Introduction

Have you ever heard of mind games before? We are not talking about brain teasers or the John Lennon song, we’re talking about psychological games that almost everyone plays among each other all the time.

You may ask your self, why do we play games? We humans are curios about surrounding and environment, playing games that engage and challenge our curiosity makes us feel more aware brain power, and that in itself gives us a sensation unmatched and our activities. Games usually seek out stimuli just slightly more complex than their preferred level of stimulation and eventually games provide that sort of stimulation. They also help the mind develop by teaching cooperation and competition, exploration, and invention.

Mind Games: Definition

Mind games or brain games are activities that are fun but challenge your brain. Games that make you think, strategize, and remember information, are all games that will help train your mind. In fact, many of these basic characteristics are what you find in many of the games you already play. Moreover, mind games are psychologically manipulative and deceptive practice intended to deceive or confused somebody.

The purpose of these games is to improve your memory, thinking, reaction time, and cognitive ability. These games are especially important later in life to keep this factors strong. While it may seem hard to believe, by simply playing certain games you can help avoid degeneration and memory loss by continuing to work your brain and keep it sharp.

Mind games are usually simple in design but have a big impact. Mind games are build to work your brain to keep it sharp and alert.

Types of Mind Games Brain games can provide stimulation through challenges. Studies shown that doing puzzles, playing games or simply learning a new language can build neural works in the brain, also it is suggested that there is an association between keeping cognitively active and decreased risk of Alzhiemer’s disease. The following activities could keep you cognitively active.

Memory Games. Helps you not only test your memory but might also improve it, because this memory game stimulates many areas in your brain responsible for storing and retrieving information. You will be having fun while keeping fit, this memory game is one of the best classics but its effects is immense. Also you will be able to learn some tricks and techniques that will help you memorize effortlessly and efficiently.

Puzzles. They come in a variety of forms, from traditional crosswords and logic puzzles to word and number play. Solving puzzles requires you to think, process, and learn, and that is the fun part. You will find some cool puzzles in many application in an android phone or even in the internet.

Riddles. They are statements or questions having a double meaning. A riddle is of two types: enigmas, which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking to find their solution, and conundrums, which are questions relying for their effects on punning in either the question or the answer.

Trivia. It is an expression used to refer to “answering quiz questions”. This type of mind game will help any person who is interested in knowledge, it will be able to give questions that might help you in your daily life, or just for fun, either way, it is a great way to seek knowledge.

Strategy Games. These type of games are dedicated to teach long term planning of actions designed to achieve a particular goal, in other words, learn how to be able to think ahead, while taking into consideration all possibilities.

Most Popular Mind Games

There are a lot of mind/brain games that exist nowadays. The following mind games could keep you cognitively active. So I bet you may want to give them a try, here is a list of some of them.

A. Chess
Chess is a two player strategy board game chessboard, a checkered gameboard with 64 squares arrange in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world’s most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide in homes, parks, clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments. In recent years, chess has become a part of some school curricula.

Each player begins the game with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. Each of the six piece types moves differently. The objective is to 'checkmate' the opponent's king by placing it under an inescapable threat of capture. To this end, a player's pieces are used to attack and capture the opponent's pieces, while supporting their own. In addition to checkmate, the game can be won by voluntary resignation by the opponent, which typically occurs when too much material is lost, or if checkmate appears unavoidable. A game may also result in a draw in several ways, where neither player wins. The course of the game is divided into three phases: opening, middlegame, and endgame.

The first official World Chess Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, claimed his title in 1886; the current World Champion is the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen. In addition to the World Championship, there are the Women's World Championship, the Junior World Championship, the World Senior Championship, the Correspondence Chess World Championship, the World Computer Chess Championship, and Blitz and Rapid World Championships. The Chess Olympiad is a popular competition among teams from different nations. Online chess has opened amateur and professional competition to a wide and varied group of players. Chess is a recognized sport of the International Olympic Committee and international chess competition is sanctioned by the World Chess Federation (FIDE), which adopted the now-standard Staunton chess set in 1924 for use in all official games. There are also many chess variants, with different rules, different pieces, and different boards.

