"Most people's idea of fitness stops at the neck … but the brain is the CPU of our body, and
most people don't do much to keep it as fit as possible," said Patti Celori, executive director of the New England
Cognitive Center in an
article by Wired. The article focuses on the emergence of the idea that brain exercises can help prevent or delay
age-related brain decay.
So what does this mean for gaming? It means Nintendo might have a hit strategy on its hands as they pursue the non-traditional gamer. Nintendo wants to sell games to people who don't even currently consider themselves gamers, and to that end they've been working on a number of titles that fall outside of the conventional video games space.
Take, for example, Nou o Kitaeru Otona no DS Training (roughly "DS Brain Training for Adults"), a game in which players perform a variety of mental excercises to excersize their brains and to make their brains "younger." This title is aimed at all of us who are distressed at the loss of our cognitive facilities as we age. Nintendo's brain training games speak directly to the need to keep our cognitive engines in good working order.
If Nintendo can make this game (or at least a version of it) accessible to the aging baby boomer generation, they might find have a sleeper hit on their hands.
