Game on! The Science of Video Gaming

Bees are essential for food production and, through their pollination efforts, they contribute billions to the world economy. But their numbers have been declining alarmingly in recent years and one reason may be that they are falling victim to a class of insecticides calledneonicotinoids. These chemicals get into all parts of a plant - including the nectar that bees collect. But bees should, we were told, avoid plants containing neonicotinoids because the taste would put them off. Now Geraldine Wright, from Newcastle University, has shown that, not only can bees not taste neonicotinoids, they actually alter the insects' brains to make them prefer food laced with the chemicals, so they end up poisoning themselves, as she explained to Chris Smith...

Geraldine - This manuscript started out as an experiment to test whether bees could taste neonicotinoids in sucrose solution. We wanted to know whether bees might be able to taste these pesticides and avoid them when they were flying around in the field and possibly foraging on the flowers of seed-treated plants. And basically, the design is to put an individual bumble bee into a plastic box and to put a food tube, one on each side, so that they have one that contains sucrose and another one on the other side that contains sucrose plus a toxin. What we did is we changed to the amount of toxin that we put into the sucrose toxin tube to see at what point the bees would be able to detect the food and avoid the toxin.

Chris - Was your hypothesis then, that because people have said, we don't need to worry so much about some of these insecticides that we put on things because the insects like bees that we want to have around us, they will naturally develop an aversion to the taste of these things and avoid them.

杰拉尔丁——是的。That's the rationale that a lot of people use, is that these are pesticides. They should taste bad and they should be avoided by insects. So, we wanted to test whether bees could actually detect these compounds in floral nectar and possibly avoid them.

Chris - Can they?

Geraldine - Well, our experiment showed that they cannot in fact taste these pesticides. What's more, using this experimental design, we found that instead, bees prefer to drink solutions that contain 2 of the 3 most common neonicotinoid pesticides.

Chris - Why are they drinking more of the sugar solution if they don't know the stuff is in there and how do you know they don't know the stuff that's in there?

Geraldine - We used a specialised technique that allowed us to record from the bees' taste buds and we applied the neonicotinoids to the bees' taste buds and we couldn't find any evidence that bees could actually taste these compounds using their mouthparts. What I think is happening is that these compounds are acting on the neurons in the bee's brain to make sucrose more rewarding to the bee, just like nicotine affects human beings.

Chris - What would be the consequence for the bee? Would there be something other than just a sort of memory reprograming effect to favour those flowers? Would there be other health deleterious effects?

杰拉尔丁——是的。所以,不幸的是the same concentrations that we used which happen to be the concentrations that have been reported from nectar also have been shown to do other things to bees including affecting their motor function, affecting their ability to form olfactory memories, affecting their ability to navigate and find their way home. So, there are detrimental effects of the concentrations that we tested as well.

克里斯-显然有很多关注paid to the phenomenon of colony collapse disorder which people believe is probably multifactorial. There are lots of elements probably playing a part. Would you say your findings are consistent with these pesticides being involved?

杰拉尔丁,已经有一些研究how that exposure to low doses of these pesticides, specifically imidacloprid, interacts with the bee's immune function and that causes a greater - especially in honeybees - a greater susceptibility to parasites like varroa mites. So, I think that there's good evidence that when you're seeing a situation like colony collapse disorder that it's likely that it could be caused by exposure to the toxin simultaneously with other stressors that also then influence the ability of bees to deal with those forms of stress.

克里斯-东北大学的杰拉尔丁·赖特wcastle.

Wearable technologies are, according toWikipedia, "clothing andaccessories incorporating computer and advanced electronic technologies for practical functions and features". People are claiming that this is set to become the next big thing. Here to give us his critical opinion is business entrepreneur Peter Cowley, who is also the UK's businessAngel Investor of the year...

