Brain games have emerged as a new segment of games within serious games, over the last few years there is some research being done as to whether they are effective. This project aims to analyze current brain games from a game design perspective to find out whether they are good games.

The research involved analyzing games from the four different brain domains of Attention, Visual Spatial, Memory and Language processing by characterizing them for the different forms of fun, and whether individual elements within the games such as sound effects, music, non-playing characters, fonts etc. were plain or pleasing.

Using quantitative analysis we analyzed 33 randomly selected individual and brain fitness company brain games. Any casual observer who has tried some of these games has probably noticed that brain games tend to offer much less engaging game play than a typical successful online casual game. They appear not to be fun enough to attract players unless the player is overly concerned about brain fitness. In fairness, serious games are not expected to be as fun or as well designed as high budget blockbuster commercial games and we wanted to test that hypothesis and provide a systematic analysis of the brain games in the market.