Mind Gaming
Here’s how to become the ultimate Mind Gamer
Red Bull Mind Gamers combines puzzles and escape rooms. But how do you become the best of the best?
If you love testing your brain power, then Red Bull Mind Gamers is just for you. Anyone can play its online puzzles to sharpen their mental skills.
Every game on the Red Bull Mind Gamers platform relates to four basic abilities that define a mind gamer: logic, creativity, visual thinking and strategy. These abilities are related, so understanding how they work helps both game designers to create better games and players to solve them. Let's see how these work – with a suitable game you can try for each.
1 min
Are you up to the Red Bull Mind Gamers challenge?
Are you up to the Red Bull Mind Gamers challenge?
Logic
Logic is the foundation of all mind-gamer abilities. Logical thinking is a process that involves moving from one related thought to another, often associated with scientific and mathematical thinking.
Our brains are wired for pattern recognition – when we recognise a pattern, we achieve insight, which is what makes puzzles fun.
It enables players to reason, form ideas, and solve problems. This area has to do with logic, abstractions, reasoning, numbers and critical thinking.
Logic-based games are designed by creating patterns, which the player has to recognise in order to solve them. If the patterns are too obvious then it's not fun to play, so they need to be obscured – the player needs to make an effort.
Clara Fernández-Vara is the co-founder of Fiction Control, a narrative design company, and Associate Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center. She's a game designer and writer as well as an academic, and explains: How do we use logic to play a mind game? First, we examine all the information available, we try things and we see what happens to understand how the game works.
"In a way, playing a game based on logic means figuring out the patterns that the designer has hidden from us in it, thus doing reverse engineering. It is a delayed battle of wits between the designer and the player.”
Play this game: Initial Condition
Creativity
Creative problem solving in puzzles is the mental process of searching for a new and novel creative solution to a problem. This can imply techniques like reframing a problem, increase the quantity of fresh ideas or a change of perspective to identifying new dependent dimensions.
"Creativity problem-solving can be a way to spur creativity," Fernández-Vara says. "We have to create new knowledge – even if it's only new to us – to overcome an obstacle using our brains only.
"It is important that creativity-driven challenges involve a specific set of constraints. An open canvas is not always conducive to creativity – a blank space can be intimidating, as storytellers with writer's block can attest. So the designer has to set a clear goal and make the constraints very clear to the player.
"The player may only need to find one solution, but the ways to get to it may be many – some may be obvious, some may not have been anticipated by the game designers themselves.
"This type of challenge can train us for abilities beyond games. Mathematical geniuses resolve the most difficult problems because they can think of original ways of finding a solution, while artists find new points of view to show us the world and make us understand it in a novel manner. The key to creating games that encourage creativity is therefore to give room to the player to come up with different solutions, but always within the established constraints.“
Play this game: Quantumlights
Visual thinking
By solving visual puzzles players are challenged to think in visual images and use spatial judgment and the ability to visualise with the mind's eye. Skill sets needed are observation, shapes and colour recognition or reproduction through artwork. Also the perception of three-dimensional space and decoding of information in graphs, charts and diagrams can be part of these puzzles.
"Visual abilities allow us to see the world in different ways," explains Fernández-Vara. "Optical illusions are a type of playful objects, where the image is tricking our brain to see things that cannot be possible.
"A sharp eye and a keen mind will provide you with the essential skills to tackle all the visual challenges of mindgames.“
Play this game: Last Ritual
Strategy
Strategic thinking is a mental process applied by players in the context of understanding implications of strategic actions to their success in the game. In some cases players create a mental model of the complete end-to-end system, or his or her role within it. Players might also have to think in time – which means being able to hold past, present and future in mind at the same time.
Clara Fernández-Vara says: "Games based on strategy can become very complex, because they require players to come up with long-term ways of achieving a specific goal. Players have to think about every move as part of a calculated series of actions whose consequences affect one another.
"The key is to understand how the game works – the logic of it – as well as anticipate how the game is a system and behaves over time. Developing a strategy means understanding what game designers call the dynamics of the game. A game like chess is the quintessential strategy game.
"Strategy focuses on the capabilities of players to make decisions."
Play this game: Hexahedral
- Head to the Red Bull Mind Gamers website for more games to improve your problem-solving skills.
The World Finals of the 2018 Red Bull Rubik's Cube World Championship is being held on 21st September as part of Red Bull Mind Gamers. The best cubers from across the world will represent their country at the championship in Boston, USA. To read more on the championship, click here.