10 ms·

Inter-brain sync occurs without physical copresence during online gaming

138 points by programd 4y ago

mym1990 4y ago
Me while playing League of Legends as my 4 teammates completely rip me to shreds for underperforming: "Yep, they are all on the same page, that's for sure".
- frostwarrior 4y ago
  My entire experience with MOBAs is that people will rip you to shreds for not doing or knowing every overly specific thing people didn't know either when they had less experience.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    Or don't even know currently but just want point fingers. Something about humans becoming anonymous really bring out a different side of us...
    - moonchrome 4y ago
      Not really about being anonymous as I've seen the same pattern when playing with people I know in real life, although playing with strangers removes a lot of restraint. It's more that those games create a scenario where you are going to be frustrated for 20+ minutes because of mistakes of others, and you likely started playing because you're trying to get away from frustration IRL.
      - dwringer 4y ago
        Unfortunately I can agree with this completely. I stopped playing Fortnite because of this. Although it can be fun without winning, when they introduced the victory crowns to reward multiple consecutive wins (along with an emote to rub it in everyone's face) it seemed like just enough to cause us all to start getting frustrated and screw up team morale.
- wincy 4y ago
  Ugh I stopped playing league of legends because it just made me so angry and act so terribly. Screaming at my friends and just constantly feeling angry and frustrated. With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. My wife’s ex would piss in bottles while drinking vodka and playing. If I try to play League she’ll throw the breaker because the noises are triggering to her. Now I play D&D because losing is just as much fun (or more fun!) than losing.
  - skulk 4y ago
    > With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. This is theoretically expected of skill-based matchmaking systems.
    - ianbutler 4y ago
      You are right about sbmm, but it doesn’t make for a good progression system imo. If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. It should only feel like a slog/be super competitive when the external rank matches the hidden elo. Not the entire time IMO. Some games get this right, others (looking at you Apex Legends Arenas Mode) does not and it just winds up being a terrible slog.
      - bick_nyers 4y ago
        Lol so true. Why am I being matched up against top 500 players when I am quite literally making my way through bronze. Just double my queue time until we find a good match at that point.
      - cube2222 4y ago
        Actually, I think matching you against equal players would be much better in such a situation, but you should gain much more visible elo for wins than you lose for losses (thus going up even with a 50% win rate).
- adamrezich 4y ago
  maybe it's just me but I've noticed a general steady decline in Dota 2 Turbo mode "toxicity" over the years.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    Tons of initiatives going on in MOBAs to work on the toxicity problems, I hope they are working!
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      I usually end every turbo game with "ggwp, have a great evening everyone", and commend all of the other nine players unless someone was being an asshole (regardless of whether we won or lost, or whether that player performed well). I can't remember a time when Dota 2 was ever friendlier than it is now (been playing for over a decade now, since beta)… at least, in Turbo. I'm sure the other "full" modes still have quite a bit of nastiness as the games run longer there than in Turbo. the whole reason I play the game is what TFA is talking about, syncing up and pulling off cool shit with four other random people against five other random people online. when it works it's incredible.
      - mym1990 4y ago
        Really good mindset!
- cevn 4y ago
  I just play ARAM now, it's less toxic than ranked.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    The problem with ARAM is people play terribly and if you're actually trying to play well, it's pretty frustrating. People mess around and then are like "it's just ARAM bro" when you're like "yo wtf plz actually play properly". In general, League is a frustrating experience because it's basically inevitable that even when you're playing your absolute best, others on the team aren't. The occasional great experiences where everyone has that synergistic gameplay and excellent coordination/execution makes it all worth it (I guess), but every other match has me wondering "why am I still playing this?" heh
    - cevn 4y ago
      I devote most of my competitive energy to Rocket League for this reason. Games are only 5 minutes long and you can actually solo carry. Also you don't have to re learn the game every 3 months when a balance patch hits. edit: I know what you mean. A great League game makes it all worth it, but those seem to be maybe 10% of the games and the other 90% you are just trying to be a kindergarten teacher trying to keep everyone from going afk.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- leach 4y ago
