The Wonderful Service of Gamefly

This past month I finally decided to give Gamefly a try. Gamefly is a video game rental service similar to Netflix, being that rentals are sent through the mail. There is a monthly charge for the service, which includes free shipping, no due dates and no late fees. Gamefly was founded in 2002 and has since then grown into a popular business. The end of the year report for 2010 shows that Gamefly’s total revenue had increased 32.2% to $85.5 million from $64.4 million 2008. Their total subscribers in 2010 was 328,000.

My experience with Gamefly was a good one. I had received an email from them offering an extended free trial of 30 days. Normally the trial is 10 days. I signed up for it and picked out from a wide variety of PS3, Wii, Xbox 360, and even older console games. The trial was for their 2 games out at a time service. I chose Catherine and L.A. Noire as my first two choices. Now here is where I ran into a problem. I provided them with a shipping address which was for my college P.O. Box. I had received an email from customer service saying there was a problem with the address and to contact them. I replied to the email and almost a week later I had not heard from them. I discovered that Gamefly customer service has a live chat available. I don’t believe that it is widely known therefore the wait time is only less than a minute usually. The first person I spoke to I explained that my P.O. Box address was correct and that I will receive their envelopes. The employee told me that she forced the address into the system and that it would work. About a week and half later I still had not received anything in the mail and my account still told me that I needed to contact customer service. At this point I was frustrated. I had lost about 2 weeks of my free trial waiting for games that hadn’t even shipped yet. So I signed back into the live chat and spoke to another employee. I explained my ordeal yet again and that the address would work. He apologized for the inconvenience, gave me back my 2 weeks I had lost, and said that he would personally monitor my account to make sure that I would have games shipped to me. He was very nice and knowledgeable about his job. A couple days later I received my two games.

Catherine was the first game I played, and I didn’t even think to check that L.A. Noire would work. After playing Catherine, I discovered that L.A. Noire was damaged and would not work in my console. Yet again, I signed into live chat, explained my ordeal, and the employee apologized and immediately sent me another copy, which did work. The only bad part was that L.A. Noire counted as my second game in both transactions so I only got 3. In a period of about 20 days I had received and completed 3 games.  I had another week to order more games, but due to school I stopped at 3.

Despite the fact that I had a couple of issues with shipping addresses, and damaged games, I did enjoy my time using Gamefly’s service. The customer service was very good, the shipping time was very fast, their selection of games is very extensive. I would very much love to subscribe to them again possibly during the summer when there is more time. Gamefly’s prices per month run:

• 1 game out at a time-$15.95 per month
• 2 games out at a time-$22.95 per month

Video Games as Art – Tattoos

This week in blogging I’d like to focus on video games as more than just a game, but as art. People all over the world go to different lengths to create an artistic representation of games. Today the focus will be on video game tattoos in honor of receiving my first game based tattoo this past Monday.

This is my Organization XIII tattoo based of the video game, Kingdom Hearts (pardon my odd posture. It’s hard to take a photograph of your own ankle!).

Here are some other popular gaming tattoos…

So what do people think about the concept of video game tattoo? Some people think it’s lame. Some people think it’s awesome. People who find the idea of gaming tattoos to be ridiculous are usually not gamers themselves. They might not play video games at all, and think it’s “geeky”.  But what about that person’s tattoo of say, a unicorn? As with all tattoos it is up to the person getting it. What does it mean to them? To me, my tattoo is a representation of one of my favorite games. And there is a more personal underlying meaning behind why I favor the characters in the game. If someone wants to know, they should just ask me and I would happily tell the story.

WhatCulture! did a piece on the art of video gaming in tattoo form. They said in their article, “…each tattoo shows the players love for gaming and demonstrates the mediums power to communicate as an art form.”

Kotaku.com offers a few tips on committing to video game based tattoo:

1. Make sure the art is exactly what you want so that you’re favorite character isn’t inaccurately depicted.
2. Try it out first. There is such a thing as temporary inkjet tattoo paper so that you can make your own tattoos at home!
3. As with all tattoos, go somewhere that you trust. You don’t want your Mario tattoo to look like a stick figure mess.
4. It IS a tattoo and it is going to be there forever. Make SURE it’s what you want to see when you’re 50 years old. Personally I look forward to seeing my XIII tattoo when I’m old and have grandkids.

