Brain Training and Its Gamification

In the article I will try to consider two types of thinking and possible options for their training and gamification. Thinking like the problem to be solved can be divided into the so-called productive and reproductive.
Productive, it is creative thinking is characterized by the creation of something qualitatively new, in the context of solving problems (problem solving) and is used to solve complex, previously unsolvable tasks for people. Reproductive thinking, on the contrary, is used for tasks for which the solution scheme is already known, and the implementation essentially depends only on the basic cognitive skills of the person.

Creative thinking

Imagine the task facing creative thinking in the form of an abstract two-dimensional plane, on which somewhere there are several points of acceptable solutions. A person faces the problem of finding one of these solution points, but the difficulty lies in the impossibility of going through all the possible options, so in most cases insight comes to the rescue. The classical scheme for solving a creative problem consists of stages
1) Preparation - task formulation
2) Incubation - a temporary distraction from the task
3) Illumination - the appearance of an intuitive solution.

A couple of years ago I was interested in methods for solving creative problems, and came to the conclusion that there was no particular success in this area. The problem is that the mechanisms behind the process of illumination are little studied, as a result there is no methodology that would guarantee its appearance. Therefore, they are trying to replace insight with, if I may say so, stochastic methods that can be used guaranteed.
All techniques are inherently reduced to the types of brainstorming. Brainstorming - the generation of random points-ideas on the problem plane. The strength of the method is that due to the fantasy, which is given complete freedom, it is possible to significantly expand the spread of points and, as a consequence, to increase the coverage area of ​​the plane. After all the ideas have been expressed, they are analyzed, in the hope that one of them will be located somewhere in close proximity with a suitable solution. And from this point it will be possible to try to reach the solution at the expense of reproductive thinking. There are many brainstorming improvements, the whole essence of which boils down to reducing the solution space, for example SCAMPER sets some rays on a plane in the direction of which you need to come up with ideas. It is assumed that such directions have a high probability to get to the solution (for example, one of the techniques sounds like “to replace something, for example, components, materials, people”). Or TRIZ, which, due to the fact that it is sharpened for a specific area, can even more significantly reduce the size of the plane of solutions.
Therefore, creative thinking is presented in the form of a certain monolithic process that cannot be divided into components, which could somehow be separately trained and assembled from them as a variant of gamification. The best option for training is seen only in the direct solution of full-fledged creative tasks, which in turn leads to the main difficulty. Automatic generation of creative tasks and, moreover, verification of solutions, which will be invented by man, is an extremely non-trivial task. And I think without a full AI, this task can only lie on the shoulders of other people. What in the head gives rise to some sort of MMORPG, where there are factions of those who bring tasks into the game world, those who solve them and those who value all this. So, the task of gamification of the training of creative thinking seems to me extremely laborious. Therefore, we move on to something simpler.

Reproductive thinking

As already mentioned, it is used for tasks that, in principle, already have a solution scheme. A person is able to cast components of the problem with his mind and outline a plan for finding a solution. The quality and speed of the decision will essentially depend only on cognitive skills. Consider the examples. Need to learn a new application. All we need for this is the ability to concentrate on learning, and the memory to memorize everything that has been learned. The creative contribution here is generally minimal. Or, for example, find and fix a bug in the code. Of course there are bugs that may require a thorough creative approach. But if you take a normal, average bug, the speed with which you can find it also directly depends on attention, spatial thinking (which is intensively used when navigating through code), short-term memory, etc. In general, you can think of many everyday and professional tasks that do not require a creative impulse and the solution of which depends only on the cognitive abilities of the person.
In this type of thinking, in contrast to the creative, there are quite tangible components - attention, memory, spatial thinking, volume of attention, and so on. In theory, we can train all this and thereby directly influence the speed and quality of problem solving.
From my experience I would also like to mention the state of the flow, one of the characteristic features of which is an increased concentration (complete disconnection from the outside world when solving the problem). In the process of practicing the exercises for attention, you can achieve a similar state, and over time when coding it became easier for me to enter the stream. Actually, we will be implementing gamification of cognitive skills training.
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Gamification

Unlike creative thinking, everything can fit into the framework of a single game, since we have fairly easy-to-generate and easily verifiable cognitive tasks. Let's go from simple and focus on the classic version of the game with elements of RPG (pumping the character by defeating the mobs). In the role of mobs will be training exercises. Walking on the level is not much different from the usual game, so the whole point is contained in the combat system.
There is a pair, a player is a cognitive task (for example, to memorize a set of pictures). This pair has the following parameters:
1) Is there an error in response
2) Average response time
3) Was the answer faster than average time?
4) Time limit for response
5) Is the answer received in the allotted time?
The combat system will consist of sequential submission of cognitive tasks to the player. As a result of which, either the player will receive damage or a mob. Tasks are given until one or the other has health, which will lead to victory or defeat, respectively.
1) Obviously, the worst deal is a perfect mistake. In this case, the player receives critical damage.
2) The most positive alignment is the answer faster than the average time. Promotion for this will be a critical hit from the player.
3) If the player does not have time to answer in the allotted time, then he receives normal damage.
4) If the answer is slower than average, it strikes the enemy, but at the same time he himself receives a retaliatory strike. Damage to the retaliation will increase with time so that the player, even if he does not have time to respond faster than the average, remained an incentive to respond as quickly as possible.
For the victory given experience, which gradually will increase the complexity of the tasks.

Total We take the above idea, add a maze walk, health potions and chests, wrap up graphics with opengameart.org and sound from freesound.org, plus half a year of unhurried development on weekends and get:

ru.brainexer.com/cognitivequest.html

This is my first game project, so constructive criticism is extremely welcome.