Entry tags:

jambar

severed heads make you smarter
After about twenty years of playing video games, I have learned the following:

• red barrels explode
  
• no brick should remain unpunched
  
• collecting 100 of anything is beneficial
  
• living things usually blink just before/upon death
  
• girls dislike video games
  
• girls also dislike men who play video games

I’ve also learned that little of this knowledge is applicable to real life, unless you happen to be a cooper who works with dynamite, or perhaps if you have a vendetta against masonry - I’ve buried that hatchet years ago. Video games, while fun, are really just time-wasters, and the educational ones most of us played in childhood were so tedious that uttering the title “Number Munchers” to someone who played it can trigger night terrors.

Brain Age, a “brain training” program for the Nintendo DS, seeks to remedy this problem. Developed by neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, Brain Age finally gives video games a purpose beyond teaching angsty middle-schoolers how important it is to always aim for the head.

The pace of gameplay in Brain Age resembles Nintendo’s “Wario Ware” series, with lightning fast speed and perception from the player being the key to success. But instead of the numerous crazy tasks from “Wario,” you’re instead asked to do speed math and take reading tests. If someone told me that one day I would actually enjoy performing math drills in video game format, I would’ve probably punched them in the face for such blasphemy. Now that I get a rush out of remembering what 9 times 7 is, I’m afraid that I have a lot of apologies and out-of-court settlements to make.

Brain Age offers two main modes: training and the brain age test. Training offers a series of exercises, including speed math, speed reading, and tests of both counting and memory. The real strength of the program comes from the motivation received from continuing it every day. If you play on a regular basis, the floating head of Dr. Kawashima – the mascot of the game whose decapitation is somehow not unsettling – will reward you with encouragement and new activities. He also chastises you for staying up late (thanks to the DS’s internal clock) and doing poorly, which I respond to by singing the chorus of “It’s My Life” by Bon Jovi. Tragically, my rebellion is not translated by the DS’s built-in microphone.

But there is more to Brain Age than trying not to anger a floating head. Everything you do in the game is measured and charted, which will finally give quantifiable proof that you are smarter than other people. This is especially true when more than one person’s profile is stored by Brain Age, as it turns the program from a fun diversion into a struggle for supremacy. The “brain age test,” a series of 3 random activities, actually ranks your brain (and worth as a person) in “brain years,” with 20 being the best possible score. I have a problem with living in a world where 20 year-olds are the smartest, so I like to think that their heads just have the least amount of rot.

Since Brain Age is meant to be played by non-gamers, the program offers an intuitive control scheme using a combination of the DS’s stylus and microphone. It’s also designed so that, when playing, you hold the DS like an open book, which is meant to comfort people absolutely terrified by the concept of buttons making things happen on a video screen.

Most of the time, the control scheme works wonderfully, but there’s a bit of a learning curve. Brain Age requires that you make letters and numbers in one stroke, and this combined with a marginally spotty voice recognition system caused me to get a brain age of 72 on my first attempt. Before I decided to watch Lawrence Welk and take my Centrum Silver, I managed to retrain myself to draw a few characters and learn how to say the word “blue” in a way that the program would recognize. Now that my brain age is back down in the 20s, I no longer worry about my mindless hedonism causing premature brain death.

Brain Age is rooted firmly in science, and the documentation that comes with the program makes you feel like you’re playing someone’s doctorial thesis. And despite how much blood is actually flowing in my prefrontal cortex – which Brain Age is bent on stimulating – I actually seem to be improving. But even if I’m not actually becoming sharper, at least I have access to Brain Age’s sudoku puzzles to pass the time. With enough practice, I could have the puzzle-solving skills of a bored housewife!