During the most recent MLB postseason, Detroit Tigers pitcher Joel Zumaya sat out three games while his team faced the Oakland Athletics in the American League Championship Series. Was inflammation of his right wrist and forearm due to pitching? No, team doctors discovered it was due to Zumaya's love for Guitar Hero.

During the radio interview, Dombrowski said the Tigers' athletic training staff discovered that Zumaya's forearm pain was more consistent with the action of a guitar player than a baseball pitcher. The Tigers asked Zumaya to stop playing the video game, and he did. Zumaya then pitched pain-free during the World Series, and went 0-1 with a 3.00 ERA in three appearances.

Here's a weirder one. The Korea Times reports that stock brokerage firm Goodmorning Shinhan Securities is seeking out skilled professional players of Blizzard's classic RTS title StarCraft to potentially train and employ as day-trading stock brokers.

The StarCraft fever spawned professional players for the tourneys as well as training groups vying to join them, who have well-honed skills like quick reflexes and finger dexterity.

Such skills are a must for day traders, the active stock dealers who typically hold positions for a very short time and make several aggressive online transactions a minute.

However, Goodmorning Shinhan is agonizing over the recruitment of the skillful StarCraft players since day traders must be specialists in equity investment and fund management.

So, it looks like there's a bit of a hitch: StarCraft players, shockingly enough, don't have inherent knowledge of equity investment and fundmanagement. Still, if you're a devoit realtime strategy player and are accustomed to monitoring and actively managing many different simultaneous situations, you may very well have the fundamental mental faculties necessary in high-pressure financial activities such as day trading. Video games: they teach you to steal cars and trade stocks.

Here's a weird one. An eight year old boy of Modesto, California managed to successfully steal an elementary school teacher's minivan keys and commandeer her vehicle last week. The stunt establishes the child as the city's youngest car thief in history. Neither he nor the vehicle was hurt in any way during the escapade, and as a result police will not be pressing charges.

The third-grader told officers he "just wanted to drive around for a while" when he left the James Marshall School on Monday, officer Michael Amarillas said.

The diminutive driver snatched the keys from teacher Caren Brady's purse when she turned her back to the class. In order to operate the Dodge Caravan, he raised the driver's seat, lowered the steering wheel, adjusted the rearview mirror and turned off the radio.

The boy's mother commented that his favorite video game is Grand Theft Auto, a game the Entertainment Software Ratings Board recommends he not be playing for at least eight more years. Though it is not mentioned in the print article, CBS video coverage of the story also notes that the boy was a fan of go-kart racing and arcade racing games. A police officer interviewed in the video warns against the graphic and adult nature of the Grand Theft Auto video games and warned about "the types of things that it teaches kids, that killing cops and stealing cars is a cool thing." The news anchors expressed surprise at how many children at the school in question were also familiar with the game.

It's April 1st, which means everyone is now a comedian. A fake news round-up:

- Blizzard is opening a BurgerCraft restaurant.
- Blizzard has also revealed World of Warcraft's new Alliance race and there's the v1.11 change log.
- Ars Technica reviews Duke Nukem Forever.
- All kinds of exciting new products at ThinkGeek.
- Slashdot is, like, so rad.
- GameSpot previews World of Starcraft. They are also carrying a Cowbell Hero announcement.
- American McGee to adapt Hansel and Gretel.
- Screw the Halo movie, Flood on a Plane is the new hotness. Plus Pimps at Sea achievements revealed.
- GameFAQs.com shut down by the Anti-Cheating Association of America.
- Nude cheat for Madden 06.

Game/hardware related links in the comments will be added to the post.

The Associated Press has a piece up about a particularly unique behavior incentive being used in Oregon prisons: video games. The state's prison system allows for inmates to "buy" various items after several consecutive months of good behavior. Six clean months buys a 7" LCD TV. Eighteen clean months buys a video game console preloaded with 50 games--presumably, the consoles are generic-brand systems with Atari- or NES-styled games. Prison wardens state that the systems have become coveted items in the cells, and prisoners have been motivated to stay out of trouble in order to earn them.