  I don't even care when people are toxic, they are so easy to bait into raging when they are. I suck at league and say I do though so at least I'm honest.
- andrepd 4y ago
  I equate League of Legends with drugs or junk food. It's not fun, not rewarding, not creative, not anything. I could play 3 or 4 40m games and at the end have a completely empty feeling. It is, however, extremely addictive. I'll try hard not to get addicted to something that meaningless ever again. Games like LoL are the soul-sucking rock-bottom of games. My experience, of course.
  - standardly 4y ago
    "It's not fun" What did you expect to get out of a game? If it isn't fun, don't play! That's why it felt meaningless lol
    - sph 4y ago
      An addiction (to use the same word GP has used) doesn't have to feel fun to keep engaging in it. It just has to feel rewarding, which in its strictest sense it means your brain saying "I shall have more of this". Fun and addiction are two separate mechanisms mediated by different neurotransmitters.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      Why do smokers smoke? It doesn't even taste good when you're pumping a pack a day into your lungs.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    I have played League for 10 hours straight before and thought "wtf just happened?". Its like time just evaporates and it really does feel like an addiction.
- sdwr 4y ago
  Yup. Every time I come back to dota I get (polite) flames for the first 10 games, everyone knows I'm the weak link somehow. Takes a while to be reabsorbed into the hive mind.
tantalor 4y ago
Parallel Synchronized Randomness https://youtu.be/KlpGe7RN9zk https://youtu.be/KlpGe7RN9zk
- dwringer 4y ago
  I am also reminded of the series Maniac on Netflix, which I highly recommend.
meremortals 4y ago
edit: maybe not "without physical copresence" I believe something similar happens when musicians improvise/jam, especially Jazz: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073852 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- hammock 4y ago
  Without physical copresence?
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    There's no reason that isn't testable..
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  Yeah I was about to mention this, or really any other highly synchronized activity with a degree of improvisation involved. Very cool feeling doing this kind of thing. I think the point of studies like this using a video game, though, is that it's a lot more reproducible.
hammock 4y ago
Brain sync is known in physically present people, and as I believe is understood to be in large part mediated by the vagus nerve in your gut. Interesting to see this finding in remote setting
- vnchr 4y ago
  I wonder what other remote settings might host this phenomenon. Paired programming?
  - apalumbi 4y ago
    As a person that practiced pair programming in a professional setting for many years...this absolutely exists.
soulofmischief 4y ago
We see this behavior in rats[0] and monkeys[1] using various methods of directly linking brains, and have shown that communication spontaneously occurs even without physical presence. Video games are one step of abstraction away from wires and electrodes, but the science is still there. Seriously amazing stuff. [0] https://www.livescience.com/27544-rats-with-linked-brains-work-together.html https://www.livescience.com/27544-rats-with-linked-brains-wo... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-have-linked-3-macaque-brains-together-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-have-linked-3-mac...
fnordpiglet 4y ago
I know I always ovulated with my fleet mates in Eve
im3w1l 4y ago
I wonder what it means that the brain wave synchronization decreased over the session. Did some signal cause them to start out synchronized and then they gradually drifted apart spontaneously? Also kind of wonder if this will replicate.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  So this caused caused me to associate in interesting manners, one thing lead to another, and suddenly I was reading a really wacky paper, which does have some real science, but where it's hard to tell where science ends and fantasy begins [1]. Anyway one formulation stuck with me and came back after having some nice sleep. How lightning storms can cause the schuman resonance to ring like a bell. What I realized was that lightning is phenomenon in time-domain. And then I realized that action potentials are also a time-domain phenomenon. And what are brainwaves but the ringing of action potentials (this question is less rhetorical than it first sounds, I don't know, maybe there is actually something more to it)? Lightning storms... action potential storm. Maybe it's simply that the start of the game or something similar, that causes a strong time-domain response, basically a dirac spike, with a little resonant ringing. [1]. https://www.bobbeck.com/pdfs/beck-article-elf-waves-and-eeg-entrainment.pdf https://www.bobbeck.com/pdfs/beck-article-elf-waves-and-eeg-...
- comfypotato 4y ago