Peter - There have been wearable technologies around for many years and some of our listeners will have actually got fitness devices on them, which is approximately measuring the calorific usage of the body. Possibly, people have heard of Google glass. It was around and now has been withdrawn from the market temporarily. The Oculus Rift, which is a gaming device, a gaming headset; there's various forms of clothing actually coming in with technology in them. I'm actually an investor in a manufacture of boxing gloves which have got technology in them as well.

Chris - Boxing gloves, so you can tell how hard you socked the opposition?

Peter - Not just how hard, but also, the direction that you're actually socking the chin of the other person. So, you can train from that. You can work out, give points to the direction and location. So, it may well get used by the media to provide better feedback to how well the boxers are hitting each other.

Chris - You went down to see the launch of Apple's watch last Friday. Were you impressed?

Peter - I'm very impressed with the product. My concern at the moment is the battery life's its got is short. So, in the old days of course, the battery would last forever. We're used to charging our phones every day, so we're obviously going to have to get to the point where we have to charge our watch every day as well. But the user interface is absolutely gorgeous.

Chris - Would you find yourself actually using one?

Peter - I do use one. I've got it on me at the moment. I've got one that I bought a couple of years ago which is on the very early smart watches. There are a number of these cases which really worked for me:, things like it vibrating 10 minutes before an appointment; incoming phone call appear on my wrist and then can make a decision whether to sneak out to the meeting or answer the call.

Chris - So, that's a yes from you for that sort of technology. What other sorts of things are in this landscape? What's on the horizon for wearable technologies?

Peter - Huge amounts. We're just really waiting for a number of things. Battery life as I said earlier on will be an issue and battery is a technology that's moving on rather slowly. But this device I saw in Vienna recently, which is called a MYO, which is an armband that sits on the lower arm which measures not just the accelerometer and position of the arm, but it also monitors the electrical currents passing through the muscles so it knows where the hand is. So, in fact, you've got something that will detect not just arm position but finger positions as well. The Google Glass itself, there's a little trackpad available that sits over the thumb at the moment so you can actually use your mouse just with the forefinger and the thumb.

Chris - So, you just pinch finger and thumb together and that's effectively...

Peter - Yeah, run it from the top of your thumb. Exactly, yeah. There's even here in Cambridge, which has got some jewellery, which emits scents depending on mood and stress levels in order hopefully to get feedback to reduce amount of stress.

Chris - What does it emit or release to calm people down in a tense radio studio environment?

彼得,我不能说。我不是一个化学家。你的商店uld be able to tell me that Chris.

Chris - What about the story about Google and contact lenses? What's that all about?

Peter - Yeah, that's very interesting. There was some technology that Google has been working for some time and this is a contact lens that will have a sensor that will measure a level of a chemical, which will tell - in time, with clinical evidence - whether somebody has got potentially diabetes. But presumably also, the power has been generated from something in the eye, on the eye, the fluids on the eye.

Chris - So, your take on this is that this is definitely here to stay, this sort of technology and it's only going to get bigger.

Peter - Yeah. I mean, the figures that are floating around are about 40 million devices were sold last year and it's going to be about 300 million in 3 years' time. They won't all be watches. They'll be all kinds of other devices.

How do you actually make a video game? And how has game developmentchanged over the last few decades? David Braben is the founder of Frontier, who recently releasedElite: Dangerous.This is a space venture game that's modeled one to one on our own galaxy. He explained to Chris Smith how he got started with his latest game.

David- Well, it depends what the subject matter of the game is. It's like saying, "How do you start making your film?" I think with that, you start off with a subject matter. So, with a game like Elite: Dangerous, we started off wanting to recreate our galaxy. We would look to all the star maps in real life and work out what we wanted to do. So, you start off designing what you would expect to happen and what the player would expect to see and work out all the different subsystems that are needed to be able to make that. Then, you breakdown all of those tasks into sort of sub-tasks. These days, lots of different people then work on it together, to bring it altogether.

Chris - How do you spot the gap in the market that you think, "Aha! This is where we need to target." How do you spot those sorts of trends?

