Zeros

I generally buy gift cards for online games, since they’re convenient to pick up while visiting the checkout lane at a store, but PayPal’s pretty convenient as well. I have Google Opinion Rewards (recommend it for iPhone, since the app on Android devices only transfer rewards to Google Play instead) linked to my PayPal, so then I could build up cash on PayPal and just buy any game I want.

Not a fan of Stadia (especially since Google operates it), but PlayStation Now seems the most eye-catching. Considering that most games these days cost $60, paying $60 for a yearly subscription with a library of hundreds of games seems like a pretty good deal. And as much as companies like Microsoft, Google, or Amazon might make every move to enter the video gaming market, you really can’t go wrong with an already established video game company like Sony.

I remember visiting dollar stores and seeing books filled with word search games. Pretty fun activity, especially on a rainy day. When it comes to creating word search games, I think computer-generated word searches are the way to go, especially if you can paste in a list of words and get an image of the word search with the words you want as an output; and it’s probably how most word search books are made (computer-generated) anyway.

I can definitely see how better communication and interaction can be a thing, especially in multiplayer games. Like in MMORPGs, sometimes there are people that only know one language, and the way they learn English is from playing video games with other people (and they usually become talented speakers). And in esports and competitive games, because there’s a lot of teamwork involved, communication is pretty much essential.

As for recovery in patients, I think it’s pretty neat how video games can be used in patients. In fact, one example that I know of at the top of my head is that some pediatric eye doctors use “PDI Check” for the Nintendo 3DS in children to test visual acuity, color vision, etc.

I think it’s always difficult to blame gaming to crimes to any region (not saying it’s never the case, but it’s usually a rare circumstance), because just about anything can be related to crimes. Statistics, given the proper sample size, can be helpful in determining dependence/independence of two different data, but it can also be misleading since correlation doesn’t equal causation.

Personally, I think video games is the least concern in violence and crime; the bigger concern is social media since it’s easier for like-minded people to communicate (especially privately) and act in ways they do, especially to garner attention which isn’t really something people do in video games (people play games just to have fun usually).

Mario Kart Tour’s pretty fun. One of my favorite things about Mario Kart, ever since Mario Kart 8, was the ability to play to play with friends, and it’s just so convenient being able to do that with a phone playing Mario Kart Tour.

Pokémon GO’s pretty nice, too, but it’s been a bit stagnant over the years, especially now that people are at home most of the time. And it’s no longer compatible on iPhone 6 models and below, but the release of new Pokémon has kept it moving along just fine.

Yahtzee’s one of my favorites; it’s so simple to play and it’s really just a game of probability. Dungeons and Dragons is fun too, but it can take a long time to finish the game. I find it harder to invest time in Dungeons and Dragons, because it requires finding a group of players that are willing to also invest time, so it’s really one of those games you would play on a blue moon.

I’m usually skeptical about where and how I store photos, but iPhoto doesn’t seem to be a bad option at all. As long as it’s not connected to the cloud where the company has access to your files, I could trust it, but it is unfortunate that it’s mainly for Mac. And I don’t think even the latest macOS (Catalina) supports iPhoto. But I’ll just stick to storing photos on a flash drive (probably a better alternative since it isn’t dependent on an OS, you can always encrypt a flash drive, and you don’t have to worry about losing photos if your computer gets compromised since everything’s on a flash drive).