Video Games

When Mike Bemiss was looking for a new video game to buy, he hopped on a site operated by Gaikai Inc. and clicked on "Dragon Age 2. " Within seconds, the 37-year-old engineer from Erie, Pa., was able to play the game right from his browser — with no download, no game console and no credit card. He liked it so much that he bought the game, along with the previous game in the series. Headed by industry veteran David Perry, Aliso Viejo-based Gaikai operates a streaming service that is like Netflix for games.

The maker of the international online video game hit "League of Legends" will move to a five-building office campus in West Los Angeles after signing what was described as the biggest new office lease in Southern California in five years. Up-and-coming video game publisher Riot Games Inc. has agreed to rent all 284,000 square feet in the Element LA creative office campus being built on Olympic Boulevard between Bundy Drive and Centinela Avenue. Riot Games makes only the one game so far, but it operates around the clock.

I had been with him through a wardrobe door to Narnia, and down a rabbit hole to Wonderland. So when my 12-year-old son disappeared into a television screen beyond my calls for dinner, curiosity led me to explore the world that lay on the other side. I come back transformed by both wonder and horror, as I believe our children do. I had vastly underestimated the significance of that journey, as I believe most parents do. The PacMan wave came and went. A second wave has hit like a tsunami.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. says a "technical error" caused its website to offer absurdly low pricing Wednesday morning, touching off a buying frenzy that was fueled by bargain hunters on social media. Many products were listed at more than 90% off, with televisions and computer monitors supposedly going for $8, video games for $18, treadmills for $33. Word of the deals spread quickly. "Spent $300 on $5800 (retail pricing) of product on the Walmart ordeal. Hopefully it goes through.

For the last two decades, video game movies have been so bad that the genre itself has become shorthand for failure. So when French game publisher Ubisoft, best known for its "Assassin's Creed" series and Tom Clancy-branded military games, decided to take a stab at movies, the company didn't search for a Hollywood expert to be its partner. Ubisoft decided to hire him. Jean-Julien Baronnet, chief executive of the 2-year-old Ubisoft Motion Pictures unit, takes a hands-on approach to translating his company's intellectual property from interactive to linear media.

Blockbuster Inc. plans to allow some customers to rent video games on the Internet. The pilot program will begin during the second quarter and be available to subscribers of its Total Access service. Blockbuster plans to make online video-game rentals available nationally in the second half of the year, the Dallas-based company said.

National Geographic, best known for its yellow-framed magazine and often breathtaking nature shows, is getting into video games. National Geographic Ventures, a unit of the nonprofit National Geographic Society, will work with game publishers to turn its material into games for PCs, consoles and hand-held devices. "Our content is extremely well-suited for a global gaming audience," said Paul Levine, the National Geographic executive who will lead the new games division. The games will be drawn from a broad range of content and themes across National Geographic's properties.

Electronic Arts Inc. on Tuesday canceled Tiberium, a spinoff of its popular Command & Conquer franchise of shooter games, and said it would lay off an unspecified number of employees at its Playa Vista office. "The game was not on track to meet the high quality standards set by the team and by the EA Games label," EA spokeswoman Miriam Sughayer said. Sughayer said the Redwood City, Calif., developer would strive to place most of the affected workers into other EA projects. "This is not about cutting back financially," she said.

Yahoo Inc. will offer 400 free, advertising-supported games to increase revenue. Yahoo will use Double Fusion Inc.'s marketing technology and NeoEdge Networks' ad networks to sell and place video spots in the downloadable games, the company said.

After putting in a full day at his computer technician job, a 30-year-old Internet game player known as Ebaid went home, logged on to a game called "EverQuest" and started his night job. His game character donned armor, slapped on his sword and began slaying beasts so he could make some real money. Hail the rise of yet another strange creature of the Internet revolution--the professional online game hunter. Ebaid played for hours, slaying every computer-generated monster on his screen.

Activision Blizzard Inc. is one of the world's largest publishers of video games. The Santa Monica company produces games that are used on PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360, personal computers, mobile phones and other hand-held devices. Two of its most popular games are the war-themed "Call of Duty," and "World of Warcraft," a role-playing game set in a fantasy world. It's a big business. In 2012, the company released "Call of Duty: Black Ops II," which set video game sales records with more than $1 billion of retail sales within 15 days of its launch, the company said.

