www.thepeninsulaqatar.com CAMPUS | 3 FOOD | 8 ENTERTAINMENT | 12 Namitha Niji of BPS Pure sweet taste Hrithik unveils secures first rank in at its most trailer of KEAM in Architecture appealing ‘Mohenjodaro’ WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2016 Email: [email protected] thepeninsulaqatar @peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatar MYTHS ABOUT VIDEO GAMES P | 4-5 Sorry, they’re probably not making you smarter. WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2016 | 03 CAMPUS College of Health Namitha Niji of BPS secures first Sciences students rank in KEAM in Architecture present research work ollege of Health Sciences, Bio- medical Science Department’s amitha Niji, student of Birla Public School (BPS) Csixteen students successfully Doha has topped the Kerala Engineering, Archi- presented their graduation research tecture & Medical Entrance Exam (KEAM) 2016 projects on 15–16 June 2016. NRank list in Architecture, which was published on Esra Moosa and Redwana Bari June 20. delivered their project “The effect The Architecture rank is decided considering the Class of iron depletion on chronic hepati- 12 marks and National Aptitude Test in Architecture (NA- tis C” stating that iron studies corre- TA) score with equal weightage. Namitha scored a total of lated significantly with the severity of 341.6 out of 400 marks. Earlier she scored 94.8 percent chronic hepatitis C. This retrospective in the CBSE board exams and 152 marks in NATA which is study was conducted in collaboration one of the highest marks in the national level. She joined with Hamad Medical Corporation and Birla Public School in her fifth grade in the year 2007. Her included 195 hepatitis C positive pa- ambition was to become an architect and was pursuing tients. Missbah Baji and Nadin Younes her goal working hard with her regular studies. under the supervision of Dr. Ibrahim She has already secured an admission in School of Mustafa presented their work “Effect Planning & Architecture (SPA), Delhi, a premier architec- of combine iron chelation therapy on ture institution in India. Her father, Niji Padma Gosh, is a iron overloaded Zepra fish”. Conclud- civil & structural engineer working in Qatar Project Man- ing the study Missbah Baji and Nadin agement (QPM) in Doha and her mother, Sreejaya, is an Younes stated that based on results architect working in Qatar Design Consortium (QDC). Her of the current study treatment with sister Nayana Niji is also a student in BPS in 10th standard. iron chelators either L1 or DFO dem- Chairman and Board of Directors, and whole of Bir- onstrated modestly decrease of total la Pariwar congratulates Namitha Niji on her excellent iron which might improve shelf life of achievement and wishes her grand success in all her fu- blood products and minimize oxida- ture endeavours. tive damage. Noble International School organises trip for students he KG, Primary and Preparatory Students of Noble International School were tak- en on school trip to different places like TDoha Toys Town, Jungle Zone and FBQ Museum where all the children explored them- selves and felt like being whisked away on a jet plane, deep into a jungle filled with roller coast- ers, amusement park rides and lots more. The Students also visited the Faisal Bin Qas- sim Museum as part of an educational tour which helped the students to probe, learn and understand the Qatar heritage and al- so observed the historical collages, jewelleries, paintings, weapons, skins and pelts of animals, calligraphies and many more. The students al- so enjoyed educating themselves about the fossils and were entertained and fascinated by the display of models of cars and bikes. 04 | WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2016 COVER STORY Five myths about video games frames that Stewart Brand covered a tournament at Stanford in 1972 for Rolling Stone. Annie Leibovitz took pic- tures. And the first home game con- sole was not Pong but Baer’s Magna- vox Odyssey, which went on sale in 1972, three years before Atari’s home version of Pong. It had table tennis in it, too. Pong was not even the first coin-operated arcade game from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. That distinc- tion goes to 1971’s Computer Space. 2. Video games are bigger than movies. Since the early 1980s, people have speculated that the popularity of in- teractive entertainment was hurting ticket sales at movie theaters. In 1982, the New York Times reported that vid- eo games grossed $8bn a year, “com- pared with about $3bn for all the mov- ies shown in theaters.” More striking, the paper reported that Pac-Man had “grossed about $1.2bn — three times as much as ‘Star Wars,’ history’s most popular movie, has earned in the five years since its initial release.” The claim By Chris Suellentrop that asked you for a quarter to play it. 1958, as the first true video game. that the size of the video-game indus- The Washington Post Like any medium, video games Tennis for Two was followed by try rivals or exceeds Hollywood has have many antecedents. Most