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How To Use Video Games To Improve Your Brain
You might not think of video games as the most cerebral of pastimes, but we here at VideoJug are here to point you towards some games that are not only fun but – shock horror – are actually genuinely beneficial to your old grey matter. A short video on the best video games to improve your brain.
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Step 1:
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Brain Training
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Nintendo have been making some odd games lately, and none more bizarre than Brain Training. It's a non-game that challenges you to various mathematical puzzles and sees you scribbling answers directly into your machine using some sort of magic technology.
Quite a gamble given that most games revolve around killing aliens and not ‘adding some numbers together', but it's proven extremely successful with various versions now available for Nintendo's DS and Wii consoles.
Brain Training was designed by a prominent neuroscientist, and has the express purpose of making you better at maths and remembering things. With just a few 10-minute-a-day exercises, you'll be remembering your shopping and divvying-up restaurant bills in next to no time.
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Step 2:
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Armadillo Run
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Armadillo Run has a relatively simple premise – get the armadillo into the hole by building platforms and what-have-you for him to roll about on.
In practice, you'll find yourself inadvertently learning about physics and tensile strength and gravity and tension and all that other stuff you ignored in school because you were too busy doodling on the rude pages of your biology textbook.
That's because Armadillo Run has a very accomplished physics engine, which accurately models the behaviour of rope, metal, rubber and cloth to aid you in your task.
The sheer brilliance at work here is that Armadillo Run will get your noggin throbbing without you even noticing as it's outrageously good fun to boot. You can get it right now from www.armadillorun.com
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Step 3:
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Tetris
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Pretty much everyone's played Tetris at some point.
It's that game where some blocks tumble from the sky and you have to use your spatial awareness skills to arrange them nicely so the screen doesn't fill up.
Science boffins have actually done tests on peoples' brains when playing Tetris, and the results show that subjects' brain power increased the more they played.
The trouble is that the game's getting on a bit these days, so if you're bored with it there are modern-day equivalents that require the same degree of mental agility – look into Lumines, Meteos or Puzzle Quest. They're all the same sort of thing, packaged up nicely and a bit different, and each one will get you thinking…
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Step 4:
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Total War
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The Total War series of games is a classic example – they basically recreate full-on proper battlefields from the olden days, and force you into the shoes of a general in charge of all the little men.
Get your head around massive concepts like strategy, tactics, planning and resource management in an attempt to out-wit and out-shine your opponent.
It's like chess, but with more archers. -
Of course the fact of the matter is that pretty much all video games require you to use your brain these days, whether you're using physics to negotiate a dystopian Orwellian future in Half-Life 2, solving ancient puzzles and what-have-you in Tomb Raider or simply surviving in a rich, ultra-detailed economy in deep-space trading simulator X3: Reunion.
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