Video Games Good For Brain Development and Having Fun
Video games are great fun, but they also offer many benefits that can help kids develop into successful adults.
Training your brain and its importance
Our brain and, subsequently, our memory and cognitive skills can be trained and improved as we age. This can be done by learning new skills or challenging ourselves with new or complicated tasks. One way to do this is by playing games that require thinking, concentration, attention to detail, and more. Many games actually engage all these elements and could positively affect our cognitive skills.
Brain games may help sharpen specific thinking skills that tend to wane with age, such as processing speed, planning skills, reaction time, decision making, and short-term memory, and can also:
- Foster a greater sense of independence
- Cultivate faster-thinking skills
- Improve concentration levels, hand-eye coordination, and motor skills
- Increase general knowledge
- Develop and support social skills
- Enhance reaction times
- Improve the ability to work independently or cooperatively
but this game or activity has to have features for it to actually work:
1) It has to be challenging. It has to be a new formidable activity that will require learning.
2) It has to be complex. Doing an activity that is easy for you and you can do the same thing over and over again without thinking has no real positive effect.
3) It has to require practice. If it is easy enough for you that you are able to finish the challenge on your first try, it just means that this is not challenging for you, and you have to find a more challenging and more complex activity in order to engage your brain and cognitive skills.
What are cognitive skills?
What do we mean by cognitive skills? Cognitive skills are the mental processes involved in thinking, learning, remembering, reasoning, decision making, and problem-solving. These skills allow us to do the simplest tasks, such as remembering what to buy when shopping, and more complicated tasks, such as solving scientific problems. They help us think clearly, make good decisions, and understand what we read, write, listen to, and see. Some of the most critical cognitive skills are:
Working memory: includes our short-term memory and the part of the brain that we use to remember things, talk, and more
Response time: how long will it take for us to process a situation and react accordingly.
Processing speed: This is the amount of time before responding to a situation.
Planning: Planning the future or organizing tasks to get the job done requires focus and brain activity
Focused attention: This is the ability to focus on the subject that is important and to be able to filter out all the other unimportant matters while concentrating.
Brain Training and effect on cognitive skills
Using your brain and thinking can strengthen your synaptic connections of various parts of the brain, which are responsible for different cognitive abilities. In the absence of simulation, these connections are weakened and will have a negative effect on your abilities, such as attention, perception, memory, and more.
Training your brain can have many positive effects, such as:
1) Improvement in academic performance
2) Slow down the age-related decline of the brain
3) A powerful cognitive ability to optimize everyday performance
Train your brain with games
So we've established that brain training activities are crucial, but what is the best way to do this? The answer for everyone might differ, but one thing is constant. If this task does not seem like tedious work and if you can have fun along with it, you might be more eager to spend some time of your day doing something productive. There are plenty of video games good for brain development. Playing video games has enhanced children’s ability to learn and retain new information. This is because playing video games requires players to focus on one thing at a time while simultaneously being able to multitask.
There are several different ways to train your brain using video games. First, there are games designed specifically to help people learn new things. These games are called brain training games because they focus on improving specific cognitive skills. Second, some games are meant for relaxing and having fun. These games are called entertainment games. Third, some games combine both brain training and entertainment. These games combine elements of both genres so you can get the best of both worlds. So choosing a thinking game such as puzzles and word games are a good choice.
That is one of the reasons why we chose to create a word puzzle game. This game is based on the classic board game Mastermind. The basics of the game are that we must guess the secret word in each level, and we will be guided to the correct answer through colors. The letters of the guessed word are colored either green, orange or gray. Each color has a meaning as follows:
Green: The letter exists in the secret word, and it is in the correct position
Orange: The letter exists in the secret word but is placed in the wrong position
Gray: The letter does not exist in the secret word at all.
Are all Brain games effective?
No, not all games or puzzle games will be effective. It has no practical results if the levels are too hard to find the answer or too easy. So in Lingolish, one of the things that were focused on was how to spread the difficulty of the levels. It doesn't get too easy so that you will get bored, nor does it get too hard for you not to know the answer get stuck. A good mixture of easy, medium, and challenging levels to keep you on your toes.
Brain Train in Lingolish
A new feature has been added to our word game, called the Brain Train challenge. As players progress in the story mode, once every 20 levels, somewhere along the way, a hidden Brain Train challenge appears from under a stone, tree, or ice. They are not mandatory to play for progressing in the story mode, but players will earn extra coins and win gems if they do play them.
The game's mechanism is that we have a square of tiles such as 4 in 4 dimensions. These tiles will start to blink in a specific color. So in each level, you must pay attention to specific details, such as the number of tiles, the order of the colored tiles, and their color.
This will require your focus and attention when the tiles start to blink and will use your memory while remembering the blinking tiles. Here you can see a bit of our Brain Train feature in Lingolish: Word Puzzle Game:
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