Nintendo Brain Training for Adults design review
This isn't your typical video game review. Lost Garden blogger Danc has reviewed the Japanese Nintendo DS smash hit DS Training for Adults: Work Your Brain from a unique perspective.
Most games are treated as entertainment. As such, they don't solve any problems (unless you consider too much spare time and too much money to be problems).
This game, however, is essentially positioned as self-help software, and to that end purports to solve the problem of declining brain performance over time. That's unique in the games world, and yields some very key insights into the genius behind Nintendo's approach to capturing the non-hardcore gamer demographic.
Danc reviews the game's positioning, sales, the target market, the market need, and finally asks the question of how the game design is brought to bear on the opportunity. Enterprising game designers should consider this a must-read, and those who are skeptical about the role of business thinking in game design might have their perspectives broadened by this approach.
Given the aging US population, a localized version of the same game for the US market cannot be far behind, but that damned teensy stylus isn't very kind to arthritic hands. Nintendo will have to work on that.