David - So, many of us at Frontier are gamers, me included, and we know where there are sort of games that we know we'd like, but don't exist anymore. I mean, there have been very few space games for a long time for at least a decade, and yet, they have been very successful in the past. So, there was an obvious gap. The games market is a funny beast. It's much like the films in some ways, in a sense that a lot of the very big publishers tend not to go for the gaps in the market. They tend to go for the big sellers in the market. So, we see lots and lots of games that are all frankly quite similar to each other, and then huge gaps where there's nothing. If you talk to the publishers, they say, "Well, we're not sure games in that gap are going to sell."

Chris - How much do you have to spend in order to get a game to market nowadays? The days of being able to sit in your living room and code up a little thing that someone would take away on a cassette tape and load into their home computer? I mean, they're clearly gone. What's the price tag for that investment to get a game onto a shelf?

David - Well, the cassette tape is gone, but the principle hasn't gone.

There are still games that one, two or three people have created in often literally, their back bedroom, although they are few and far between. I mean, if you look at the massive blockbuster likeMinecraft for example, it was created by a small number of people inMojang. They created that as a very simple game and very quickly, it grew into a fantastic, monster almost.

所以,它确实发生,整个区域街道d indie gaming where independent people have gone and created games. A lot of them don't do very well, but a few of them do really well. What's great is there's a lot of - it's where our new blood is coming from if you like - it's not a million miles from the sort of indie music scene of a decade or two decades ago, when we were a lot younger when experimental music - not all of it brilliant - but some of it was great and they turned into big bands. And so, I think what's happened is the whole games business has matured a lot. So, we're seeing lots of different kinds of things appealing to lots of different audiences, whether some are aimed at kids, some are aimed at adults, some are aimed at people who want experiences where you sit down for several hours, others where you have an experience where you play for 5 or 10 minutes on the bus.

Chris - The internet must've made a massive difference now. Because I remember as a kid, I would buy a computer game. It was a one-to-one experience, you and your computer. But now, we expect almost to be able to compete against the world when we play these games.

David - Yes, I think it's made a lot of differences. I mean, one example, if you look at the kinds of games that do well and the way people find them; sort of 10 years ago, most games would be bought in a shop on a disk because you couldn't really download it.

What that meant is the gatekeepers of what games get made were the people who owned the route market. So, you would go into a big shop and often, it was only the big distributors who could get their games into those shops. So, they determine what games were made and that tended to mean lots of games that were very similar like I mentioned earlier get made.

But what's great now is the internet has facilitated this sort of independent development that I mentioned because lots of companies including Frontier now can go directly to our players, to our fans. And that means we can make games that we know we want to make, What it's done is it smoothed the route to making the game directly. What it's meant is lots of new games that probably wouldn't otherwise have got made including games likeMinecraftand including games likeElite: Dangerousare now being made. What's happened? We suddenly now got a huge range of exciting things being made.

Brain training is a popular subset of games many people use daily, but is there anyevidence that gaming can actuallychangeour brains? And with younger people in particular so enamoured of video games, can we use this as a teaching tool to boost classroom learning? Duncan Astle researches this at the MRC's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, and he went over his findings with Chris Smith...

Duncan - Well, the evidence is mixed. So, the theory goes that we know there are lots of cognitive skills that are very important for learning in the classroom. For example, working memory - the ability to hold in mind and use small amounts of information - so, if I gave you a math sum to perform that would really tax your working memory. And the theory goes, that if I could generate some games that were fun, that children could play, that really tax their working memory skills, and by putting them through a kind of course of training, that ought to have knock-on benefits for learning. That's the theory at least.

Chris - That's the theory. So, what does the evidence actually say?

Duncan - It depends who you ask.

Chris - I'm asking you.

邓肯——我认为证据是可以得到的what we refer to as 'near transfer'. So, if you train children on working memory games for example, then you find that you can get benefits on similar but untrained working memory exercises. So, in our paper, what we were interested in is, what is the impact on children's brains that are being put through these kinds of intensive training exercises?