Prison records show seven incidents in which Dodgin was sent to disciplinary segregation. But now, Dodgin says, he's been free of trouble for almost two years, thanks in part to the video games he gets to play at the Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla, where the 23-year-old is serving nine years for assault, attempted escape and other crimes.

Dodgin said nothing takes his mind off prison like the intergalactic war game Star Ally.

"You get all these weapons and you've got to beat the four boss men," Dodgin said. "You kill your enemies. They let off these bubbles sometimes. You collect their bubbles, and you get all these weapons."

There are a number of other goods and opportunities inmates can buy with their months of good behavior, including CD players and music, the privelege to attend ice cream parties, and extra visiting hours. It's certainly encouraging to see cases of video games proving an effective diversion from real world violence rather than an alleged cause of it, but one wonders if Oregon's system doesn't at least somewhat defeat the point of prison itself.

The Associated Press has an entertaining story up about a University of Minnesota journalism class in which the professors use Neverwinter Nights to as a learning tool. Since the game can be heavily modifed, the professor and a game designer have created a module depicting a fictional accident set in a fictional town. Within the game, players investigate the scene of the accident, research relevant topics, and talking to NPC citizens.

"When we initially did the game, it still had lava pits, the editor looked like an ogre--stuff like that. The librarian had breastplates," said Nora Paul, director of the university's Institute for New Media Studies.

The team, which includes game designer Matt Taylor and journalism professor Kathleen Hansen, have now modified the game graphics to look like a modern town, the fictional Harperville. A train has derailed, spilling toxic ammonia, and the players are sent out to cover the story. They dig up information by going to the library, government offices or talking to a retired train engineer at the bar.

In the last few years, the topic of "serious games"--that is, video games used in educational, professional, governmental, military, or other non-entertainment settings--has been a big one. There's even the annual Serious Games Summit dealing solely with such games and their developers. However, cases such as this show that even traditional video games can be used in nontraditional settings. Oh, and make sure to read all the way until the last sentence of the AP article; that's the best part.

Well, as you either gladly remember or are desperately trying to forget, it's Valentine's Day, that romantic observance of mutual affection or hateful marketing contrivance--you know, depending on your perspective. Anyway, for those of you unlucky in love but lucky in, uh, MMOs, Mark Wallace over at The Escapist has a heartwarming and/or crazy (again, insert perspective here) piece about a couple that fell in love and married after meeting in the game Second Life.

Apparently, what Di and Un learned about each other was enough to convince them they wanted to know even more. And as they explored their online relationship further, they only liked what they found.
...
Shortly after Di and Un tied the virtual knot, they donned their real-life Sunday best, stood together before a real live person of appropriate authority, and said the actual words that would transform them from a couple of pixilated people who happened to meet in an online game into a couple bound together in the eyes of God and the law. In other words, they met in the real world, moved in together and got married.

It just warms your heart!

And, hey, how about this: what's the one game you would choose to be your Valentine? Not necessarily the "best game ever," or the one you'd take to the desert island, but the one that gives you the warmest memories. The game you remember most fondly. As you may have discerned from my shilling reminiscing, that game for me is Full Throttle, written and designed by Tim Schafer back in his LucasArts days. Sadly, adventure games later broke my heart when all the new ones, uh, stopped being good.

Ever wondered howa questing adventurer would fare in the real world? You know, the characters in RPGs who actually gain fame and glory by delivering messages to people and killing rats. John Walker points out many of the odd conventions of roleplaying game quests, both of the single player and MMO variety. Most of his observations are ones that have been made countless times before on lists with names like "Everything I Need to Know, I Learned From RPGs," but Walker does them one better by actually going out and attempting to find an adventurer to carry out his vitally important delivery quest.

The plan: To take to the streets, dressed as a wizard, with a quest for the good peoples of Bath, England.

Would they really help out a stranger with a strange beard? Would they even stop to listen? Is there any truth to this convention we've otherwise entirely accepted?

