MindGamer: Free Brain Training for Everyone
Working with a team of PhD neuroscientists, I launched MindGamer as the web’s 1st 100% free brain-training platform. MindGamer features dozens of brain-training exercises for boosting memory and neuroplasticity.
When I launched MindGamer back in 2013 it wasn’t the first brain training platform by a long shot. Competitors Elevate, Lumosity, Peak and several other neuroscience backed platforms had already been aggressively gobbling up marketshare for some time. But MindGamer was the first 100% free, ad-supported brain training platform designed with the support of PhD neuroscientists to reach the market.
By 2013, the brain training concept was already well-established, and the web was full of neuroscientist-designed products designed to enhance neuroplasticity, working memory, spatial awareness and numerous other dimensions of cognitive performance.
What set MindGamer apart from the competition was its approach to monetization. While other subscription services like the aforementioned Lumosity and Elevate aggressively upsell unpaid users to paid tiers, MindGamer steadfastly remains 100% free. MindGamer’s ad supported strategy and zero-authentication / frictionless onboarding approach resulted in rapid adoption and a quick ascent to thousands of daily users.
MindGamer’s games are meticulously planned from the ground up with a specific cognitive benefit in mind. Some train spatial thinking. Others exercise working memory. And still others train flexibility and neuroplasticity. Each day, users are given 3 training exercises — each focusing on a different cognitive dimension.
No login. No authentication.
Addressing concerns about data privacy, and the extreme sensitivity of recording cognitive performance scores, MindGamer bucks existing trends on data collection: Yes, users are able to track personal performance over time, but individual performance data is stored locally within users’ browser data. This decision not only remoes the entire question of cloud data security, but maintains users’ anonymity as well.
Procedural Unlock.
MindGamer implements a strategic “come back tomorrow” incentive system which unlocked successive games 24 hours after the most recent visit. This strategy not only plays into the “daily training” aspect of the MindGamer platform, but also results in a high level of stickiness, as thousands of users return daily to play newly unlocked games.
The Death of Flash = The Death of MindGamer.
Beginning in 2015, web browsers began to disable Adobe’s web-animation Flash platform by default. By 2017, using Flash meant manually installing a plugin from Google’s Chrome Webstore to view Flash content. This technological sea change destroyed Flash’s seamless experience.
This added friction led to rapid user abandonment, and traffic plunged for MindGamer and thousands of conventional “arcade” gaming sites using Flash.
The other shoe dropped in 2020 when Flash was blocked completely by Google Chrome. After Google’s “Flash ban”, there was simply no easy way to view MindGamer without using a special browser — and traffic soon flatlined at close to zero.
The obvious question was: Why not rebuild the site with updated HTML5 and Javascript Canvas. I thought about it. But by then I had multiple more successful projects filling my time. MindGamer’s day had passed, I let it sunset.
Resurrection 2025
So is MindGamer dead today? Actually, no. Starting in 2025, the open source Ruffle project unexpectedly breathed new life into Mindgamer, resurrecting it from a lifeless, unplayable state to a near-perfect second life.
Yes, there are some trade-offs with the reboot. Some graphics render oddly with Ruffle’s Flash replacement, making the overall design appear somewhat clunkier than it was before. Fonts and colors are sometimes ‘off’, but for the most part MindGamer is back (which is more than one can say for its once impressive traffic) after 5 years of zero functionality.
Go get some free brain training.