  I think a muscle tiring out is a halfway decent metaphor for this. It would literally being ion concentrations, neurotransmitter vesicles, etc. that need to “recharge”. I’ve got some undergrad neuroscience research under my belt, but no real qualifications for the statements. Notice the synchronization is stronger for the second game. That would be short term synaptic neuroplasticity (and where the muscle metaphor ends).
csense 4y ago
Headline says "online", but the description sounds like they're on the same LAN. This matters because the latency between the systems (LAN latency ~ 1ms, corresponding to frequency of ~1000 Hz) is faster than the phenomena they're measuring (2-45 Hz). I'd assume the mechanism is that the player has a lot of physicality, so their brain's pretending the on-screen avatar is part of their body. If latency is artificially injected into the display or controls or both, do the brain waves develop a phase offset? Or does latency just cause the game's sense of physicality to break down? Is interactivity and real-time interaction a necessary component of brain wave synchronization? Or does it show up in non-interactive settings as well? How could this be tested? I'm thinking what might be going on here is the game forces players' brains' movement processing to physically simulate the same vehicle. The brains aren't syncing with each other, they're syncing with the on-screen object they're controlling -- which is the same for both players, causing their brains to sync -- transitively. Simply put, if Alice's brain syncs with the vehicle on screen A and Bob's brain syncs with the vehicle on screen B and the two screens are in sync with each other because that's what the game's networking code is designed to do, the EEG ends up measuring Alice's and Bob's brains to be in sync. I'd be interested in extending the experiment: Instead of giving the two players a real-time multiplayer game, have them play a single-player game one at a time, and see if their brains sync to the gameplay in the same way. One problem is replicability. To produce the sync phenomenon, you might need a game where the controllable character with good "physicality" -- a tight feedback loop between its movement and inputs, to convince the player's brain to treat their on-screen character as an extension of their body. Give the player a character they can't control, and their brain isn't convinced the character is a part of them, and doesn't sync to it in the same way. But if you give the player a character they can control, different people playing the game at different times will have different inputs, meaning the phenomenon could be there but you have no way to measure it. That is, Player A's and Player B's brain waves might sync to their individual games, but you can't measure that with similarity analysis anymore, because in Player A's game the vehicle took a different track than in Player B's game. One way to solve this problem is to give them a character with a physicality they have to consider but can't control. For example, shooting targets from a vehicle -- your brain has to simulate the vehicle's path to aim your shots, but you can't control its movement directly. The players' brains' simulations of the vehicle might end up in sync, leading to their brain waves being in sync. Another way to solve this problem is to create a game with little margin for departure from the correct path -- think about a Mario Maker speedrun level with a tight timer. Successful runs by different players will have very similar character paths and controller inputs, because significant departure from the optimal path results in failure. See if brain waves of different players may end up in sync as they're executing the same moves with the same timing.
amelius 4y ago
I would be more surprised if it occurred without means of communication. Now it is just high level cognitive interaction shows low level correlation, which is not very interesting.
capitainenemo 4y ago
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-11-games-brains-alike.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-11-games-brains-alike.ht... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131121091439.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131121091439.h... Some older research along these lines.
radu_floricica 4y ago
For some reason this really reminds me of Evangelion.
lambdaloop 4y ago
There has been a series of recent in the past few decades on brain synchronization. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell whether it's due to the similarity of the task itself (so two people see and pay attention to the same stimulus as the game naturally progresses) or due to some similar predictions by separate people (so that they are "on the same page" and anticipating each other's actions). I wish there was some sort of control to disambiguate between synchrony due to sensory processing or due to action prediction. Perhaps different games that emphasize the sensory aspect or the action prediction aspect? Uri Hassan has done some really thoughtful work exploiting the brain synchrony from sensory processing to understand the processing itself, such as finding when people pay attention (more synchrony) or figuring out which brain regions process meaning rather than sound (synchrony from Russian vs English version of a sentence).