experts Spacewar, designed by Steve Russell been a staple of mainstream news re- point to William Higinbotham’s Ten- and others at the Massachusetts Insti- porting for more than three decades. nis for Two, a demonstration creat- tute of Technology in 1962. Spacewar It’s true that Americans spent al- or decades, video games have ed for an open house at Long Island’s was popular enough among the com- most $24bn on video games last year, mystified people who don’t play Brookhaven National Laboratory in puter scientists who worked on main- compared with a measly $11bn on them. The New York Times Mag- movie tickets. But the theatrical box of- Fazine grappled in 1974 with the fice is not even close to the entire rev- emergence of the arcade game — call- enue stream for “movies” or “Holly- ing it “the space age pinball machine” — wood.” Americans spent an additional in Manhattan. What was this new coin- $18bn on home entertainment such as operated amusement? If not a kind Blu-rays, DVDs, iTunes and Netflix. of pinball, was it some sort of new- Sure, some of that money is spent fangled jukebox? Electronic foosball? to binge-watch TV shows instead of How much money was it making? Was movies. But we’re already $5bn ahead it addictive? Could it help sick people? of video-game revenue without con- Train air-traffic controllers? More than sidering the cost of (or the rights fees 40 years later, many of these ques- paid by) premium cable channels such tions are still with us. And some dura- as HBO. The video-game numbers are ble myths remain extremely difficult to inflated, too, by the inclusion of sales of dispel. hardware, such as consoles and con- trollers. The home entertainment fig- 1. Pong was the first video game. ures don’t include the cost of things like Blu-ray players or universal re- Despite numerous debunkings, the motes. idea that Pong was first persists. A More important, dollars aren’t peo- headline in Vanity Fair illustrates this ple. Here’s some rough math: When common misconception: “The Origins Grand Theft Auto V makes $1bn, it’s be- of the First Arcade Video Game: Atari’s cause 20 million people, give or take, Pong.” have bought the game. When “The Pong was a huge commercial suc- Force Awakens” makes $1bn, it’s be- cess, one that helped turn a nascent cause 100 million tickets were sold, medium into mass entertainment. But more or less. Even if every ticket buy- it wasn’t the first arcade game, nor was er saw the new “Star Wars” twice, it the first home video game that you and every Grand Theft Auto V player could hook up to your TV. Pong wasn’t shared the game with another mem- even the first video-game version of ber of their household, the Lucas film table tennis — it was just the first one movie would still come out ahead. WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2016 | 05 COVER STORY 3. They’re for men. 1982, “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” actions, and at worst merely prove was the nonviolent Dance Dance Revo- hosted a debate on PBS over wheth- that looking at an image of an explo- lution. At least since Steven Johnson’s According to a Pew Research Cent- er games like Space Invaders were too sion makes you think about explosions. “Everything Bad Is Good for You” was er survey published in December, 60 violent and taught children not to re- Many video games, including Pac-Man, published in 2005, video-game play- percent of Americans believe that spect the value of human (not merely could be called “violent” under the ers have proudly declared that their “most people who play video games alien) life. These concerns aren’t base- vague definitions psychologists often hobby may look childish and brutish, are men.” Top-selling games such as less. A review of the scientific literature, use. Frustration or competition, rather but it’s actually changing their brains Call of Duty and Madden NFL tend to conducted by an American Psycho- than violent imagery, might be leading for the better. be marketed to men, and almost three logical Association task force, found a to the heightened feelings of aggres- times as many men describe them- “well established” link between violent sion, these researchers say. 5. They’re making us smarter. selves as “gamers” (15 percent of men video games and short-term increases Hundreds of scholars signed an compared with 6 percent of women). in aggression. People who play violent open letter in 2013, when the task force And they might not be wrong. “Ac- The latest data from the Entertain- games in laboratory settings are will- began its work, to protest that media- tion games” — mostly first-person ment Software Association, the lob- ing to administer, say, more hot sauce effects research has well-known meth- shooters — have been found in a bying arm of the video-game indus- to a stranger, or a louder blast of noise, odological issues and that “responsi- number of studies to improve hand- try, does indicate that the majority of than people who don’t play violent ble scholars” may conclude that violent eye coordination and spatial thinking.