Dr Kawashima’s Discrimination Training

Recently Watchdog, (a UK consumer complaint show), ran an article on DS Brain Training / Brain Age supposedly discriminating against accents – especially those of Northern England and Scotland. As silly as this sounds, I actually found it to be entirely true when playing despite commanding a relatively well-spoken Scots tongue myself, though was impressed enough that the voice-recognition worked as well as it did. Nintendo were even thoughtful enough to allow the omission of the voice-recognition element from the Brain Age test.

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The thing they don’t mention in the segment, however, is the blatant discrimination against a particular way of writing the number 4. In order to avoid being labeled with the mental age of a seventy year-old I had to relearn something that’s come naturally since childhood, with a numerical brainwashing so thorough I’ve never been able to go back to the old way since.

2 Comments on 'Dr Kawashima’s Discrimination Training'

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  1. Comment by lightspeedchick
    February 6th, 2008 at 1:47 pm

    This is a first. I was reading this through my feeds, not really paying attention to what blog it was, and thought, hey, an article about Scottish accents and games. I have to forward this to Jonathan. Gnurf.

  2. Comment by C.Moore
    April 2nd, 2008 at 4:24 pm

    Ahahahah, yes, it can change the way one writes their numbers. However, I wonder if this works in such a way, wouldn’t it be possible to make a handwritting-improvement software for the DS? I could certainly use something of the sort.

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