138 points by programd 4y ago

mym1990 4y ago

Me while playing League of Legends as my 4 teammates completely rip me to shreds for underperforming: "Yep, they are all on the same page, that's for sure".

frostwarrior 4y ago
My entire experience with MOBAs is that people will rip you to shreds for not doing or knowing every overly specific thing people didn't know either when they had less experience.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Or don't even know currently but just want point fingers. Something about humans becoming anonymous really bring out a different side of us...
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    Not really about being anonymous as I've seen the same pattern when playing with people I know in real life, although playing with strangers removes a lot of restraint. It's more that those games create a scenario where you are going to be frustrated for 20+ minutes because of mistakes of others, and you likely started playing because you're trying to get away from frustration IRL.
    - dwringer 4y ago
      Unfortunately I can agree with this completely. I stopped playing Fortnite because of this. Although it can be fun without winning, when they introduced the victory crowns to reward multiple consecutive wins (along with an emote to rub it in everyone's face) it seemed like just enough to cause us all to start getting frustrated and screw up team morale.
wincy 4y ago
Ugh I stopped playing league of legends because it just made me so angry and act so terribly. Screaming at my friends and just constantly feeling angry and frustrated. With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. My wife’s ex would piss in bottles while drinking vodka and playing. If I try to play League she’ll throw the breaker because the noises are triggering to her. Now I play D&D because losing is just as much fun (or more fun!) than losing.
- skulk 4y ago
  > With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. This is theoretically expected of skill-based matchmaking systems.
  - ianbutler 4y ago
    You are right about sbmm, but it doesn’t make for a good progression system imo. If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. It should only feel like a slog/be super competitive when the external rank matches the hidden elo. Not the entire time IMO. Some games get this right, others (looking at you Apex Legends Arenas Mode) does not and it just winds up being a terrible slog.
    - bick_nyers 4y ago
      Lol so true. Why am I being matched up against top 500 players when I am quite literally making my way through bronze. Just double my queue time until we find a good match at that point.
    - cube2222 4y ago
      Actually, I think matching you against equal players would be much better in such a situation, but you should gain much more visible elo for wins than you lose for losses (thus going up even with a 50% win rate).
adamrezich 4y ago
maybe it's just me but I've noticed a general steady decline in Dota 2 Turbo mode "toxicity" over the years.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Tons of initiatives going on in MOBAs to work on the toxicity problems, I hope they are working!
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    I usually end every turbo game with "ggwp, have a great evening everyone", and commend all of the other nine players unless someone was being an asshole (regardless of whether we won or lost, or whether that player performed well). I can't remember a time when Dota 2 was ever friendlier than it is now (been playing for over a decade now, since beta)… at least, in Turbo. I'm sure the other "full" modes still have quite a bit of nastiness as the games run longer there than in Turbo. the whole reason I play the game is what TFA is talking about, syncing up and pulling off cool shit with four other random people against five other random people online. when it works it's incredible.
    - mym1990 4y ago
      Really good mindset!
cevn 4y ago
I just play ARAM now, it's less toxic than ranked.
- amatecha 4y ago
  The problem with ARAM is people play terribly and if you're actually trying to play well, it's pretty frustrating. People mess around and then are like "it's just ARAM bro" when you're like "yo wtf plz actually play properly". In general, League is a frustrating experience because it's basically inevitable that even when you're playing your absolute best, others on the team aren't. The occasional great experiences where everyone has that synergistic gameplay and excellent coordination/execution makes it all worth it (I guess), but every other match has me wondering "why am I still playing this?" heh
  - cevn 4y ago
    I devote most of my competitive energy to Rocket League for this reason. Games are only 5 minutes long and you can actually solo carry. Also you don't have to re learn the game every 3 months when a balance patch hits. edit: I know what you mean. A great League game makes it all worth it, but those seem to be maybe 10% of the games and the other 90% you are just trying to be a kindergarten teacher trying to keep everyone from going afk.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
leach 4y ago
I don't even care when people are toxic, they are so easy to bait into raging when they are. I suck at league and say I do though so at least I'm honest.
andrepd 4y ago
I equate League of Legends with drugs or junk food. It's not fun, not rewarding, not creative, not anything. I could play 3 or 4 40m games and at the end have a completely empty feeling. It is, however, extremely addictive. I'll try hard not to get addicted to something that meaningless ever again. Games like LoL are the soul-sucking rock-bottom of games. My experience, of course.
- standardly 4y ago
  "It's not fun" What did you expect to get out of a game? If it isn't fun, don't play! That's why it felt meaningless lol
  - sph 4y ago
    An addiction (to use the same word GP has used) doesn't have to feel fun to keep engaging in it. It just has to feel rewarding, which in its strictest sense it means your brain saying "I shall have more of this". Fun and addiction are two separate mechanisms mediated by different neurotransmitters.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    Why do smokers smoke? It doesn't even taste good when you're pumping a pack a day into your lungs.
- mym1990 4y ago
  I have played League for 10 hours straight before and thought "wtf just happened?". Its like time just evaporates and it really does feel like an addiction.
sdwr 4y ago
Yup. Every time I come back to dota I get (polite) flames for the first 10 games, everyone knows I'm the weak link somehow. Takes a while to be reabsorbed into the hive mind.

