Designing Digital Cognitive Games That Facilitate Mindful Reasoning and Decision-Making

This chapter discusses the design of external representations of the internal formal structure of cognitive games. The formal structure of a game provides the choices, which players use in decision-making. As such, four games that provide different kinds of choices are examined: 1) spatial navigation, 2) the parameters of operations, 3) object transformation, and 4) resource management. For each game, an externalization of its internal formal structure is discussed. Studies conducted with two of the games are also presented. In total, these four cases examine how an externalization can facilitate more mindful reasoning and better decision-making.