Silver Gamers Enjoy Playing Brain-Training Games More Than Adolescents

by Lennart Nacke

Just given birth to a jour­nal paper pub­li­ca­tion about sil­ver gamers. For all my press friends out there, the (imme­di­ate) release goes like this:

Solving arith­metic chal­lenges is more effi­cient and effec­tive with pen and paper, but brain train­ing with video games is more excit­ing and may be con­nected to pos­i­tive feel­ings for elderly gamers, accord­ing to a study to be pub­lished in the forth­com­ing issue of the jour­nal CyberPsychology & Behavior.

A research team from the Blekinge Institute of Technology sur­veyed peo­ple aged above 65 years, when play­ing an arith­metic brain train­ing game on paper and on a Nintendo DS portable gam­ing con­sole and recorded the time it took them to com­plete the game and the errors they pro­duced. They uncov­ered a pos­i­tive rela­tion between play­ing with the portable con­sole and the fun this age group reported. To ensure that these effects were gen­uine to older gamers, they gath­ered and com­pared results from a con­trol group of adolescents.

“It was quite sur­pris­ing that we found an asso­ci­a­tion of the game con­di­tion with pos­i­tive feel­ings for the elderly but arbi­trar­ily with neg­a­tive feel­ings for the young,” says main inves­ti­ga­tor Lennart Nacke, who is cur­rently com­plet­ing his doc­toral degree at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. The research implies that elderly might indeed appre­ci­ate the logic-training puz­zles of brain train­ing games for their men­tal ben­e­fit than younger gamers.

Journal ref­er­ence

Lennart E. Nacke, Anne Nacke, Craig A. Lindley. Brain Training for Silver Gamers: Effects of Age and Game Form on Effectiveness, Efficiency, Self-Assessment, and Gameplay Experience. CyberPsychology & Behavior. –Not available-, ahead of print. doi:10.1089/cpb.2009.0013.

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