Chris - What did you get them to do and how did you measure them?

Duncan - So, we recruited around 30 or so children. We assessed their cognitive skills using some standard assessments that are used by teachers and educationists. We gave them a brain scan using a technique called magnetoencephalography, or MEG for short. The children were then sent off and while they were away they did 20 sessions of online games. The games were quite short. They were fun, but they all required the children to tax their working memory skills. Half the children did this kind of intensive working memory training regime and half the children did a placebo intervention. So, they played the same games for the same duration but the games were pegged at a low level. So, they're really quite straightforward. They didn't really make many demands on working memory. And then the children came back to the lab 4 to 6 weeks later. We retested them with everything and we found that the children who had had the intensive version, indeed, their working memory skills had significantly improved. The brain scans revealed that we could detect significant changes in their brains, particularly in the networks involved in attention - in memory. And they were significantly enhanced in the children that had had the intensive version relative to the controls.

Chris - To what extent do you think this is going to be a long term change? Or do you think that as soon as they stop playing the game or whatever they were doing then they're going to revert to where they started?

Duncan - Well, we know that these kinds of games are still measurable up to a year later. So, a year later, the children will have retained around 85 per cent of the gain that they made so it's quite substantial.

Chris - Do you think age is a factor as well? Do you think that people playing David's games for example need to be doing that from a young age to reap a benefit?

Duncan - The question of benefit is an interesting one. So, all we've shown is that if you give children games that tax these cognitive skills, they get better at similar but untrained skills. The theory is that the younger you are, the more plastic the brain ought to be and therefore, the gains ought to be bigger. But there's not been all that much work to support that. But the question of gains is a really interesting one because there are some people who argue that this kind of intensive training is the cure for all sorts of ills - problems with reading, problems with math, diagnosis of ADHD, what you need is working memory training. However, some of the evidence that's used to make those claims tends to be based on studies that aren't always so well designed. So, no control group or they've got a control group but they don't actually do anything, or the children aren't randomly allocated to groups. We know that these things can make a really big difference. When you do do a study with the kind of gold standard design, actually the benefits, the wider benefits of things like maths and reading, of this kind of working memory training is negligible.

Chris - Do you think that the critical thing is that the game, intrinsic to a game is fun? And therefore, if it's stimulating, it gets much better engagement because the children are having fun and it's because they've got that strong motivation and buy in and they engage with it very powerfully, that's why they get the cognitive benefit.

Duncan - I think that could well be the case. If you have the time to leaf through our paper then you'll see in the data there's a large degree of variability in how much of an improvement the children show. And I suspect that a big part of that is the extent to which they're motivated. The games are designed to fun and playable, the kind of thing that you enjoy doing. If you speak to the parents...

Chris - Well, unlike a maths lesson.

Duncan - Exactly. Math can be fun too, but if you speak to the parents and they say, "Actually, sometimes it was quite a chore to get the children to do these games." So, I think that intrinsic motivation is an important aspect of the kinds of benefits that they may get.

Duncan Astle, from the Cognition and Brains Sciences Unit in Cambridge, and David Braben, from Frontier Games, rejoin Chris Smith to discuss where video games are headed; how theInternet has changed things, and reminisce about their favourite games. First up; Duncan answers Victoria's question on whether a game can change your brain.

Duncan - I guess there's a good reason to suspect that there will be a significant change as a resul,t because we know that the brain changes as we experience the world around us. It's an incredibly adaptive system and it's designed to be that way. That's the way it's meant to work. The real challenge in this area was that it's exceptionally difficult to design good experiments. The classic way of studying it is to basically do a kind of correlational study, where you look at whether there is significant brain effects that are associated with how many hours you spent playing games and to conclude that those differences in the brain are likely caused by playing the game.

Chris - You're saying, is it cause or effect. "I'm good at those games because I get more reward from those games because I have a brain that makes me play them well?

Duncan - Yeah. It's really difficult to design really good studies that pull those things apart.

