Here's another cool article at Reveries about a new video "game" for the Nintendo DS that is specifically targeted at adults. This sure expands the use of video game devices to a whole new genre. I bet we'll see some news coverage of this being used as a therpapeutic device to stave off Alzheimer's Disease.

Lisa wants her own DS because she loves Jack's Nintendogs game. Who would have ever thought that the video game market would expand and morph into such a cultural phenomenon that spans all age groups? No wonder the toy industry is in shambles.

Nintendo’s latest videogame hit is not a shoot-em-up for kids but a brain-trainer for adults, reports Ginny Parker Woods in The Wall Street Journal (2/23/06). This success story — 1.8 million units sold — is happening in Japan, but Nintendo hopes to export it to America in April. In Japan, sales are fueled by the existing popularity of “brain-sharpening exercises” as well as the celebrity of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, the scientist who developed the game, which is called Brain Age. In America, Nintendo hopes that the game will find favor among older consumers, perhaps most of all baby boomers anxious to keep their minds sharp and help ward off dementia.

Brain Age is designed for Nintendo’s DS, a hand-held gaming device that “opens like a book and has two screens … Simpler than most other videogames, Brain Age flashes questions on one screen while the player writes answers on the other. The player is peppered with a series of timed drills, allowing the game to measure the user’s ‘brain age.’ Twenty is the best, because that’s around the age at which most people’s brains are fully developed but still agile. Most users find that they are much ‘older.’ But by working through rounds of exercises … players can bring down their brain age and chart their progress over time.” Nintendo hopes that it will both sell a lot of copies of Brain Age, as well as the DS devices on which they must be played.

That strategy has worked really well in Japan: “Around a third of the people who buy games in the brain-building series are over 35, and another third are between 25 and 34 … Many of these older gamers have lined up to buy their first machines in order to play Brain Age, and the DS is currently sold out in Japan because production cannot keep up. ” When Brain Age goes on sale in the U.S. on April 17, it will feature various memory and reading drills as well as soduku puzzles. Nintendo hopes that the new game will get an extra boost when it introduces its new Revolution console which, because it eliminates the sometimes complicated keypad controllers, is expected to appeal to adults. As Nintendo president Satoru Iwata explains: "We have to get nongamers into videogames … to do this we have to completely change the nature of game play." ~ Tim Manners, editor