| Industry insight from journalist Paul “The Game Master” Hyman. [Reprinted with permission from “The Hollywood Reporter.”]
BOOMERS ARE GAMERS, TOO!
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"Fruit Mixup" is a match-three game like hundreds of others but, on Eons.com, it's touted as enhancing visual and spatial skills.
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When the news broke that playing video games helps keep senior citizens' minds alert and crackling, it was a big day for game-loving boomers. And an even bigger day for marketers of the so-called "brain games."
Up until then, playing these casual games was merely fun. Now, it turns out, they supposedly promote health, too. And the folks who create and sell the games are making sure you know it. The result is a fairly new -- but growing -- video game market sector marked by its graying demographic.
But when Nintendo, for instance, says that its "Big Brain Academy" keeps your neurons dancing, does it truly? And are there any therapeutic effects to playing Midway's "Hot Brain," Ubisoft's "MindQuiz," Telegames' "Ultimate BrainGames," Majesco's "Brain Boost," or Radica Games' "CrossTrain Your Brain"?
"Probably not," says Dr. Deborah Barnes, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco and the San Francisco VA Medical Center. "I mean, it kind of bugs me when I see marketing agencies taking one little study and saying that their product makes you feel 10 years younger in terms of your memory. I know that's their job but, coming at it from a research perspective, I think people should test their products completely before they go out and make claims about how well they work."
While there's limited evidence that some type of mental stimulation is beneficial to aging minds, she observes, boomers ought to perceive their game-playing less like a doctor's prescription and more like grandma's chicken soup, meaning that having games on their minds "can't hoit."
Still, a relatively new Web site for over-50s, called Eons.com, whose slogan is "Lovin' life on the flip side of 50," sees gaming as an integral part of its potpourri of content.
"The idea of exercising your brain is a relatively new field," says Jeff Taylor, Eons' founder and CEO. "There's been lots of work on pushing off dementia, but not so much on the idea of exercising ...
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