First of all, I should immediately get this out of the way: No one, at any point, approached me to ask for a quest. Short of suspending a yellow exclamation mark above my head, I'm not sure what more I could have done to attract the attention of any passing adventurers braving the cold thoroughfare through the centre of the town. If anything, people did their very best to avoid me, refusing eye contact, moving far away from my pleading face. It was already concerning.

Walker ended up having to actively solicit the help of passing adventurers, rather than being himself solicited as he expected, but he managed to get a couple takers. The world may yet be safe another day.

Now this is some crazy stuff. A group called Eyebeam has released OGLE: The OpenGL Extractor, a software package that will, much like the name implies, extract 3D models from within games or other 3D applications. Essentially, it's like taking a 3D screenshot of a particular character or object you like within a game.

OGLE (i.e. OpenGLExtractor) is a software package by Eyebeam R&D that allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows. It works by observing the data flowing between 3D applications and the system's OpenGL library, and recording that data in a standard 3D file format. In other words, a 'screen grab' or 'view source' operation for 3D data.

The primary motivation for developing OGLE is to make available for re-use the 3D forms we see and interact with in our favorite 3D applications. Video gamers have a certain love affair with characters from their favorite games; animators may wish to reuse environments or objects from other applications or animations which don't provide data-level access; architects could use this to bring 3D forms into their proposals and renderings; and digital fabrication technologies make it possible to automatically instantiate 3D objects in the real world.

If you somehow have access to a 3D printer, this software provides an easy to way to made actual real life figures of your favorite game characters. Insane!

OGLE itself is a plugin to another piece of software called GLIntercept. The OGLE website has a detailed guide for getting the whole thing up and running.

Nerve.com had a ten-day feature up about video games, appropriately called The Video Games Issue. It ended up with thirteen articles relating video games to sex (Nerve's usual topic of choice). Most of the articles are from people with little prior video game experience, which leads to some odd bits of misinformation at times but can also give some interesting perspectives. One writer used Maxis' The Sims as a form of therapy after a failed relationship.

I'd always written off video games as a waste of time. But after being dumped at age twenty-one by the first boy I'd ever truly fallen for, there were plenty of hours to be wasted. ... My concerned co-workers thought going out might help. Instead, I went home and installed The Sims. ...

In The Sims, relationships develop on a numerical scale, and they make sense. I liked this because my relationships at the time made none. SimSpeak is simple: if an initial conversation (Talk About Interests) goes smoothly--like, say, the first time Devon and I talked--the relationship score raises and further communicative options appear on a pop-up menu--Tell a Joke, Friendly Hug, Flirt, Juggle. Yeah, juggle. Unable to engage in typical modes of ridiculous couple entertainment like imitating Napoleon Dynamite, the Sims juggle.

There's an article about where the game adaptation (and film adaptation, for that matter) of Aeon Flux went wrong, a couple who try out the interactive drama Facade, a bizarre retrospective on Leisure Suit Larry, and interview with that grandmother who plays video games, and more.

Oregon State University assistant professor of psychology Mei-Ching Lien has been studying people's ability to easily change topics or trains of thought on the fly while performing other tasks and believes that doing so is a difficult task for the human brain. For example, people talking on cell phones while driving are likely to experience "inattention and slow reaction times" especially when the conversation is involved, because the two tasks both require a level of complexity on the part of the driver. Lien did have one point to make about an activity that might mitigate this sort of problem:

In her lab studies, she has yet to test any volunteers who are immune to delays in multi-tasking, though she says some students do much better than others. "I have to say that the best ones are those who play a lot of video games," she pointed out. "Those are lab studies, however, and not driving tests."

Though she did not do any tests specifically testing a link between video game prowess and the ability to concentrate while driving and using a cell phone, her observation is one that crops up rather frequently in tests measuring mental sharpness if not necessarily suggesting anything about raw intelligence. So if you're worried about your brain rotting (or possibly melting) due to a gaming habit, know that you might just be a bit quicker on the uptake as well. Just don't forget to go outside sometimes too.

