estimated 100,000 workers playing video games full-time and that trading virtual goods has become a $1.8 billion industry!
Check out this game: Desktop Tower Defense is so addictive! It’s an online flash game and it’s impossible to stop playing, so don’t start if you’ve got no time. 
Enjoy!