Extra Life gives lives to those who need it

Gamers will be happy to know that they can help the people around them by doing what they do best- playing video games. “Play Games. Heal Kids.” That is the tag like for Extra Life a website that every year in October hosts an event where people pledge to play games for 24 hours straight and others donate money during that time. Extra Life has raised money for 170 different children’s hospitals and in total has raised $440,000. Earlier this month, Xbox 360 held an event called Gaming and Giving for Good on Xbox Live to help raise money for Extra Life as well.

This year’s Extra Life event will be held on Saturday, October 15th beginning at 9 a.m. To register for the event is simple. You can register for free by signing up under the Extra Life Classic and your goal will be to raise $100. You must enter in your PSN, or Xbox LIVE Gamertag in order to participate. Participants will then be asked to recruit 4 sponsors who will donate $1 an hour during the marathon ($24 total). Participants will also be given a link to a page where they can ask for donations and a goal tracker will be displayed showing how much they’ve raised.

This year I will be trying my hand at raising money for this charity event. It only makes sense, right? The most I’ve played in a day was 15 hours. Can I make it to 24? If you’d like to help please visit my page to donate! I will be helping raise money for University Health Systems of Eastern Carolina. The gaming begins October 15th!!!

Some Interesting Statistics

Ever wondered what the actual truth is behind video games? Well here are some interesting facts.

According to OnlineEducation.net :

• 65% of US households play video games.
• 49% of gamers are ages 18-49 and the average gamer is 32 years old. That’s an interesting fact since when it comes to marketing advertisements always seem directed to a more younger crowd. Also whenever there is a crisis that likes to point the finger at video games, such as the Columbine shooting, it always seems to involve teenagers.

The ESRB did their own study and found some more interesting statistics:

• 40% of gamers are indeed females. If you’ve ever been online to the many different gaming websites, such as Gamespot.com, a lot of the users will not be afraid to admit that they don’t believe that girls play video games. Why, when I was on that website for a few years so many of the people told me that they didn’t believe I was a girl since apparently girls don’t play video games….
• The average adult gamer has been playing for 12 years. I’ve been playing for 14 years. It’s not the average, but remember, the average gamer is a 32 year old male and I’m a 21 year old female so I’ve got room to stretch.
• 93% of the time parents are present at the time games are purchased or rented AND 97% of parents report always or sometimes monitoring the games their child plays. So what is the deal with all the parents freaking out about their children playing bad games? How does the old saying go? A few bad apples ruin the bunch.

So there are some great facts about the real world of gaming. Video gaming has some of the most bizarre myths and I hope that this brings light to what some people may think.

Sad news for gamers, playing doesn’t promote cognitive development

It’s recently been discovered that playing video games does not boost cognitive development. In all honesty I did slightly believe that it did. If you’ve grown up playing video games where you have to solve puzzles, crack riddles, and the like wouldn’t it make sense for you to develop that part of your mind more? And when the Nintendo DS was introduced there were games that seemed to help promote brain development such as Brain Age. The Brain Age website reads:

Brain Age’s intuitive gameplay makes brain training easy for everyone. Train across fifteen activities. Solve simple math problems, recite piano songs, play a challenging version of rock, paper, scissors, and test your memory skills in the classic game, Concentration. You’ll love your mental workout!

A study on hand-eye coordination has been conducted on surgeons and the results showed that surgeons who played at least 3 hours a week made 37% less mistakes during surgery and finished it 27% faster. From personal experience I can tell definitely that playing video games has improved my hand-eye coordination. So it would seem that while playing video games might not make you smarter with puzzles, hand-eye coordination does develop somewhat.

A Quick History of Video Games

Computerized gaming roots back to the 1950’s with some simple computer games that were similar to table tennis or shooting airplane targets. In 1977, the Atari was released that would soon take gaming to a whole new level. It was the first console that had plug in cartridges that game in a variety of different video games. The first game to be released was Pong. It was similar to the table tennis game involved in the 50’s.

As time went on gaming branched out into various arcade games such as PAC-MAN, Frogger, and Street Fighter, as well as many others. As technology grew people were able to bring some of these classics into their home through purchasing other consoles. While their have been a great number of consoles created and sold to gamers the most popular are as follows:

• Nintendo Entertainment System (October 1985)
• Sega Genesis (August 1989)
• Sony Playstation (September 1995)
• Sony Playstation 2 (October 2000)
• Nintendo GameCube (November 2001)
• Microsoft Xbox (November 2001)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 (May 2005)
• Sony Playstation 3 (November 2006)
• Nintendo Wii (November 2006)

Here is a weekly overview of video game hardware sales:

So with the constant in gaming technology what will the future offer us? What will be the next console to be released and which of the major gaming companies will release it first? Only time will tell.