Cutting up ships in space, exploring accessibility in Minecraft with BuildAbility, playing games may boost your cognitive function.

Space salvage game Hardspace: Shipbreaker gets full release

Vancouver’s Blackbird Interactive has pulled Hardspace: Shipbreaker out of early access and into full release.

Available for Windows computers through Steam and Xbox PC Game Pass, Shipbreaker puts you in the spacesuit of a salvage operative, contracted to float around the vacuum of space, cutting up derelict and abandoned spaceships and collecting the valuable parts.

There’s a story here that deals with some interesting ideas, like servitude to a corporation, dangerous working conditions, a dystopic future, but the real fun comes in figuring out how best to carve things up without killing yourself in the process.

There are so many ways to die. If you lose your tether you’ll just float away. If your cutting torch gets too close to a fuel cell, things explode. If you don’t plan your movements, you could get pinned between parts that are floating around.

With uncanny physics and massive ships, Hardspace is a delight to play. You’ll have to upgrade your equipment in order to consider more difficult contracts, because you’ve got a debt to pay, and it’s not getting any smaller.

Exploring what accessibility means in the world with Minecraft BuildAbility

Minecraft’s Education Edition has another essential world for kids to explore.

BuildAbility was developed in partnership with Ontario’s Peel District School Board (serving the municipalities of Brampton, Caledon, and Mississauga) and based on the lived experiences of students who confront barriers to accessibility every day.

The world focuses on accessibility and building inclusive spaces. After learning about the five types of barriers – attitudinal, information/communication, organizational/systemic, physical, and technological – students will explore spaces in the Minecraft world and be tasked with redesigining and rebuilding spaces to make them “accessible for all”.

Educators get access to a full lesson plan which includes learning objectives and student activities.

Research shows that playing video games can enhance cognitive skills

A new survey of research into the effect of playing video games on the cognitive functioning of adolescents shows that doing so can improve executive function as measured by memory, attention, and task switching tests.

Published in European Psychologist, the article, Effects of media multitasking and video gaming on cognitive functions and their neural bases in adolescents and young adults, the authors reviewed research from about the past ten years.

The authors from the University of Helsinki contrast video game play with other passive screen time such as TikTok and “excessive media multitasking”, which “may lead to enhanced distractibility and problems in maintaining attention”.

They did not include in their survey research into gamers who were diagnosed with disorders characterized by an inability to manage game time. People who prioritize gaming over everything else and for whom that interferes with sleep, school, and physical activity actually have more social and mental health problems than the norm.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, study co-author Mona Moisala talked about a study she conducted in 2017 investigating the impact of gaming on cognitive performance of adolescents.

“Parents shouldn’t think their kids should go out and start playing videogames to get a cognitive advantage, if they aren’t already,” Dr. Moisala told Julie Jargon. “But parents also shouldn’t worry about gaming frying kids’ brains or making them zombies, because that’s not true.”