Games for Brains

Exploring the smart side of video games.

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This week GAB are looking at the benefits of gaming. We’ve almost drowned ourselves in discussing race and geek girls - and it’s high time we had a nice break to feel warm and fuzzy.

Lets remind ourselves of not only why we love gaming, but why it can be good for us.

We’ll be posting and linking things like the one above (source: http://visual.ly/gaming-good-you) here, and on our Twitter, Facebook & Website. And you can share your questions and stories with us by dropping us an Ask.

Merry Gaming :)

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Me and my sibilings are homeschooled,  and you know what taught my little brother to read/ write? Minecraft. He plays on servers and had to learn how to talk to people on the chats

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I’m a proud volunteer w/GAB. Follow to stay on top of all things awesome :)

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**Hearts and minds meet through video games** NBCNews made this nice video report explaining gamers are far from asocial.

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**MegaCity for iOS, free this weekend** MegaCity is a puzzle game nicely dressed up with a city building theme. Different buildings provide positive or negative score to surrounding tiles and your goal is to strategically place them, so that the citizens living in houses and apartments bring in enough points to progress through the game. While we don't have time to write a full review yet, we wanted to let you know there's a few hours left to grab MegaCity 1.6 for free from the [AppStore](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/megacity-hd/id452535701?ls=1&mt=8).

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Have you ever though packing a suitcase is like playing Tetris? Well, this guys have!

Pack This! is a free game from Vivity Labs, part of their online brain gaming platform Fit Brains.

The game changes between packing bigger and bigger suitcases and a rush mode where you just have to identify the correct piece as fast as possible. We're having much fun with it around the office.

Play free in your browser.

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TETRIS T-shirt

(via Frog Port スタッフブログ | テトリス MADE ME SMART Ｔシャツ)

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We can't agree more! :)

[gamesforbrains]

A culture without play

Psychology Today writes about a tribe where play is shameful. The famous British anthropologist Gregory Bateson wrote that they lived “a drab and colorless existence.”

The Baining believe, quite correctly, that play is the natural activity of children, and precisely for that reason they do what they can to discourage or prevent it. They refer to children’s play as “splashing in the mud,” an activity of pigs, not appropriate for humans. They do not allow infants to crawl and explore on their own. When one tries to do so an adult picks it up and restrains it. Beyond infancy, children are encouraged or coerced to spend their days working and are often punished—sometimes by such harsh means as shoving the child’s hand into the fire—for playing. On those occasions when Fajans did get an adult to talk about his or her childhood, the narrative was typically about the challenge of embracing work and overcoming the shameful desire to play. Part of the reason the Baining are reluctant to talk about themselves, apparently, derives from their strong sense of shame about their natural drives and desires.

This is a real life example of something we usually see in dystopian movies like Equilibrium, but still it's not too dissimilar to how adults change as they grow up and start considering play as a waste of time.

It's a thoughtful article and I recommend you read it in full.

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What does mom think about latest game trailers?

Mike Meyers of GamesBeat sat down with his mother to ask her just that. Below is the commentary she had for the latest Call of Duty game, but see all five of them in context as they are pretty sweet and special.

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What does mom think about latest game trailers?

Mike: Alright, this one is for Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

Mom: [Sarcastically] Oh, this sounds good. Is it like the other Call of Duties?

Mike: Yeah.

Mom: Oh, I’m not going to like this.

Mike: What do you know about Call of Duty?

Mom: You kill people! No wonder our country’s gone to pot.

[David S. Goyer's credit appears. He's the story writer and previously worked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.]

Mom: It’s the same guy who made Batman?

Mike: Well, he wrote the story.

Mom: Oh.

Mike: Do you know what’s going on?

Mom: No. I have no idea. It’s always good versus evil. Is this a war movie?

Mike: Yes.

Mom: Another war movie?

Mike: Game!

Mom: What?

Mike: It’s a game. Not a movie.

Mom: Well, whatever.

Mike: It’s in the future, though.

Mom: Oh. Well, I won’t be here.

[The trailer ends.]

Mom: Now how much does this one cost?

Mike: They all cost $60.

Mom: Oh my!

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Harvard scientists map the inside of the human brain as a magnetic resonance scanner builds the first 3D interior maps of the brain

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This is amazing to see, so many neurons.

