Ikohn4ever
04-07-2006, 02:27 PM
http://img55.imageshack.us/img55/8182/spotlightcover7im.jpg
Five years ago, a Japanese professor released a study that asserted video games stunt brain development and could lead to anti-social behavior.
Now you can find that same professor’s likeness in a game based on that research.
The tremendously popular “brain game” series for the Nintendo DS, is more mental workout than traditional game, and it’s based on the principals that Dr. Ryuta Kawashima first used to attack video game playing.
Both the study and the game were built around the use of real-time imaging of the brain, which can track which portions of the brain are being used while people are doing different things.
In 2001, Kawashima said the imaging showed that playing games doesn’t use the prefrontal cortex, where learning, memory, emotion and impulse control take place. Instead, only the portions of the brain used for movement and vision were used.
But the brain games, Kawashima claims, exercise those frontal lobes.
The first of the three games — officially titled Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day — is a collection of 10 training exercises that include simple math problems, memory, and other brain jumbles and are meant to be played once a day. After your day’s “training,” you can have the game test your brain age. The lower the better.
The three brain games released in Japan were all tremendously popular, particularly among aging baby boomers, combining to sell more than 5 million copies and transforming the brain game franchise into a cultural phenomenon. Now the concept is days away from hitting stores in the U.S.
A ‘treadmill for the mind’
“The development of this game came from our belief that people wanted something new,” Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told a gathering at the Game Developers Conference last month. “In this case, that game took the form of a ‘treadmill for the mind.’”
Iwata said the idea for the brain games stemmed from a Nintendo board member who complained that he knew no one his age who played video games.
He argues that since Japan is an aging society, Nintendo should create a game for seniors.
Iwata formed a task force instructed to invent a game “whose appeal would include everyone from youngsters to baby boomers to seniors,” Iwata said.
About the same time, a book by Kawashima was beginning to explode in Japan. The book put forth the professor’s theories about brain stimulation and provided “brain exercises.”
Iwata asked the task force to figure out how to turn the idea and exercises of the book into a game.
The team developed a prototype that also included a test that measured a person’s brain age, to add a competitive element to the game.
Before the game could be fully developed, Iwata knew he had to get Kawashima on board, he said.
Iwata and the professor met for three hours on the day Nintendo’s portable DS launched in Japan.
“We showed him a prototype brain training software and explained how his work might translate to our medium,” Iwata said. “He was enthused, and we started exchanging ideas. The doctor offered to demonstrate evidence on how the prototype software was stimulating brain activity.”
Kawashima borrowed a Nintendo employee and had him wear a device on his head that could track blood flow across the surface of the brain.
The device showed that the prototype was stimulating the brain, Iwata said. “This was an important moment for all of us.”
Nintendo decided to build both voice- and hand-writing recognition that they had been developing into the game, Iwata said.
How to market a brain game
Bringing the game from prototype to finished product took a team of nine just three months to complete.
Iwata said creating the game was the easy part; the real uphill battle, he knew, would be getting people to buy it.
“My bigger concern was how the market would react, beginning with retailers,” he said. “Few people inside Nintendo believed they would place very big orders ... the game was just too different from what they knew. Maybe it wasn’t even a ‘game’ at all.”
Iwata started chiseling away at the retailers’ reluctance by requiring their buyers to play the game for 15 minutes.
After playing the game, the country’s retailers bought 70,000 copies, not nearly enough to meet the eventual demand.
By the time the second game hit, seven months later, retailers ordered 850,000 copies — which was still not enough. That second brain game had the highest first-week sales of any game for the popular DS system.
“Something had changed," Iwata said. “New people were playing.”
Nintendo’s hands-on, word-of-mouth approach to marketing the game in Japan was a tremendous success, but it’s yet to be seen if the non-traditional game can crack the non-gaming market in the U.S.
“The appetite is huge for these games in Japan,” said Beth Llewelyn, Nintendo of America spokeswoman. “It’s expanding the market.”
Llewelyn says Nintendo has similar hopes for the game here.
She points out that with baby boomers hitting their sixties, brain health is becoming an important topic. “The whole concept is easily transferred to our market,” Llewelyn said. “Anyone can pick this up.”
