Mind360.com Beta was launched yesterday very quietly and I am very proud to present it here as its my brother in law brilliant startup :)

Our brain needs training to be in shape, just like our muscles, and this is why Mind360 was created, they offer a variety of games that allow you to practice and improve different cognitive aspects of your brain, and as a member you have a personal training program to improve your cognitive capabilities and strengthen your weaknesses, and do all this while playing and having fun (well not all fun, some is really hard work, but the challenges keep you going).

As described best in Mind360 home page: Brain training games aren’t just for seniors anymore. Now you can hang on to your wits by simply playing the leading scientifically based brain training games on the net. And what better way to strengthen your cognitive skills than by having a fundamentally good time as well. Today’s advanced brain training games help improve your memory, increase your ability to stay focused, plus make faster and better decisions.

As a Cognitive psychologist I am very familiar with Brain training, it was proven to work amazingly, for example on US Air Force pilots, and on US basketball players .

The best thing as I see it is the ability to get a professional automated analysis of your achievements and to see if your progress is sufficient and where to invest more time. This is truly not trivial, and part of the key to get a real improvement.

Here is an example of one of the games "Celebrity Spot" and what you can gain just by playing it.

• Cognitive exercise: Motoric Precision
• Cognitive skill trained: Eye-Hand Coordination
• Objectives: Synchronize mouse movement with click timing

Although it is just in beta and has a few bugs here and there and some of the advanced function are not up yet, it gives a great user experience. and i cant finish without saying one more thing about the design – it is just amazing, my compliments to the designer, clean, professional and beautiful design.

Keep up the good work.

I came across a game developed with and for Amnesty International, called " Pictures for truth ".

About the project: "This game was developed to support Amnesty International's campaign on China. The story and characters represented are fictional. The aim of this project is to sensitize the player to human rights violations"

About the game: "You are a journalist and photographer. A few months before the Beijing Olympic Games, your best friend, Jun Shen, a human rights defender and journalist, calls for help. You will do everything you can to help him. This adventure will take you to China where you will be confronted to many human rights violations.  By investigating, taking pictures and publishing your articles, you will work to solve the problems you encounter and eventually save your friend!"

Anyway... I played with the game for about an hour until I finished the game (Its a short game) with a score of 4000 fame points (Hurray!) and I must say that I liked it, It brought me back to the good old days of playing simple quests. But this is obviously not a game for gamers, its a very creative way to spread the amnesty agenda. And a good work doing so in this way, it really brought it to my attention.

In terms of usability the game is pretty intuitive, and I have just one main remark - It was really hard to learn how to start playing... Why?

This is the first screen you encounter after you load the game

Good idea to show me the game instruction before i play, but i kept looking and looking for the Start playing button, and couldn't find him. I just didn't know how to start the game. After a lot of air-clicking I pressed the instructions button F1 and the instruction disappeared and I could play the game. From my subjective view, this was not so intuitive... so please add a Close/Start/Play button instead of making us try and understand that this is not a pre-game screen, and just a layer of the instructions already opened...

Other than that, and on an ethic level something really bothered me

During the game you need to take pictures of "events" in order to publish articles (each article gives you more fame points). If you manage to get a better picture that shows things in different angels, for examples a bigger focus on the big bad Chinese police and in the background its prisoner, you gain more fame points then just a simple picture of both of them.

What is my problem?

• First, the game objective is to gain "Fame" points by revealing the truth and exposing the real deal. Do Amnesty people do it for the sake of fame?
• Second, the game enforces the art of taking the right picture? Do Amnesty encourage people touch up the pictures so that they will be more effective?

These things make me think a lot about the objectivity in reports, The entire conception looks a bit rotten, But the game is pretty cool, and it does deliver an important message, so go play it .

I don't know about you, but when I was a kid there was a fun game we used to play. We took a sheet of paper, and wrote a story with the entire classroom, each kid, turn by turn without even knowing what the other kids wrote about. On the sheet of paper we wrote a beginning to a story, for example "Once upon a time". We passed the paper between the participants, and each one of them (in his turn) added the next sentence to the story. The next in turn would only be able to see the last word of the sentence the previous player wrote, and he had to write the next sentence based only on that, as the only hint to the real context. Eventually when there was no room left of the sheet of paper - we revealed what everyone wrote and that was the story.

The fun part of this game is that sometimes you get a really funny and surprising short stories.

So far with nostalgic thoughts... I am trying to replicate this same game in the Twitter community, so in order to do that I opened another twitter account dedicated to that called Shtory (Shared short story) - There our story will evolve.

