If one title epitomises the Nintendo DS’s impact on the world’s view of gaming, it’s surely Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? With its touted 10 million users and high-profile advertising featuring Patrick Stewart and Julie Walters, it’s succeeded in interesting a whole new market in games, but has the Touch Generations! brand left gamers worse off?

This past Mother’s Day, Nintendo and some high-street games specialists purposefully marketed the Nintendo DS and Brain Training as a suitable present for your Mum, which is surely no more insulting than the more traditional anti-ageing creams. The Brain Training bundle even features a silver-haired lady enjoying her DS, and you can expect to see similar images this Easter. It’s had a huge presence in games shops for the past month or so, and as it remains at number two in the all-format charts it’s clearly working.

The entire campaign is masterfully pitched, particularly the TV advert for More Brain Training, which features three players squarely outside of the stereotypical gamer demographic. It has to be well done – if the original game is so popular, why buy anything else, particularly more of the same? And how do you advertise the second game without superceding the first?

The Daily Grind

The answer is by covering all bases. One player trains every day, one used to train and one has never trained. That’s fairly comprehensive cover! The regular player is deemed up to the challenge, the lapsed player could swing either way and the non-player should probably never attempt Continuous Countdown again. It’s possibly the most judgemental advertising campaign for a game ever, pigeonholing its audience by means of reward or punishment.

“You trained every day, congratulations! Now buy more!”

“You have neglected your training. You must start all over again!”

This is compounded by the language of the voiceover. More Brain Training is described as “the next instalment in the Brain Training regime”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a game called a “regime” before, but it fits perfectly: the day-to-day tasks, the overseeing Doctor, the use of uncertainty to maintain daily cooperation. Even if you do manage to play the original Brain Training every day for a year, it then tells you that you’ve received all its benefits and leaves you with no option but to buy the second game. I personally like to decide myself if I’ve played a game as much as I can.

Grey Matters

I’ll make no argument as to whether Brain Training really does make your brain faster, but from a gamer’s point of view it does have an extreme “dumbing-down” effect. If you’ve read my site before, you’ll know I’m an advocate of intelligent gaming – games that have purpose and originality, that showcase what games can be and the experiences they can give. Brain Training would seem to be a perfect fit for this, but in my opinion it’s guilty of undermining them.

The main problem is that it has dumbed-down people’s expectations of what games should be. As a rule the popular media tend to report only on violent or otherwise controversial games, whilst they advertise games about counting how many men are in a house. This complete polarisation surely is detrimental to the industry: with no understanding of how diverse games can be, how can the mainstream come to accept them? If games have to be at either end of the scale to gain recognition, how is this going to damage developers and publishers?

Before Dr Kawashima hit the scene, you didn’t often hear adults talking about their “Nintendos”, or what their high score was. It has brought new gamers in, but where do they go from there for new experiences? The stream of Training games is clearly purpose-built for them, but it’s a short-term thing: when the DS is obsolete in three or four years, what are these new gamers going to be playing? The irony is, the smart money is on Even More Brain Training.