The 11 Video Games Needed to Unlock Your Inner Genius

What if Video Games Could Make You Smarter?

We posted about Johnson’s book, “Everything Bad is Good for You,“ then began thinking, “What if Video Games Could Make You Smarter?” If you believe in the premise, that video games are in fact good for developing intellect, which games would you turn to?

Then M.A.W. had to ask so it was a must to come up with something. Even though we also wrote about how playing video games negatively impacted the GPA of college students, it appears that if it were not an either/or proposition and time was spent studying and playing video games, there are indeed games that do actually help develop intellect.

After dusting off a few game consoles and digging around the web for the last week we compiled our list of the top 11 games that make you smarter. Each of these first eight offer multiple inputs and objectives that must be handled simultaneously, the layering effect of meeting one goal before moving on to another as the game builds momentum, and the idea that trial and error is a great way to foster curiousity and reward risk-taking. Most importantly, problem solving is a focus of virtually every aspect of each game.

The Games that Teach Interactively

1. Psychonauts - if an technology expert counts this as one of his favorites then you know it has intellectual capability. The game also offers a lot more than just jumping around and firing off weapons. As the game notes, “The inside of a person’s mind can be a crazy place.” Characters have some amazing psychic powers, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, levitation, invisibility, and clairvoyance, but can only have three assigned at time. Can one of these psychic powers handle the obstacle in your path?

2. Civilization III - learn about the ancient Baylonians by playing the game from their perspective. The maps teach the relationship between geography and city growth, impact of rivers in war, et al. Make it all the way to the end in the latest version of the game and you get a full understanding of the challenges facing a modern city littered with nuclear weapons. Truly intellectually stimulating and yet teaching all the time.

3. Wild Divine – the Wild Divine Project is designed to promote self-care and wellness through biofeedback technology. The computer based tools are designed to help a person reduce stress and achieve optimal health. Designed to improve total physical and mental health, we might not categorize this as a computer game yet this is precisely the way that computers can indeed enhance learning.

4. NeverWinter Nights – one of new genre of biowar games that is often seen as the videogame version of dungeons and dragons. Begin by creating a character and then take him through a 50 hour adventure – yes 50 hours. Teaches about moral dilemmas, as a character has choices how to respond to others: to lie, intimidate, or simply ask questions. Just as in the real world, the choices are never black-and-white.

5. Call of Duty 3 – takes place in 1944 during the Normandy Breakout. Learn about the war from an inside perspective, fighting for four different armies. Makes it very clear how difficult it was to wrestle control of France as well as how other folks lost family members in the warfare, etc. The game makes the war come alive by being immersed in it.

6. RollerCoaster – the premise is considered very simple: The user must create and run a successful amusement park. Creating a business climate concept amidst the design of a park, the game asks the user to achieve a certain attendance or profit goal. The map features multiple zoom levels and can be rotated 90 degrees in either direction allowing for great visual teaching. Creating a layout involves skillful planning – even so as to deal with the potential line of people waiting to use a popular ride.

7. Re-mission – travel into a human body to fight cancer colonies as Roxxi, a fully armed nanobot touted as gutsy, destroys for the good of the human body. Deemed an excellent teaching tool for the many types of cancer that attack the human body as well as full of the action aspects that make videos games so enjoyable for people. The one shoot-em-up on the list.

8. Sim City DS – as GameSpot says, with this edition of the Sim series you might actually learn something. The game manages to make city planning fun and is of course the opposite of most video game fare, destruction. In Sim City DS there is innovation if no weapons and the whole game is about construction. This one also features tutorials that are key to getting started. Totally teaches about society construct, from building roads and balancing commercial, industrial, and residential so as to have an inviting city where people want to live.

Three others that were on our list are Myst (porblem solving on a mystery island), World or Warcraft (roleplaying extraordinaire), and Second Life (the Sims with incredible three-D modeling). But we wanted to offer at least three games that resemble traditional pencil and paper puzzles and stick to ten choices.

Traditional Fare Moves to the Computer World

9. Hot Brain – mini-games such as Picto-Rhymes where you see a picture of an object then need to select a word that rhymes with the object, math problems missing the operator, and an incomplete shape where you need to select from four different pieces that would complete that shape. All of the games are on a time limit. Your score is a temperature, indicating that, if you do well, you have a “hot brain.”

10. Brain Age 2 – features great sudoku puzzles, other math problems with twists, the keys of a piano on the touch screen, voices offering two or three words at the same time.

11. Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree – this brain teaser gem starts under a completely false premise, that while playing the game your brain gets bigger and heavier, and then scores you accordingly. Big Brain Academy features mini-games in random sequences divided into categories such as compute or identify. One simple game asks users to listen to a customer ordering food then asks you to recite the order back. Again it is of the more traditional puzzle variety fare but will certainly get a user thinking.

Now we turn to the game experts – let the suggestions begin!!