Game flow example:

• First sentence: 5000 years ago man kind faced a dilemma.
  • I the twitter page I will only publish the word "dilemma", this word will be the only clue for the next person to add a sentence to the story.
• Second Sentence (by a random user): dilemma. We didn't know what to do, so we decided to go to sleep.later that day
  • The twitter page will now only display the word "Sleep." (the word dilemma will no longer appear only, sleep).
• Third sentence (by another random user...): Day. Day or night it doesn't matter I'm so tired I must go to sleep, but my wife keep on nagging about the garbage.
  • and so one, you get the point (forgive me for not being too creative or imaginative here...)

Guidelines and Rules:

• In the twitter account of Shtory , you will only see one word each time. This word you see is the last word of the sentence the previous person added to the story, and based on that word you need to continue the story with your own sentence.
• Only the first sentence will be fully published from the beginning in the twitter page, the rest of the sentence will only be represented by the last word of the sentence.
• The sentence you send me, must begin with @shtory and the last word of the previous sentence (the word published on the twitter account) for example "@shtory Dilemma. we didn't know what to do..."
• Only the first sentence that I'll get as a twit reply will be added to the story, I assume that I'll get duplicate sentences per word, and there can only be one sentence to continue the story based on that word.
• Once a new sentence was written and added, a new "last word" will be published for the next sentence, so follow the account to know what is the relevant word.
• Only one twit can be sent to continue the sentence (meaning no more than 140 characters).
• Do not include links into the sentences you send.
• You can send as many twits as you want, but you can not continue a sentence you already added to the story.
• After 100 twits I will publish the full shared story.

Let the fun begin

I would like to share with you an interesting game I read about in an interesting blog of an interesting person Dan Ariely.

A virtual reality game called "Snow world" was created to reduce the pain of burn victims, by giving the patients a snowy virtual world to wonder in. This psychological experience reduced their pains and the need for pain relief medication. You can read more about it in the Sciencentral article.

This is an amazing idea. Finally a good use for VR... The fact that the virtual world the burn victims play in is a snowy one is not really what matters that much (I presume) but the fact that the patients get the chance to place their mind in another place, far away from the pain. This is a really good use to games, which have the tendency to make you forget about the real life... (ask my wife)

Came across some games of an Israeli flash game developer (among other things) Eyal Shahar, and one of his games really amazed me - Blind Shooter, the idea behind it is so creative and so "out of the box".

The purpose of the game is to shoot birds of some sort (why birds...) by aiming with the left and right arrows, while you can't see a thing ("see" on the screen shot on your left...).

So how do I know where to shoot? By listening of course... you heard me!

When the target (the poor bird) is to the right of me, I'll hear her voice in the right earphone, if the target on the left I'll hear the voice on the left earphone. In addition the volume of the bird voice changes to give me another indication of how far on the right (or left) the bird is (High volume - closer, Low volume - not so close). when I start hearing the bird on both left and right earphones I can assume that the bird is pretty much on my target. If I aim correctly at the bird, and "kill" it, I'll just stop hearing that bird. (I presume that no real birds died in making of this game :).

It really made me feel blind and helpless, that it made me wish that the indications that were given during the game, were much stronger, but I guess the life of a blind is not that easy, and I feel it is important for us to appreciate and understand it. So go and experience it.

More over the idea behind Blind Shooter is so creative and so "out of the box" and I just love it!

Can't wait to see what will be next, meanwhile I'm going to play again with some of the other games he developed, like this other really innovative one called PAH! - A Voice controlled game.

I came across  a few weeks ago by chance (Thank you StumbleUpon ) with Bart Bonte's games , and I fell in love with them in just a few seconds. I fell in love with its simplicity, and with its creativity level. (The man is a genius).

What makes Bonte games so brilliant?

• Most of them do not include any instructions on how to play the game, you either get it, or try until you do.
• They require you to think differently every time, sometimes it requires you to think outside the box, sometimes you need to think in a very methodological way, and sometimes you just need to do the obvious. But you always have to think.
• When you pass a stage or finish a game, It always gives you a good feeling of accomplishment, you feel like you gained something by playing. Didn't play so many games that gave me that.
• The games are very simple and creative, each game has its own "spirit".

2 games I really adore and I must recommend you to play (I feel that I need to warn you that these games are highly addictive):

• F actory balls 2
• D uck, think outside the flock

I'm so happy when I witness such a great combination of simplicity, cleverness and creativeness ,Bart Bonte is certainly one to follow.

Came across this very unique demo of a "Painting game" by Ian Dallas

What fascinated me the most, was the fact that in this game you reveal the world by splattering paint around. You decide where to splatter paint and what parts you think are crucial to be revealed in order for you to progress in the game.

It will be interesting to see if all people will splatter the same things or not, do we view the world differently? do we need the same visual "anchors" to understand the world we are in?

Very creative and innovative, but regarding game play, would we be able to splatter paint for the entire game?

The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.