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Report on software for brain training

March 11th, 2008 (Visited 2617 times) Tags: serious games

Not “game industry” per se, but games are what drive this market right now. Pretty interesting.

» Report: The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008 « Brain Fitness Revolution at SharpBrains

5) Over 400 residential facilities for older adults have launched computerized “brain fitness centers.” Sales to the healthcare and insurance provider segment grew from $35 million in 2005 to an estimated $65 million in 2007.6) More than five programs have shown results in randomized controlled trials. Cognitive functions that can be trained include: visual and auditory processing, working memory, attention, and decision-making.

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9 Responses to “Report on software for brain training”

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Kerri Knight said on March 12th, 2008 at 11:18 am:
A retirement community I used to work for bought a Wii shortly before I left. They can’t get it from one meeting room to another fast enough for all the people wanting to reserve a few hours on it with their social group. Folks who wouldn’t dare pick up a 12lb. bowling ball can play again, when its under 20 degrees and 6 inches of snow are on the ground, they can still play golf, etc.
You haven’t lived until you’ve seen 60-80 year olds squealing and giggling like children when someone gets a strike!
Revenge of the ignored demographic?
len said on March 12th, 2008 at 12:21 pm:
Nope. Gaming bringing happiness to everyone. Jane McGonigal gets two points.
len said on March 13th, 2008 at 6:19 am:
This is interesting to this thread and the cross-gender thread:
A group of Stanford University researchers, for example, recently found gender differences in the brains of computer gamers. Males showed more neural firings, suggesting that they were physically experiencing the game in a manner different from women.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120527756506928579-3wNdJRXhkpLqY4EDBt4j3ly1foo_20090312.html?mod=rss_free
Kerri Knight said on March 14th, 2008 at 8:59 am:
Much like with the studies shown at GDC, I have to ask ‘what kind of gameplay was tested?’. Was it fighting games, killing stuff, territorial control? I’m not contesting the results per se, but I’d wager that it means typical women find much of the gameplay out there not so engaging.
On the other hand (warning, anecdotal evidence!), I typically found it was women who organized songs, dance routines, and made the social connections to get successful entertainer troupes going in SW:G. Inside the average static city cantina, the closer to naked you were the more business you’d get (and being a buff-bot helps disarm insecure males from worrying about the players’ gender). However, when it came to putting actual shows on, the ladies were always hammering down loose nails like the stereotypical male raid leader checking consumables and loot priorities before a run.
Yes, 18-30 males should be worried, some day designers will figure out there are other people on the planet!
len said on March 14th, 2008 at 10:16 am:
I agree. That was the case in Cybertown too. Women organized those concerts. It was great fun but it also clued me into how little the behaviors differed from what I saw in meatspace gigs. I kept my then 10 year old son next to me at the keyboard to sort out which of the girls inviting me into the private chats were actually pre-teens. He could spot them by their screen names. Not a perfect filter but it worked well enough.
So you think good entertainment (good music, well-choreographed dance gestures, online live plays, etc.) can make a difference? I can see that in virtual worlds (don’t know how that works in games). It was what I hoped back in the 90s online worlds would evolve toward once the virtual sex began to bore.
Not that I’m opposed to buff bots. I’m a more of a chubby fan.
Kerri Knight said on March 14th, 2008 at 11:26 am:
I should clarify a bit. Buff-bot can be used as a term of endearment to refer to someone who provides beneficial enhancements to players. In SW:G, it came to be used more negatively to identify those who loaded up their character, turned on a scripted macro and dispensed them with cold computer precision unattended. It drove down the value of buffs, since they could service whole groups and there was no collection enforcement with nobody at the controls.
Entertainers came to be treated like NPCs by a decent segment of the population. ‘Buff me plz’ was commonly the only social interaction you’d get from them, having been trained to receive a reward for right clicking and hitting invite. In fact having to ask for the buff at all is an annoyance they only have to put up with when dealing with an at-the-keys entertainer.
The buffing system is much different now and requires active involvement from both participants (barring 3rd party mods which are against the EULA) and provides for building a custom buff mix per the customer’s needs. This also gives you something to talk about, even if a bit mechanical. Then there’s how easily a request for armor buffs segues so well into “oh, sounds like you’re going someplace dangerous”, a guaranteed tip increaser :9!
