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Hearing someone else on the train playing it reminds me...
One of the things Stacey brought home from GDC this year was a game called 'Brain Age'. The premise is that it's basically exercise for your brain, activating prefrontal cortex, memory, etc. It's number puzzles, counting exercises, syllable counting, memorization, that sort of thing. Kind of fun, and, let's face it. Who wouldn't want to be smarter?
So okay, the smartest people in the room are the Nintendo people, since I had to spend a fair chunk of money buying a DS to play it on, but that said, let's look at this 'game'.
It gives you different time-based tests you can do to focus on activating different parts of your brain. Math: A mix of simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems. Counting. Various exercises. Reading, and some interesting cognitive tests. Memory, word matching, etc. It mixes them up and throws them at you in different orders and complexities so you can't just learn one chunk and be done with it.
From what I heard, Steve Wright scored an 80 the first time he played and 23 the second on the 'quick test'. The best score is 20. I got a 42 my first try and 20 my second. What gives? No way I'm smarter than Steve Wright.
The answer lays in one of the more interesting things about the 'game'. The DS is an incredible toy! You can draw on it, talk to it, etc. The 'Brain Age' game uses these features. You have to match words by saying them (though you can request no spoken tests if you're in a noisy area) When you do the math problems, you write the answers on the screen. Same for the word-matching games, and obviously for the drawing games.
I'm a wiz with math and pretty fast on the other things but where I blew Steve Wright away is in my art skills. Not to say I'm a fantastic artist. I know I'm not, but I draw every day, I draw fast and gestural. I write by hand frequently. Wright, probably doesn't, and this is why my score was higher.
Anyhow, neat game, but I think maybe I am smarter than I give myself credit. I found that in very little time playing with it, I started being able to predict the sort of question it might ask me next. It's designed to burn associations into your brain. It does this in part by asking questions with similar data to both lull you and throw you.
For example. In the math questions, it might ask: 1+5=, 9-3=, 2*3=, and then 6*0 (It usually doesn't do 3 in a row like this, I'm giving an exagerated example)
Anyhow, the idea, is that you start to understand these all evaluate to the same thing, but just so you don't get overconfident, it then throws something that looks like it might yield the same answer, but of course, does not. I'm a little disappointed with the math section in that none of the answers ever exceed 2 digits, but these are also sort of the 'bottom level' tests. There are more challenging things further in.
Anyhow, all and all, kind of a fun toy. Does it make me smarter? I don't know, but at least it keeps me entertained.
One of the things Stacey brought home from GDC this year was a game called 'Brain Age'. The premise is that it's basically exercise for your brain, activating prefrontal cortex, memory, etc. It's number puzzles, counting exercises, syllable counting, memorization, that sort of thing. Kind of fun, and, let's face it. Who wouldn't want to be smarter?
So okay, the smartest people in the room are the Nintendo people, since I had to spend a fair chunk of money buying a DS to play it on, but that said, let's look at this 'game'.
It gives you different time-based tests you can do to focus on activating different parts of your brain. Math: A mix of simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems. Counting. Various exercises. Reading, and some interesting cognitive tests. Memory, word matching, etc. It mixes them up and throws them at you in different orders and complexities so you can't just learn one chunk and be done with it.
From what I heard, Steve Wright scored an 80 the first time he played and 23 the second on the 'quick test'. The best score is 20. I got a 42 my first try and 20 my second. What gives? No way I'm smarter than Steve Wright.
The answer lays in one of the more interesting things about the 'game'. The DS is an incredible toy! You can draw on it, talk to it, etc. The 'Brain Age' game uses these features. You have to match words by saying them (though you can request no spoken tests if you're in a noisy area) When you do the math problems, you write the answers on the screen. Same for the word-matching games, and obviously for the drawing games.
I'm a wiz with math and pretty fast on the other things but where I blew Steve Wright away is in my art skills. Not to say I'm a fantastic artist. I know I'm not, but I draw every day, I draw fast and gestural. I write by hand frequently. Wright, probably doesn't, and this is why my score was higher.
Anyhow, neat game, but I think maybe I am smarter than I give myself credit. I found that in very little time playing with it, I started being able to predict the sort of question it might ask me next. It's designed to burn associations into your brain. It does this in part by asking questions with similar data to both lull you and throw you.
For example. In the math questions, it might ask: 1+5=, 9-3=, 2*3=, and then 6*0 (It usually doesn't do 3 in a row like this, I'm giving an exagerated example)
Anyhow, the idea, is that you start to understand these all evaluate to the same thing, but just so you don't get overconfident, it then throws something that looks like it might yield the same answer, but of course, does not. I'm a little disappointed with the math section in that none of the answers ever exceed 2 digits, but these are also sort of the 'bottom level' tests. There are more challenging things further in.
Anyhow, all and all, kind of a fun toy. Does it make me smarter? I don't know, but at least it keeps me entertained.