A few months ago it was revealed that video game publishing licenses held by bankrupt publisher Acclaim would be auctioned off. Later, a full list of properties was released. Now, the website has been updated with contact information to actually go ahead and start bidding. Most of the bids are still relatively low, with offers of $5,000 for games such as Alias, Crazy Taxi, and Mary Kate and Ashley Get a Clue. Five games in the Bust-a-Move series are currently at a combined price of $7,500. Re-Volt and Re-Volt 2 are up to $40,000, and the Extreme G series is up to $75,000.

It looks like the files and records for the games were being shown yesterday and today in Oceanside, New York, so interested parties who aren't able to head down there at a moment's notice may have to bid sight unseen. Of course, if you're a massive Riven fan who just can't bear that anybody would republish the game without your permission, that's a risk you may have to take.

Did you see the recent episode of CSI: Miami in which a bunch of gamers were found to be committing serial murder and robbery in imitation of a video game? Well, I didn't, but Salon's Andrew Leonard did. If you didn't catch it and don't want it spoiled, feel free to stop reading. Anyway, it seems that not only were these fictitious gamers committing the aforementioned crimes, they were actually raping people for extra points, which clearly strikes deep at the core of the actual appeal of Grand Theft Auto--oh, I'm sorry, "Urban Hell Raiser," the rather thinly veiled game featured in the show. But wait, there's more:

To those of us who do live in the real world, as opposed to video game land or the tortured plot devisings of bad TV writers, it might seem unrealistic that a gaming company wouldn't cooperate with the police in such a circumstance. Kinda suspicious. Hey, you don't suppose the gaming company might be involved, do you? It turns out that executive isn't just smarmy -- he's Satan. Not only is the company providing bad role models to the youth of today, but, in an effort to boost sales in a competitive industry, it's also actively supplying college students with Tec-9 automatics and encouraging them to murder innocent people.

The situations described are clearly ludicrous, but it's not difficult to surmise that there are plenty of people out there whose opinions were merely reinforced by way of CSI: Miami. After all, Jack Thompson (coincidentally from Miami) has built quite a name for himself and gathered quite a following, as crazy as it might seem, by making similar accusations as the ones in this episode--except in real life.

Of course, one response in the article's comments section points out, rather plausibly, "Maybe TV execs are just jealous that they are losing out the 18-24 male demographic to Playstation 2."

A research division of electronics manufacturer Philips, Surrey's Philips amBX Group, has devised a technology and scripting language that will use situations in video games to create actual effects in the real world. The system uses the environments of a video game to trigger various components surrounding the gamer--fans, different-colored lights, heating devices, and so on. The point is to make the entire room representative of what's going on in the game, to heighten the game's immsersiveness.

This means that in a game the lights in your room will match up to the environment you are gaming in. E.g. Green for jungle and blue for the ocean. Strobes of white light could simulate a lightning storm and a burst of air from a fan could make huge jumps feel more realistic.

Seems...interesting. Philips claims to be currently discussing the technology with developers. The company plans to launch its product next May, which means we'll probably see it at E3.

So apparently there was some wacky 3D computer monitor at BlizzCon, and I missed it. Assuming you've got an nVidia video card with two DVI connectors--apparently only nVidia cards have the requisite stereo drivers--you'll be able to use a Neurok Optics iz3D monitor that creates the impression of actual 3D graphics.

Inside the game adapter is a hardware neural network that processes depth queues such as differences in color, brightness, shadows and size of objects. Chechelashvili says, "It's more complicated than just saying what is in front and what is in back. The neural network performs many calculations and to make sure there is no delay, we had to build it into hardware."

The drawback? You'll need to wear a pair of included polarized glasses. The device goes on sale this December. A 17" version will run $1499, with 19" and 23" versions forthcoming.

