The missing games

Today I happened to think about how, when I was 4–7 years old, we didn’t yet have the internet at home, or it was just becoming a thing. At that age it was rare and memorable to get to play snake on my mom’s phone. But maybe even more interesting was, a couple of years later, getting to play a game on my big brother’s(?) phone where… I actually remember really poorly what you did in it, but I do remember that you played 1v1 games on a few different cognitive tasks. I’d guess one example was some kind of memory game.

In the terminology of the time, it would have been called a “brain game”, and with the technology of the time you probably played against hardcoded algorithms rather than other people, or at best over Bluetooth. I also remember the game gave scores, from which I interpreted that I’d done really well, which felt very rewarding. If I hadn’t been dependent on a phone borrowed from my big brother, I would surely have played it a lot more, at least enough to remember what the games are.

Reflecting on those times, there’s something really hopeful in it. I sense that same hopefulness when I hear people older than me describe what it was like to live through the birth and rise of the internet. The internet makes it possible, for instance, for an ordinary stay-at-home mom from Kangasala to offer her child brain games. Enormous potential.

To my regret, I note that my hopeful thoughts about that potential have gone unrealized in the realm of brain games. Two decades have passed. The games it’s now possible to build can’t be compared to snake on the Nokia 3310. Good puzzle games have surely been made, but is that it? Where are the games that are fun and that improve generally useful cognitive abilities? Is the problem a lack of demand, the difficulty of game design, or an insufficient understanding of how cognition works and how to train it? Where are the games that train decision-making under uncertainty and the aggregation of information, effective communication and cooperation, noticing and correcting cognitive heuristics that misfire, the rapid absorption of new concepts and processes, figuring out confusing things through targeted tests and experiments, careful planning and anticipating challenges in advance, generating many kinds of hypotheses and ideas, coordinating massive groups of people to solve a shared problem, avoiding mutually disadvantageous situations in non-zero-sum games, or operating in a state of epistemic disagreement?