If you're male and find it a wee bit difficult to put down the controller when you're playing a video game, then the findings of a Stanford study might be able provide you with a pretty interesting reason behind it.

In a study done by Allan Reiss and his colleagues, they were able to find out that video games have a greater effect on the reward region of the brain of men than in women. Details of their study in the full article.

The worldwide, seven-million gamer community of Xfire and their Debate Club will be hosting a live debate session in their fourth Xfire Debate Club: The Two-Handed Sword on April 26. This time around, the heated discussion will be bringing a varied panel of guests ranging politicians to game industry journalists and critics to contest the matter of "Censorship in Video Games."

The session, to be moderated by Stanford University's Henry Lowood, will bring together Matteo Bittanti, a researcher at Stanford University; Hal Halpin, CEO of Entertainment Consumers Association; Dennis McCauley, CEO of GamePolitics.org; Russ Pitts, Editor of The Escapist; to discuss matters regarding:

• Governments' involvement and their regulation of video games
• Game exposure to children and their consequential influence on them
• The power of "the creative license"

Frederic Descamps, senior director of marketing at Xfire, commented, "As video games become a more mainstream form of entertainment, questions regarding censorship and legislation continue to gain significance." The debate will take place at April 26, 4 p.m. EDT or 1 p.m. PDT at Xfire's debate section. You can head there through the "Read" link below. And don't forget to bookmark it!

Soren Johnson, recognized for his work on Firaxis' Civilizations series, is "moving back" to the fold of Electronic Arts to join creative genius Will Wright's staff on the ambitious cross-platform project Spore.

Johnson was a former EA intern while he was taking up graduate school in Stanford University in California. He has a bachelor's degree with honors in history and has an MS in computer science, making him ideal for the Civilizations series.

He was Lead Game Designer in Civilization IV and Co-lead Designer in Civilization III. The Civilizations franchise rose to prominence in the late 90's and has been one of the most respected names in the real-time strategy genre.

Spore, on the other hand, is described by its developers as a massive single player game. How it works out is still uncertain, but we'll update you as soon as news is forthcoming.

CNET News reports that Stanford University Libraries">Henry Lowood, curator of the Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University Libraries have in their collection 25,000 plus videogames. The said curator is also in charge of archiving the electronic gems.

The 25,000 games originally belonged to former Stanford student Steven Cabernetti who passed away recently. What's noteworthy about this collection is that most of the titles are still in their original shrink-wrap. The games were gifted to the Stanford Library for use in their history of science and technology collections.

Henry Lowood, together with game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky and academic researcher Matteo Bittanti and journalist Christopher Grant also came up with a list of the ten most important games of all time. The chronological list has been submitted for review and potential permanent preservation to the U.S. Library of Congress.

The ten games are: Spacewar (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), the Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).

CNET has a video report of the Stanford University Library collection and can be viewed via our "read" link below.

Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, has a proposal that has been submitted for the consideration of the US Library of Congress, the research arm of the United States Congress and what is practically the national library of the United States of America.

The proposal, to use the words of Heather Chaplin from the New York Times, is video games have "a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying." The proposal was drafted by a consortium: Stanford University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Illinois.

Video games have a cultural and historical significance. On March 8 at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2007, Henry Lowood announced a game canon, a list of important video games worth preserving. "Creating this list is an assertion," Lowood said, "that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance."

The video game canon: "the stuff we have to protect first." Below is a list of the members of a five-person committee that presented a canon of games worth preserving at the GDC.

• Henry Lowood, curator, History of Science and Technology Collections, Stanford University
• Warren Spector and Steve Mertzky, game designers
• Matteo Bittanti, academic researcher, Humanities Lab, Stanford University
  
• Christopher Grant, game journalist, editor of joystiq.com
  

The National Film Preservation Board compiles an annual list of films that are added to the National Film Registry managed by the Library of Congress. If the US Congress believes that films aren't necessarily tools of the devil, then maybe the world is ready to agree that video games such as these are worth preserving for the rest of human history:

• Three classic games: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980)
• Tetris (1985) (The designer, Alexey Pajitnov, won a GDC Award at GDC 2007.)
  
• SimCity (1989)
• Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)
• Civilization I (1991) / Civilization II (1996)
• Doom (1993)
• The Warcraft series: Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994), Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995), Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002)
  
• Sensible World of Soccer (1994)

"The game canon is a way of saying this is the stuff we have to protect first," said Spector.

Emulators and preservation. Lowood explained a particular challenge. Hardware has changed so much that thousands of games can only be played using emulators - which technically violate copyright laws. It's something to think about - isn't it - that emulators and piracy are serving, in their own way, to keep the memory of old games alive. Now let me see if I can bring up Shadow President (DC True, 1994) on DOSBox.

They came, they saw, they conquered. Today, we'll be reporting the finalists for this 9th Independent Games Festival student competition and best mods competition. Much like our readers, we wish them a hearty congratulations for making it into this coveted list.

• TU Wien: And Yet It Moves
• Koln International School Of Design: Ball Of Bastards
• DigiPen: Base Invaders
• Stanford Junior University, a private university regarded among the finest in the world">Stanford University: Euclidean Crisis
• DigiPen: Gelatin Joe
• Guildhall at SMU: Invalid Tangram
• Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy: Opera Slinger
• SungKyunKwan University: Rooms
• Hogeschool van de Kunsten, Utrecht: The Blob
• DigiPen: Toblo

  As for the awardees for IGF's top four game mods:

• Best Single-player FPS Mod: Cut Corner Company Productions' Weekday Warrior mod (Half-Life 2)
  
• Best RPG Mod: Ossian Studios' Darkness Over Daggerford (Neverwinter Nights)
  
• Best Multiplayer FPS Mod: ES Team's Eternal Silence (Half-Life 2)
• Best Other Mod: Ludocraft's Spawn Of Deflebub (Unreal Tournament 2004)
  

The winners for both categories will be awarded a stipend of US$ 500 to help them attend this year's Game Developers Conference. The Conference itself will be held on March 6 to 9 in San Francisco. Finalists for both events will be showing their works at the IGF Pavilion, with one winner being selected from each group for the GDC's IGF awards. The Best Student Game wins US$ 2500, with the Best awardee winning a US$ 5,000 cash prize.

Click on the read link for the full details on these contenders. Also Make sure to catch up on the other awardings for this major event.

When a word like "addiction" is pasted right after the words "internet" and "game", you know it's not going to be all that great. This new article on CNN discusses addiction to using computers and consoles, with a Stanford study recounting just how bad addiction to computing (rather than computers) can get.

Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, head of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic of the Stanford University School of Medicine, mentioned how their earlier poll of people got to them.

As Aboujaoude notes in the article,

We are seeing more people who lost their jobs because of too much time spent surfing the Internet during work. More relationships are breaking up because of spouses sneaking out of bed to check e-mail in the middle of the night.

While this does seem specifically pointed towards just surfing the net, you have to remember that game consoles are also computers, technically speaking. Previous reports have mentioned that symptoms of addiction have shown themselves when gamers play, and let's not forget the personal accounts of people who've gotten attached to World of Warcraft.

While computer use still doesn't have the "mental illness" tag on its head, the symptoms do happen to be there. Gaming might be good for us in moderation, if one study is to be believed, but fostering good relationships outside individual pieces of tech will definitely help to keep gaming a venue to have fun rather than a place to get a fix.