Towards the-the latter part of my freelance career, when I was working uh, in serious games quite a bit, I got more and more interested in neuroscience, and how neuroscience overlaps with serious games, and one of the things that was really wonderful sort of uh, synergy between neuroscience and gaming, is that the scientists had all of these complex uh, ways that they wanted people to interact, and use parts of their brain in different ways, but the methods that they came up with were almost always really boring and, you know, trivial to the patients that they had some in. And so games were just this wonderful solution that got them much more involved, and we as game designers often could learn to fine-tune the types of interactions in a game to go after the specific types of results they wanted. And in return, we game designers had more or less empirically figured out a lot of ways that games affect the brain, and a lot of my-my friends, Raph Koster, Jesse Schell, for example, we talk a lot about the way the brain works, and how games affect that, and how people evolve to play games, and having actual neuroscientists who not only were interested in what we do, but were giving us opportunities to learn how they do their job, and how to make our games better at- figuring out what going inside people’s heads, going on inside people’s heads when they’re playing games. It was just a win-win all around, so they get more engaging experiments, and we got better insights into the brains of our game players.