Adjusting the game for U.S.
Nintendo was careful, when translating the game for the U.S. market, to pay attention to both the language and cultural differences, said Scot Ritchey, bilingual product specialist who worked on altering the game for the U.S.
“When we first got a hold of the Japanese version of the title we spent a couple of days just sort of figuring out what it was all about, but at the same time thinking about some localization issues in the back of our minds, like how are we going to make this engaging for a North American audience,” Ritchey said.
Some of the activities just didn’t translate well, and the team couldn’t just invent new ones.
“All of these brain exercises had to show increased blood flow to the prefrontal cortex while you are doing them,” he said. “It wasn’t merely a matter of finding something that was engaging and looked a bit brainy.”
After wrapping up the translation process, Nintendo brought in unusual focus groups to check out the game.
“We brought in people 70 and 80 years old to play this thing,” Ritchey said.
Instead of focusing solely on whether the participants enjoyed the game, the team asked them if the images and fonts were big enough and if they understood what they were supposed to be doing.
“Could someone who had never in their life played a video game pick this thing up and be rolling in five minutes?” Ritchey said. “There were a lot of unusual challenges ... ”
Ritchey and others at Nintendo say that brain games is the first in what they expect will become a new and popular genre of games.
Nintendo hopes that it, and other non-traditional games, will help expand the market to people who wouldn’t normally play video games.
“The broader focus here is on expanding the market,” Ritchey said. “We are focusing on thinking about people who don’t play and what their interests are, what kind of things they would get into and serving those needs, making something that is intuitive and accessible and compelling for them.”
Brain games, and their ilk, are not a flash in the pan fad, Ritchey promises.
“This is the dawning of a new time in which there are games for everyone,” he said. “I just get excited thinking that this could be, not to get too grandiose, but sort of a watershed cultural moment where people who have traditionally been into video games and people who have not learn how to talk to each other about it and enjoy it.
“They find some common ground.”
http://blogs.rockymountainnews.com/denver/freePlay/2006/04/gaming_for_the_brain.html#more
I just posted this mainly for the picture but its an interesting article
Five years ago, a Japanese professor released a study that asserted video games stunt brain development and could lead to anti-social behavior.
Now you can find that same professor’s likeness in a game based on that research.
The tremendously popular “brain game” series for the Nintendo DS, is more mental workout than traditional game, and it’s based on the principals that Dr. Ryuta Kawashima first used to attack video game playing.
Both the study and the game were built around the use of real-time imaging of the brain, which can track which portions of the brain are being used while people are doing different things.
In 2001, Kawashima said the imaging showed that playing games doesn’t use the prefrontal cortex, where learning, memory, emotion and impulse control take place. Instead, only the portions of the brain used for movement and vision were used.
But the brain games, Kawashima claims, exercise those frontal lobes.
The first of the three games — officially titled Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day — is a collection of 10 training exercises that include simple math problems, memory, and other brain jumbles and are meant to be played once a day. After your day’s “training,” you can have the game test your brain age. The lower the better.
The three brain games released in Japan were all tremendously popular, particularly among aging baby boomers, combining to sell more than 5 million copies and transforming the brain game franchise into a cultural phenomenon. Now the concept is days away from hitting stores in the U.S.
A ‘treadmill for the mind’
“The development of this game came from our belief that people wanted something new,” Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told a gathering at the Game Developers Conference last month. “In this case, that game took the form of a ‘treadmill for the mind.’”
Iwata said the idea for the brain games stemmed from a Nintendo board member who complained that he knew no one his age who played video games.
He argues that since Japan is an aging society, Nintendo should create a game for seniors.
Iwata formed a task force instructed to invent a game “whose appeal would include everyone from youngsters to baby boomers to seniors,” Iwata said.
About the same time, a book by Kawashima was beginning to explode in Japan. The book put forth the professor’s theories about brain stimulation and provided “brain exercises.”
Iwata asked the task force to figure out how to turn the idea and exercises of the book into a game.
The team developed a prototype that also included a test that measured a person’s brain age, to add a competitive element to the game.