Anyways, I’m not as upset as I used to be about the issue, since developers seem to be working out the emergent issues like many of the ‘established’ game play models had to go through and it is/will mature. Although more games including social modes like those would be helpful in speeding up the process!
Crafting is another example, and often came down to traditional gender market roles. Women excelled at tailors and architects not from superior resource collection or factory efficiency, but again from the social level. Custom outfits on the spot, one tailor, one crafting robot, one cantina full of very badly outfitted males. One hour later, 20 much more coordinated looking folks, several thousand credits richer. Is your house looking spartan? Who’s gender dominates arranging domestic settings? Weapons, armor, and food/drinks (consumable buffs) came down to more of the traditional min/max kind of decisions about what works best for combat gameplay.
So you think good entertainment (good music, well-choreographed dance gestures, online live plays, etc.) can make a difference?
People willingly missed shuttle trips to /cheer, /clap, chat with us, crawl through the fog from our effects bots, etc if we performed inside the starport rotunda. One night, about a month into my playing the game, we actually got all but a couple of entertainers in a cantina to organize. In the grand scheme of the complexity you could design into the routines, we did some very simple tricks. We laid the band out in an interesting way, horn section lined up, big Nalargon in the middle, etc. The dancers line up 4 and 3 wide, 2 deep. We did some simple band flourishes and manually timed effects. About 30 minutes later my framerate was at about 3 FPS because the normally transient population of cantina frequenters was all backed up and there were about 80 people in the room, chat bubbles everywhere (social environment!). “OMG this is awesome guyzzz!”, “wow! party in here”, “how are you guys doing that, thats amazing”
The next step after that: “Will you guys come do a show at my city?”
When people are paying 6+ figure contracts to the best troupes to come to their player events, when a city built around a troupe even after the troupe officially dissolves puts on 2 jams a week seeing dozens at a time and hundreds over the course of the evening, I’d say thats my equivalent to downing Illidan or ‘beating’ whatever game. The ability to motivate hundreds of people to alter their behavior, even just for 5 minutes, with the tools we were given was always incredible fun!
len said on March 14th, 2008 at 1:39 pm:
That’s incredible, Kerri. It was never that good in the old daze of vr.
It seems there would be an emerging industry for pros who know how to set those events up, coordinate, have libraries of effects, etc. Maybe you and yours should hook up with Morgan’s people to manage that kind of thing.
Me, I’m just getting around to putting songs on YouTube. Real late adopter of that tech but I like it.
Ingrod said on March 15th, 2008 at 12:32 am:
Oh, SW:G continues being great for things how that!
Yes, 18-30 males should be worried, some day designers will figure out there are other people on the planet!
For luck to me Im 34 years old now xD
An interesting question is how women can deal with the theoric male 18-30 content?
A diplomatic/social system for conquer or controling territories and economic resources without body to body fight? In real life many enpowered womens have important political and economic roles, controlling countrys and finances, why not in games?
Can we imaginated a game enviroment where women and men (or older and younger players) can play for the same objetives, buth with different paths to accomplish these objetives?
Kerri Knight said on March 15th, 2008 at 6:04 pm:
Can we imaginated a game enviroment where women and men (or older and younger players) can play for the same objetives, buth with different paths to accomplish these objetives?
Even better, how about multiple objectives in the same setting?
What you’re asking is important, though, because a lot of social gameplay elements don’t work as well in linear games where all the reward goes to those on the track. In the sandbox worlds, people tend to promote their own goals and negotiate exchanges that are mutually beneficial. Play styles with no mechanical game support do well through secondary and tertiary reward schemes supplied by those involved in the primary incentive structures. Another result of this is currency gets spread around, reducing the divide between haves and have nots that usually grows into rich-get-richer problems in linear models. Thats all great for established groups, but I think there should be some basic income support from the game. I can’t tell you how many new entertainers I adopted until they were on their feet once the buff-bots were hogging all of the tipping business (and the age-old problem of how to sell low-level services on a server/shard that has matured to ‘endgame’ level).
People want to tickle different areas of their brains. Whether thats wrapped up in a social, combat, or crafting metaphor matters just as much. Generating combinations of styles and mixed with multiple objectives each with multiple ways of reaching them, all in a shared reality would be a daunting task.
Is it too ambitious to ask for?

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