Chris - Now, this is a terrific one, David. Max tweeted, "When do you think eSports will be respected in the west and what will be the catalyst for that?" I suppose you should probably tell us first of all what eSports is.

David - Okay. For those who don't know what eSports is, it's playing games in a competitive way, often for prize money, in the same way, people do championships for darts or whatever, you do it with a computer game and the best player gets to win. Now, it's very, very big particularly in the East at the moment and it's taking also in the US, there are competitions.

Chris - And big prize money, isn't it?

大卫-绝对大奖金和补偿lling. Often online, the competitions are streamed so people watch them. They get big audiences. So, I think it's gradually increasing. But to answer the wider question, I think when games start to get respect, eSport gaming will get more respect. I think that's part of the issue. Gaming is generally played by - the average age of gamers has been going up steadily, but there is still an influential part of the population who don't get touched by gaming, whose image is the bleepy games from the 1980s. And they assume that's what gaming is like, but it's not the case.

Chris - A question from Philip for both of you. We'll start with Duncan. What's your favourite game and why? Did you have an Atari?

Duncan - We didn't have an Atari. The coolest thing in the world at that time, was that our dad had helped us to link two PCs together, which meant that we could both play against each other at the same time. We used to play a game calledDoom, which I don't know if it's still around, but it's a pretty violent shoot 'em up. We were oblivious kind of playing around, kind of shooting which we thought was great fun. I guess it stopped us tearing the living room apart.

Chris - David?

David - A very difficult one.

Chris - You're a bit conflicted because, obviously, you're almost honour-bound to name one of your own pieces of software!

David - Well, I have to nameElite: Dangerous, butElite: Dangerousaside, I think there are so many games I've got so much enjoyment out of through time that I really enjoyed games likeZelda, from a long time ago now. More recently, I think games likeSkyrimare very compelling, a game you can really immerse yourself in. All the way back to '80s, games like Defender from the arcades right in the start of the programme. So, I think I'd rather not actually give one answer because that's too easy.

Chris - Very diplomatic. Just briefly, withElite: Dangerous, you obviously had to move into the internet regime to make this a multiplayer game. How do you manage to bring all of these players together in real time across the internet when I know for a fact that my internet connection where I live is so shaky. There's no way I'm sending you data to your service fast enough to match everything up. How have you solved the problem of getting everyone to experience a smooth game play, like you have?

David - Well, we don't need a lot of data. The game will balance that sort of thing. To play, we mix a server traffic with peer-to-peer traffic, so from a technical point of view, some of the data is going directly between the two computers, some goes via our service. We have different modes. You can play solo, so you don't necessarily play online so much, but you still see the input of all the other people. And that goes just to our server and it's a very low speed data connection. So with all of these, it's sort of, to a degree, it's sort of horse's for courses. But the game itself also does some balancing. So overall, we've found it's been working very well.

克里斯,你以前对我提到你actually almost possibly discovered some new science withElite: Dangerousas well because when you modelled the galaxy, faithfully, it didn't look right.

David - Yes. The night sky you see in the game is actually drawn from all the objects that are stored in the game - if you like from the galaxy - and it didn't quite look like the night sky were really see. There were a lot more dark bits in the real night sky and the thing that's evident - if you just look at the galactic centre, towards the constellation Sagittarius, you see that there's a bright section of stars above and below. So, it looks like a sort of milky dust, the actual Milky Way. And that's because the middle section, whihc is actually the brightest bit of the galactic centre, is obscured by a large amount of dust. What we found we had to do is add way more dust than we're expecting to, to get it to match up. And it's interesting, it ties in with a lot of other scientific observations. So, over a period of about 22 million years, the sun oscillates through the galactic plane and extinction events actually coincide - there's a peak at roughly every 22 million years. So, it's quite probable, there is a lot of matter in the narrow galactic plane that ends up coming through our solar system, disrupting it. So, there is a lot to suggest that this is real science because we've matched it empirically with the real night sky.