Video Games

More on video games and the ways they may alter the brain: Researchers at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America reported Wednesday that young men's brains changed after playing violent video games for just a week. Dr. Yang Wang, a radiologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, and colleagues divided healthy men who were 18 to 29 years old and not frequent players of violent games randomly into two groups.  One group was asked to play a shooter video game for 10 hours over the course of a week and to refrain from playing the game for a second week.  The second group was instructed not to play any violent video games at all over the two-week period.

Top 10 U.S. Video Games in May 2011 (publisher) L.A. Noire (Take-Two Interactive Software) Brink (Bethesda Softworks) Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game (Disney Interactive) Portal 2 (Electronic Arts) Mortal Kombat 2011 (Warner Bros. Interactive) Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision Blizzard) Zumba Fitness (Majesco) NBA 2K11 (Take-Two) Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft) Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (LucasArts) Source: NPD Group Inc.

If you've got a kid who plays video games, you probably have concerns that he or she (probably he) spends too much time on them and might be viewing content not to your liking. Here are some tips for controlling your child's video game usage. • Play the games yourself: By doing so, you can check the content and talk it over with your child. "If you don't get involved and help kids learn to think critically about role models, activities and media content, then they're absorbing things unquestionably that you might want them to question," according to Common Sense Media, a nonprofit children and family advocacy group.

Today: DVDs and games DVD sales Top-selling movies of the week: 1 Marley & Me (Fox) 2 Bolt (Disney) 3 Twilight (Summit) 4 Slumdog Millionaire (Fox) 5 Seven Pounds (Sony) -- DVD rentals Most-rented movies of the week: 1 Marley & Me (Fox) 2 Seven Pounds (Sony) 3 Slumdog Millionaire (Fox) 4 Quantum of Solace (MGM) 5 Twilight (Summit) -- Video games Most-rented games of the week (with console, publisher): 1 Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360, Capcom) 2 Halo Wars (Xbox 360, Microsoft) 3 Wanted: Weapons of

If there's anything more American than a college football game, it's the marching band's halftime show. Baseball games don't have it. Pro football games rarely have it. Hockey games definitely don't have it. It's a beloved oddity of tuba-flavored Americana jammed halfway between four quarters of watching giant men batter one another. And despite the brutality of American football - where the athletes get bigger and faster every year and careers are brutish and short - marching bands have helped usher nerd culture into the mainstream.

The cast and creators of HBO's "Game of Thrones" were in San Francisco this week for the Season 3 premiere, which airs Sunday. But along with the return of the show, fans have also been handed a new GOT video game on Facebook called "Ascent" which is officially in "open beta. " The game had 100,000 people signed up waiting for it to finally launch in late February. And when it finally did, the stampede of users downloading it crashed the servers of the company that made it,   Boston-based Disruptor Beam.

Violence is at the heart of some of the most popular video games. Now the Supreme Court is going to decide whether California, home to many of the country's biggest game companies, can outlaw the sale to children of games in which people are maimed, killed or sexually assaulted. The video-game industry, which like the film industry runs a self-enforced rating system, has prevailed in 12 lower federal court rulings striking down state and local governments' attempts to regulate what types of games can be sold to minors.

Just as the credits are about to roll on Arnold Schwarzenegger's tenure as governor, Pepperdine University constitutional law professor Barry P. McDonald granted him an 11th-hour pardon for having gotten there by being so good at making ultraviolent action films. McDonald seemingly absolves the Governator for his on-screen murders, assaults and mayhem because he helped push to the U.S. Supreme Court an appeal defending an ambiguous law punishing sales of so-called violent video games to minors.