Since the second half of the 20th century, computers have been programmed to play chess with increasing success, to the point where the strongest home computers play chess at a higher level than the best human players. In the past two decades computer analysis has contributed significantly to chess theory, particularly in the endgame. The computer Deep Blue was the first machine to overcome a reigning World Chess Champion in a match when it defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Chess is a game full of strategy. You cannot simply move a piece and hope to win. Instead, You have to plan ahead, outwit you opponent, and only then can you win. Regularly playing chess sharpens your strategic thinking and will keep your mind strong to a certain extent.

B. Sudoku
Sudoku originally called Number Place, is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids that compose the grid (also called "boxes", "blocks", "regions", or "sub-squares") contains all of the digits from 1 to 9. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid, which for a well-posed puzzle has a unique solution.

Sudoku appeared seemingly out of nowhere and today is incredibly popular in the United States, the UK and many other countries. The original "sudoku" game, however, was called "Number Place," and it first appeared in Dell Magazines' "Dell Pencil Puzzles & Word Games" in 1979.

A retired architect named Howard Garns created the puzzle at the age of 74 (and, sadly, passed away in 1989 before the game experienced its surge in popularity).

Today sudoku puzzles can be found in newspapers, puzzle books, online and in video game form, and range in difficulty from easy to hard. Many variations have also popped up, such as diagonal sudoku, even-odd sudoku and "greater than" sudoku.

Completed puzzles are always a type of Latin square with an additional constraint on the contents of individual regions. For example, the same single integer may not appear twice in the same row, column or in any of the nine 3×3 sub regions of the 9x9 playing board.

The puzzle was popularized in 1986 by the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli, under the name Sudoku, meaning single number. It became an international hit in 2005. There is much thought that you have to put into this game and it is a great way to keep your mind sharp.

C. Rubik’s Cube
Rubik's Cube is a 3-D combination puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. Originally called the Magic Cube, the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toy Corp. in 1980 via businessman Tibor Laczi and Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer, and won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle that year. As of January 2009, 350 million cubes had been sold worldwide making it the world's top-selling puzzle game. It is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy.

In a classic Rubik's Cube, each of the six faces is covered by nine stickers, each of one of six solid colours: white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow. In currently sold models, white is opposite yellow, blue is opposite green, and orange is opposite red, and the red, white and blue are arranged in that order in a clockwise arrangement. On early cubes, the position of the colours varied from cube to cube. An internal pivot mechanism enables each face to turn independently, thus mixing up the colours. For the puzzle to be solved, each face must be returned to consisting of one colour. Similar puzzles have now been produced with various numbers of sides, dimensions, and stickers, not all of them by Rubik.

A standard Rubik's Cube measures 5.7 cm (approximately 2¼ inches) on each side. The puzzle consists of twenty-six unique miniature cubes, also called "cubies" or "cubelets". Each of these includes a concealed inward extension that interlocks with the other cubes, while permitting them to move to different locations. However, the centre cube of each of the six faces is merely a single square façade; all six are affixed to the core mechanism. These provide structure for the other pieces to fit into and rotate around. So there are twenty-one pieces: a single core piece consisting of three intersecting axes holding the six centre squares in place but letting them rotate, and twenty smaller plastic pieces which fit into it to form the assembled puzzle.

Although the Rubik's Cube reached its height of mainstream popularity in the 1980s, it is still widely known and used. Many speedcubers continue to practice it and other twisty puzzles and compete for the fastest times in various categories. Since 2003, The World Cube Association, the Rubik's Cube's international governing body, has organized competitions and kept the official world records.

D. Scrabble
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a gameboard which is divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words which, in crossword fashion, flow left to right in rows or downwards in columns.

