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related to its mathematical and spatial computation capacities and the pos-
sible alternative uses these may receive.
On another occasion, the roles were inverted: the U.S. Air Force
expressed its discomfort when Sony decided to suppress the capacity of
its latest console, PlayStation 3, to run the Linux operating system. Why?
Because the air force uses a supercomputer composed of more than two
thousand consoles connected and processing in parallel to analyse satellite
images and for other national security tasks that, if processed by a super-
computer, would produce much higher costs (Marco 2010).
Images such as that of U.S. soldiers using Xbox 360 gamepads to control
robots that deactivate bombs in Iraq prove to what extent there is a perme-
ability between video game technology and other spheres of human life.
As a last example, we can consider the dif erent uses of Kinect, a sensor
recently commercialized with Microsoft's Xbox 360. This motorized camera,
equipped with lenses for dif erent frequencies of the light spectrum, is being
used by surgeons during operations to visualize scanners of the patient on a
suspended monitor and manipulate the images using gestures, so that they
do not have to abandon the sterilized space and it is unnecessary to spend
part of the budget on sterilizing computer equipment (Moretti 2011; further
examples are available at
http://tecnologia21.com/kinect-controla-robot an
d
We should also note that the video game industry is a highly competi-
tive industry in all aspects, but especially in its capacity for graphic repre-
sentation. This has been the obsession of companies like nVidia, ATI and
big video game corporations such as Nintendo and, above all, Microsoft
and Sony, whose most recent machines display tremendous graphic-pro-
cessing capacities. It can be argued that the standards of real-time render-
ing software and hardware are set by the world of video games, which has
managed to transfer this technology to other processes (military, medical,
industrial, etc.) where three-dimensional real-time representation is neces-
sary. This is also technological gamifi cation. Some researchers go even fur-
ther (and back) contending that video games themselves are responsible for
the invasion of our homes by the most sophisticated electrical appliance in
history (personal computers); once upon a time, washing machines were the
most complicated artefact to date. Video games entered our home with the
excuse that they could help thousands of students in their studies or help
do the home accounts, etc. Video games eventually accustomed us to a new
interface unknown to our civilization up to that point.
Another technological contribution of video games to other domains or
disciplines are the so-called
serious games
, a name that might be explained
by the guilty feeling that occurs when taking video games out of their
context of unproductive leisure; this feeling might be lessened by creat-
ing the label “serious games” (whose seriousness had been previously and
scornfully denied). In this respect, “a new study from the University of
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