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A study performed by the Gains Through Gaming Lab in the Department of Psychology at the North Carolina State University shows that playing World of Warcraft improves cognitive performance of seniors.

Comparing the cognitive functioning test scores of participants in the experimental and control groups, the researchers found the group that played WoW saw a much greater increase in cognitive functioning, though the effect varied according to each participant’s baseline score.

“Among participants who scored well on baseline cognitive functioning tests, there was no significant improvement after playing WoW – they were already doing great,” McLaughlin says. “But we saw significant improvement in both spatial ability and focus for participants who scored low on the initial baseline tests.”

Full report here.

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Playing games is awesome, but we need to be responsible players, aware of how our brain works and that some games are designed with that very knowledge in mind. Learn more in The Atlantic:

Exploiting the Neuroscience of Internet Addiction

Thanks to neuroscience, we're beginning to understand that achieving a goal or anticipating the reward of new content for completing a task can excite the neurons in the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain, which releases the neurotransmitter dopamine into the brain's pleasure centers. This in turn causes the experience to be perceived as pleasurable. As a result, some people can become obsessed with these pleasure-seeking experiences and engage in compulsive behavior such as a need to keep playing a game, constantly check email, or compulsively gamble online.

The article closes with good advice:

I'm learning that to function effectively and happily in an increasingly virtual world, I have to commit a significant amount to time to living without it.

That's what we always say. Play games for a while, then go get some fresh air, read a book, call a friend. Games are great, but so are many other things. We need to be in control of how we spend our time.

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Gamify Your PhD

This initiative has a very cool aim to illustrate complicated PhD research with games!

The Wellcome Trust has launched an initiative -- called Gamify Your PhD -- to bring together researchers with developers in order to create games that explore the latest developments in biomedicine.

Researchers are invited to send their ideas about how their PhD research could be illustrated through a game. In order to inspire them, Mobile Pie (with the advice of Wired.co.uk editor Nate Lanxon) has created an interactive embeddable guide to basic gaming mechanics, featuring 16-bit minigames. These include a Darwin-inspired survival-of-the-fittest pigeon game, a Mendel genetics puzzle game, a game based on Asch's work on conformity and a Newton-targeting apple physics game.

Read the full coverage on Wired.

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How Washington Learned to Love Video Games

Video games have come a long way in their fight for the status as both artistically respectable medium as well as a positive cultural influence.

And just like film, rock music, and comic books before them, video games are no longer merely tolerated, but embraced by Washington, from the formation of a new congressional caucus to the placement of campaign ads on XBox games to the entombing of a Commodore 64 behind plexiglass at the Smithsonian.



"This exhibition could not have happened at any other point in history than right now," declares Smithsonian curator Chris Melissinos. "For the first time we have gamers raising gamers. I believe, from this point forward, you are going to see a greater more rapid appropriation and acceptance of video games as anything from art to a worthwhile pursuit."

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New tool in cancer research: Video games

MSNBC made a video about the puzzle game Foldit, which takes the Folding@home concept of discovering new proteins one step further. Instead of relying on raw computational power they are trying to see if humans' spatial reasoning and problem solving can outperform the computers in the search to cure AIDS, cancer and Alcheimer's.

A video game called FoldIt is helping researchers at the University of Washington discover new proteins that can be used for anything from cancer research to genetic therapy. The developers behind FoldIt believe that it could one day be used to solve even more complex problems, like global warming or poverty.

Download the game free on Windows, OSX and Linux: Foldit

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Mars Rover Landing game releases on Xbox

As NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity is coming closer to landing on Mars on August 6, the agency has released a free game for Xbox 360 in collaboration with Microsoft. The experience allows users to take control of their own spacecraft using Kinect and face the extreme challenges of landing a rover on Mars.

Available at Xbox Live Marketplace: Mars Rover Landing

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Games for Brains Begins

Hey guys!

Welcome to our little corner of the Internet where we talk about games that your neurons will be happy to play. You can find more about our mission on the about page.

Long story short, we're creating Brain Center, an app for discovering thinking games and getting the most out of them with brain training.

What's brain training you say? Well, it's like going to fitness to keep your body fit, but for brains — only it's way more fun because with Brain Center you do it by playing games, something you're already doing, right? Win-win!

Follow us if you love video games and want to learn how playing is actually good for you. We'll throw in great game recommendations in there as well.