In 1933, New York City architect Alfred Mosher Butts created an early version of the game we know as Scrabble. To determine how many tiles there should be and how many points each letter should be worth, he calculated letter frequency on the front page of the New York Times. So, for example, “Q is a letter that occurs least often in English text, so it should be a letter that there is only one tile of, and that tile should be worth 10 points,” says John Chew, co-president of the North American SCRABBLE Players Association (NASPA).

The board is marked with "premium" squares, which multiply the number of points awarded: eight dark red "triple-word" squares, 17 pink "double-word" squares, of which one, the center square (H8), is marked with a star or other symbol; 12 dark blue "triple-letter" squares, and 24 light blue "double-letter" squares. In 2008, Hasbro changed the colors of the premium squares to orange for TW, red for DW, blue for DL, and green for TL. Despite this, the original premium square color scheme is still the preferred scheme for Scrabble boards used in tournament.

The name of the game spelled out in game tiles from the English-language version. Each tile is marked with their point value, with a blank tile—the game's equivalent of a wild card—played as the word's first letter. The blank tile is worth zero points.

In an English-language set, the game contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10. The number of points of each lettered tile is based on the letter's frequency in standard English writing; commonly used letters such as vowels are worth one point, while less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each worth 10 points. The game also has two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no point value. The blank tiles can be used as substitutes for any letter; once laid on the board, however, the choice is fixed. Other language sets use different letter set distributions with different point values.

Benefits of Mind Games

There is no fun like mind games fun. Mind games fun involves using your grey matter to solve puzzles, figure out the answers to riddles, stretch your memory and more the thing about them is that they are both entertaining educational.

Mind games makes you think. It challenges you to be creative and flex your mentall muscle. By playing games like these, you sharpen your thinking and speed up your thinking time. It is just like exercise that you do to make your body stronger or more limber. You can use it to improve your memory and study show that mind games can help reduce Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative mental disorder.

Playing mind games keeps brain active despite getting older. Playing mind games is the same with the activities like writing, reading, and answering puzzles. There are some parents who let their children play mind games despite the young age for they believe that it can sharpen their minds.

Playing mind games is good form of mind exercise. It can keep one fromm ageing mentally. However, this does not remove the fact of the need to have a physical exercise.

Thinking, strategizing, and remembering information are just few things that you will do in games to build your mind. Keep your mind sharp and strong throughout your life be remembering the benefits of playing mind games.

Many mind games have their advanatages and the best part is they all teach very important life and cognitive skills that anyone could benefit from. Try a few brain training games and you will start to see the difference in no time at all. Mind games will also raise self-esteem, personal confidence and all around moral so there is nothing to lose.
Braing Games: A Bane ?

On this issue, the jury is essentially unanimous: intensive play of brain games has been shown to have negative cognitive effects. Merzenich references studies that indicate such games can create “listleness and discontent in slower-paced and less stimulating academic, work or social environments.”

While strong evidence is mounting, research is proceeding but still incomplete. According to Han and Renshaw, investigations suggest that “brain arease that respnd to game stimuli in patients with brain games addiction are similar to those that respond to drug cue- induced craving in patients with substance dependence. “In addition, they state that brain games has been shown to create “dysfunction in five domains: academic, social, occupational, developmental and behavioural. While gaming addiction may differ from other types of addiction, it clearly appears to be a very real issue.

Conclusion

Games play an important role in the life of youngsters if they are played at proper time. Some games are played to keep body fit and are considered as another form of exercise whereas some games require the efforts and coordination of mind.

If you are a person who takes great interest in playing challenging games, which seems to be also very competitive, then you must also know that these games can sometimes be a little frustrating to solve.

There are so many great benefits to brain games, besides pure enjoyment, it seems a shame to miss out of them.

Bibliography http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/08/01/brain-exercise.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_Cube http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/mind-games.aspx http://www.brainhq.com/why-brainhq/brain-training-your-way/12-benefits-of-brain-fitness http://www.lifesdha.com/a-beautiful-you/exercise-your-brain.aspx https://sites.google.com/site/memoryproblems01/the-benefits-of-playing-mind-games https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201004/mind-games-keeping-your-brain-sharp-through-play