Business Week Online has a feature up entitled Attack of the Gaming Grannies, focusing on gamers over the age of 50. According to research cited in the article, over-50 gamers make up 19% of the gaming market; while those numbers do seem slightly suspicious, the number is definitely increasing. The same research states that 53% of current gamers expect to continue playing games for the next 10 years, which is a bit less surprising. The article is a fun read, getting responses from gamers such as the 69-year-old Barbara St. Hilaire (aka Old Grandma Hardcore), who is currently hard at work mastering God of War (PS2).

Old Grandma Hardcore has been firing away since 1975, in the Age of Atari. She started by stopping off at the mall arcade with her kids while shopping. "Then I really got into it when Nintendo came out with Super Mario. I remember playing with my son all night long, competing against each other." Since then, she has played hundreds of titles and worn out a long line of gaming consoles, from Atari to Xbox.

Older gamers have stated that playing video games regularly can help keep their eyesight sharp, their minds alert, and their joints exercised. 68-year-old Liam Murray has no plans to stop playing games within his lifetime. He'll keep up the habit until "the good Lord calls me. It's up to Him when I quit."

Unconfirmed reports have suggested that these "video games" (otherwise known as "murder simulators") are turning the world's senior citizens into killing machines at an alarming rate.

1UP is reporting on a Michigan theatre production called Video Games: The Rock Opera. Written and performed by comedy troupe The Corner, it is a musical interpretation of video games and gamers. The show tells the story of a guy who, of course, gets sucked into the video game realm through his television. As one might expect, the game references are much more centered around old school gaming than recent titles, and in 1UP's video interview the producers reveals that they tend to spend most of their gaming time on systems such as the NES and the SNES.

Of course, it's the songs, not so much the references, that make the musical. Composer R. Mackenzie Lewis takes the lyrics written by members of The Corner, and comes up with catchy tunes you'll end up humming later that evening. Fair warning that it's for the best to try to catch yourself. Singing the lyrics to "I'm a Ninja" or "Welcome to Hell Town" might creep out the family. Then again, so would "Mr. Mistoffolees."

Those of you who happen to live near Eastern Michigan University's Sponberg Theatre may want to consider checking this out. I mean, it has singing ninjas in it. Come on.

A round-up of today's gaming/hardware related April Fools jokes. If you find anything else post in the thread and it will get added.

- Beyond Unreal has the Unreal 3: Slug Saga - The Adventures of Ne'ban press release.
- Sven Co-op is adding a flight sim mode.
- Hexus sues Beyond3D for not going beyond 3D. They also look at AMD's GPU.
- From Voodoo Extreme: Blizzard merges WoW with Guild Wars, Carmack contacts aliens on cell phone, people want the Phantom, Fox's Prey reality show.
- Gabe Newell is leaving Valve.
- QuakeCon taken over by Imps.
- The Game Gear returns.
- Doomworld, I'd hit it.
- World of Wordcraft announced.
- Multiplay UK has word of Frogger Online.
- Avatar change on the World of Warcraft forums.
- Blizzard & Pandaren Xpress hook up for a /panda command in World of Warcraft.
- Apple is coming out with the gPod.
- The iTreoPod is reviewed by CNET.
- In Star Wars Galaxies Ewoks are now armed and extremely dangerous.
- European World of Warcraft players get Warbucks coffee.
- Halo 2 Multiplayer Eggstravaganza.

GameSpot's Dungeon Siege 2 media page has been updated, as there is a new video interview with Gas Powered Games founder Chris Taylor about the action RPG sequel.

Well I noticed this week that Fileshack has a whole lot of movies, commercials, and other cool non-porn video files. Since there's no LNC on Thursday, I figured why not post some of the more recent stuff?

Movie Trailers
- The Polar Express
- Shrek 2 (yes, I know Maarten linked this in FP)
- The Day After Tomorrow
- AvP
- The Punisher

Games
- Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna Movie #1 and #2.
- STALKER: Oblivion Lost
- The Battle for Middle Earth
- Prince of Persia
- Need for Speed Underground Gameplay (and non-gameplay)
- SSX 3 67 Trick Combo!!!