Gamification: Games raise brain loads

Building products with my background in gaming, the topic of “Gamification” comes up regularly. Usually with the idea of making a mundane user task more entertaining and therefore increasing the likelyhood of completion.

First, a bit of theory:

There are three so called brain loads:

  1. Cognitive/Mental: Memory, Thinking etc.
  2. Motor: Moving hands or arms
  3. Visual: Stimulation through visuals

Games raise (= increase) one or more of these brain loads to create an entertaining and engaging experience.

  • Visual & Motor: Fruit Ninja, Point and click shooters
  • Motor only: Press buttons as soon as you can
  • Motor + Mental: Candy Crush, Starcraft
  • Mental: Puzzle games

Back in the 80’s, the goal was to lower brain loads to make everything as easy as possible. Now, there are software/web structures that are very established so they can be made more complex again to make things more engaging.

Some fail, and some succeed. I will write about that in a future post.

Nils Neubauer @nilsneubauer