Tom Clancy, who died Tuesday at age 66, was an author who created imaginary stories from the raw material of a real world in conflict. His audience seemed to grow exponentially as he conquered one media platform after another. In his 1984 debut, "The Hunt for Red October," he proved himself a master of the late Cold War espionage novel, with assorted Russian generals and commissars as his foils. But his fictional creations also took life in movies, television programs and even in a series of video games to which he lent his name.

For the better part of four years, former college athletes have been fighting in court to be compensated for the popular video games that bear their likenesses and jersey numbers. Now they have won a partial victory. On Thursday, attorneys for the players announced a settlement that will pay tens of thousands of former athletes -- if not more -- for games that included their likenesses dating to 2003. Even before the agreement, Electronic Arts had announced the discontinuation of its “NCAA Football” series. The amount it will now pay -- which was not disclosed -- must be approved by a judge.

The day after our first date, I received a letter grade. "A+," she texted. We had gone from the Internet to real life in two days, and one 10-hour first date had me hooked. I actually had been hooked hours before when, nearing 2 a.m., she was in the midst of a rant defending the length of Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" and I interrupted it with a kiss. She recalled the moment at brunch on our second date. "I was talking about 'The Hobbit' like a crazy person, and I thought this guy is either going to run or kiss me, and you kissed me. " My mind keyed in on the either/or phrasing, which implied that she too had been anticipating the kiss.

Despite the growth of Netflix, Amazon.com and other legal channels for watching entertainment online, the volume of pirated movies, TV shows, music, books and video games online continues to grow at a rapid pace. The amount of bandwidth used for copyright infringement in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific has grown nearly 160% from 2010 to 2012, accounting for 24% of total Internet bandwidth, according to a study from NetNames, the British brand protection firm. At the same time, the number of people engaged in copyright infringement has grown dramatically too. In January2013, 327 million unique users illegally sought copyrighted content, generating 14 billion page views on websites focused on piracy, up 10% from November 2011, according to the report.

Video games aren't just for the young - they can improve declining brain function in the old and elderly, according to a new study published in Nature. The findings by a team of UC San Francisco researchers show that the aging brain is a lot more robust than it's often given credit for, given the right type of mental exercise. The findings “provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, of how a custom designed video game can be used to assess cognitive abilities across the life span, evaluate underlying neural mechanisms, and serve as a powerful tool for cognitive enhancement,” the study authors wrote.

The amount of time young people spend consuming media has ballooned with around-the-clock access and mobile devices that function practically as appendages, according to a new report. Young people now devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to daily media use, or about 53 hours a week -- more than a full-time job -- according to Kaiser Family Foundation findings released today. A few years ago, the same researchers thought that teens and tweens were consuming about as much media as humanly possible in the hours available.

Despite the growth of Netflix, Amazon.com and other legal channels for watching entertainment online, the volume of pirated movies, TV shows, music, books and video games online continues to grow at a rapid pace. The amount of bandwidth used for copyright infringement in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific has grown nearly 160% from 2010 to 2012, accounting for 24% of total Internet bandwidth, according to a study from NetNames, the British brand protection firm. At the same time, the number of people engaged in copyright infringement has grown dramatically too. In January2013, 327 million unique users illegally sought copyrighted content, generating 14 billion page views on websites focused on piracy, up 10% from November 2011, according to the report.

U.S. consumer spending on video games fell in the second quarter as fewer titles were released and players anticipated the release of new consoles, said research firm NPD Group in a report Thursday.  In the three months that ended in June, Americans spent a total of $2.88 billion on video game content, down about 3% from the same period last year. The decline reflected the decreased number of newly released games, the firm said. There were 37% fewer new titles in the quarter compared with last year.

When I first heard that a group of Berkeley fourth-graders were using Minecraft as part of a campaign to help a classmate who had been deported, I didn't need much convincing to write about their story . That's because in my home, Minecraft has become a dominant presence. My son, a fifth-grader, and my daughter, a third-grader, are consumed by Minecraft -- and so are many of their classmates. PHOTOS: Biggest tech flops of 2013 -- so far But what's truly amazing is that Minecraft has become one of the bestselling games of all time by defying much of the conventional wisdom about what it takes to make a hit video game these days.