Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Basketball Players and Fighter Pilots

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Water Cooler Games

Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Basketball Players and Fighter Pilots

by Ian Bogost November 5, 2004

categories: Health & Medicine Games

An AP story reports on a training tool called IntelliGym, which an Israeli company developed for pilot cadets. The game, which has been around since the mid-90s, purportedly "improves concentration." Now the game's developers are selling it to college and pro basketball teams "to increase the player's ability to focus on several things at once, recognize patterns among moving objects and make decisions quickly." Here's how it plays:

In IntelliGym, two sets of abstract figures move constantly across a dark screen. One set is larger and egg-shaped, while the other looks like small video-game spaceships.

A player tries to attach one of the smaller figures to a larger one to steal its ``energy.'' The player also must ``shoot'' to transfer power from one small figure to another as openings appear. The game gets progressively more difficult as it's played and is individually adjusted depending on a players' strengths or weaknesses.

(via Kotaku)