Before the game could be fully developed, Iwata knew he had to get Kawashima on board, he said.
Iwata and the professor met for three hours on the day Nintendo’s portable DS launched in Japan.
“We showed him a prototype brain training software and explained how his work might translate to our medium,” Iwata said. “He was enthused, and we started exchanging ideas. The doctor offered to demonstrate evidence on how the prototype software was stimulating brain activity.”
Kawashima borrowed a Nintendo employee and had him wear a device on his head that could track blood flow across the surface of the brain.
The device showed that the prototype was stimulating the brain, Iwata said. “This was an important moment for all of us.”
Nintendo decided to build both voice- and hand-writing recognition that they had been developing into the game, Iwata said.
How to market a brain game
Bringing the game from prototype to finished product took a team of nine just three months to complete.
Iwata said creating the game was the easy part; the real uphill battle, he knew, would be getting people to buy it.
“My bigger concern was how the market would react, beginning with retailers,” he said. “Few people inside Nintendo believed they would place very big orders ... the game was just too different from what they knew. Maybe it wasn’t even a ‘game’ at all.”
Iwata started chiseling away at the retailers’ reluctance by requiring their buyers to play the game for 15 minutes.
After playing the game, the country’s retailers bought 70,000 copies, not nearly enough to meet the eventual demand.
By the time the second game hit, seven months later, retailers ordered 850,000 copies — which was still not enough. That second brain game had the highest first-week sales of any game for the popular DS system.
“Something had changed," Iwata said. “New people were playing.”
Nintendo’s hands-on, word-of-mouth approach to marketing the game in Japan was a tremendous success, but it’s yet to be seen if the non-traditional game can crack the non-gaming market in the U.S.
“The appetite is huge for these games in Japan,” said Beth Llewelyn, Nintendo of America spokeswoman. “It’s expanding the market.”
Llewelyn says Nintendo has similar hopes for the game here.
She points out that with baby boomers hitting their sixties, brain health is becoming an important topic. “The whole concept is easily transferred to our market,” Llewelyn said. “Anyone can pick this up.”
Adjusting the game for U.S.
Nintendo was careful, when translating the game for the U.S. market, to pay attention to both the language and cultural differences, said Scot Ritchey, bilingual product specialist who worked on altering the game for the U.S.
“When we first got a hold of the Japanese version of the title we spent a couple of days just sort of figuring out what it was all about, but at the same time thinking about some localization issues in the back of our minds, like how are we going to make this engaging for a North American audience,” Ritchey said.
Some of the activities just didn’t translate well, and the team couldn’t just invent new ones.
“All of these brain exercises had to show increased blood flow to the prefrontal cortex while you are doing them,” he said. “It wasn’t merely a matter of finding something that was engaging and looked a bit brainy.”
After wrapping up the translation process, Nintendo brought in unusual focus groups to check out the game.
“We brought in people 70 and 80 years old to play this thing,” Ritchey said.
Instead of focusing solely on whether the participants enjoyed the game, the team asked them if the images and fonts were big enough and if they understood what they were supposed to be doing.
“Could someone who had never in their life played a video game pick this thing up and be rolling in five minutes?” Ritchey said. “There were a lot of unusual challenges ... ”
Ritchey and others at Nintendo say that brain games is the first in what they expect will become a new and popular genre of games.
Nintendo hopes that it, and other non-traditional games, will help expand the market to people who wouldn’t normally play video games.
“The broader focus here is on expanding the market,” Ritchey said. “We are focusing on thinking about people who don’t play and what their interests are, what kind of things they would get into and serving those needs, making something that is intuitive and accessible and compelling for them.”
Brain games, and their ilk, are not a flash in the pan fad, Ritchey promises.
“This is the dawning of a new time in which there are games for everyone,” he said. “I just get excited thinking that this could be, not to get too grandiose, but sort of a watershed cultural moment where people who have traditionally been into video games and people who have not learn how to talk to each other about it and enjoy it.
“They find some common ground.”
http://blogs.rockymountainnews.com/denver/freePlay/2006/04/gaming_for_the_brain.html#more
I just posted this mainly for the picture but its an interesting article