By Frank Bublitz
My ability to understand and use the images I see for work and play has always been weak. My first neurological test revealed that my brain was accurately using stimuli I saw at 20% of a normal human’s.
Now, thanks to the science of “Gamification” I am average. Yay, average! It reminds me of the old Night Court episode where a couple deep in debt was rejoicing when they found “…we’re worth nothing!” while calculating the net worth.
When my wife and I were dating we went to the Imlay City Fair and played games on the Midway. Back then I could literally not win a kindergarten game that involved using metal “Pizza Slices” to cover up a picture of a pizza pie. The poor young lady running the game even tried to show me how to do it. I still could only place half of them correctly.
Testing revealed that my comprehension and use of the written word and my verbal acuity was at 90% of human ability. My therapist attributed that to the improv games and musical theater that I was performing and teaching at the time.
No matter what the difference was one thing is clear. Playing board games is what changed me from 20% to 50% success in copying what I see and picking out one shape from another on a diagram.
For those readers who enjoy reading scientific reports below is the National Institute of Health article summarizing current research on board games and health:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12535416/#REF3
My therapist and I play games that are either created specifically to improve the cognitive deficits like mine OR are regular games adapted for that purpose. One is a form of Uno. You must read the number or order (Skip, Reverse, etc) but you must also match the color of the card as well. So a card may read Yellow, but the word Yellow is written in BLUE. So you must play a blue card instead of a yellow one.
We are engaging my “Working Memory”. That is the cognitive function you use to process new information accurately.
Games have been in use as teaching tools so long that a term, Gamification, is now used to describe the method of teaching through games. Sorry to tell you people who use cell phone or computer-based games for this purpose. They don’t work as well, at least in the practice at which I am treated as physical board games.
Another comprehensive report on the health benefits of playing games, in the July 2021 issue of The Lancet Psychiatry, talks about games played in groups. Some research, albeit with small sample sizes shows that playing board games with other people adds to the beneficial effect.
Since we are social beings that makes perfect sense logically. One of the reasons that I created All-Star Trivia to teach people the truth about people with mental illness was that players who had a mental illness could demonstrate to other players that a person with mental illness is just as nice, or not nice, as anyone else.
In other words, we are real people who behave that way about 99% of the time.
So the next time you want to play Uno, Euchre, Chess, or another game that is played in a group remember to have fun!
Because Fun IS Healthy!