tantalor 4y ago

Parallel Synchronized Randomness https://youtu.be/KlpGe7RN9zk https://youtu.be/KlpGe7RN9zk

dwringer 4y ago
I am also reminded of the series Maniac on Netflix, which I highly recommend.

meremortals 4y ago

edit: maybe not "without physical copresence" I believe something similar happens when musicians improvise/jam, especially Jazz: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073852 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

hammock 4y ago
Without physical copresence?
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  There's no reason that isn't testable..
jamal-kumar 4y ago
Yeah I was about to mention this, or really any other highly synchronized activity with a degree of improvisation involved. Very cool feeling doing this kind of thing. I think the point of studies like this using a video game, though, is that it's a lot more reproducible.

hammock 4y ago

Brain sync is known in physically present people, and as I believe is understood to be in large part mediated by the vagus nerve in your gut. Interesting to see this finding in remote setting

vnchr 4y ago
I wonder what other remote settings might host this phenomenon. Paired programming?
- apalumbi 4y ago
  As a person that practiced pair programming in a professional setting for many years...this absolutely exists.

soulofmischief 4y ago

We see this behavior in rats[0] and monkeys[1] using various methods of directly linking brains, and have shown that communication spontaneously occurs even without physical presence. Video games are one step of abstraction away from wires and electrodes, but the science is still there. Seriously amazing stuff. [0] https://www.livescience.com/27544-rats-with-linked-brains-work-together.html https://www.livescience.com/27544-rats-with-linked-brains-wo... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-have-linked-3-macaque-brains-together-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-have-linked-3-mac...

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I know I always ovulated with my fleet mates in Eve

im3w1l 4y ago

I wonder what it means that the brain wave synchronization decreased over the session. Did some signal cause them to start out synchronized and then they gradually drifted apart spontaneously? Also kind of wonder if this will replicate.

im3w1l 4y ago
So this caused caused me to associate in interesting manners, one thing lead to another, and suddenly I was reading a really wacky paper, which does have some real science, but where it's hard to tell where science ends and fantasy begins [1]. Anyway one formulation stuck with me and came back after having some nice sleep. How lightning storms can cause the schuman resonance to ring like a bell. What I realized was that lightning is phenomenon in time-domain. And then I realized that action potentials are also a time-domain phenomenon. And what are brainwaves but the ringing of action potentials (this question is less rhetorical than it first sounds, I don't know, maybe there is actually something more to it)? Lightning storms... action potential storm. Maybe it's simply that the start of the game or something similar, that causes a strong time-domain response, basically a dirac spike, with a little resonant ringing. [1]. https://www.bobbeck.com/pdfs/beck-article-elf-waves-and-eeg-entrainment.pdf https://www.bobbeck.com/pdfs/beck-article-elf-waves-and-eeg-...
comfypotato 4y ago
I think a muscle tiring out is a halfway decent metaphor for this. It would literally being ion concentrations, neurotransmitter vesicles, etc. that need to “recharge”. I’ve got some undergrad neuroscience research under my belt, but no real qualifications for the statements. Notice the synchronization is stronger for the second game. That would be short term synaptic neuroplasticity (and where the muscle metaphor ends).

csense 4y ago

Headline says "online", but the description sounds like they're on the same LAN. This matters because the latency between the systems (LAN latency ~ 1ms, corresponding to frequency of ~1000 Hz) is faster than the phenomena they're measuring (2-45 Hz). I'd assume the mechanism is that the player has a lot of physicality, so their brain's pretending the on-screen avatar is part of their body. If latency is artificially injected into the display or controls or both, do the brain waves develop a phase offset? Or does latency just cause the game's sense of physicality to break down? Is interactivity and real-time interaction a necessary component of brain wave synchronization? Or does it show up in non-interactive settings as well? How could this be tested? I'm thinking what might be going on here is the game forces players' brains' movement processing to physically simulate the same vehicle. The brains aren't syncing with each other, they're syncing with the on-screen object they're controlling -- which is the same for both players, causing their brains to sync -- transitively. Simply put, if Alice's brain syncs with the vehicle on screen A and Bob's brain syncs with the vehicle on screen B and the two screens are in sync with each other because that's what the game's networking code is designed to do, the EEG ends up measuring Alice's and Bob's brains to be in sync. I'd be interested in extending the experiment: Instead of giving the two players a real-time multiplayer game, have them play a single-player game one at a time, and see if their brains sync to the gameplay in the same way. One problem is replicability. To produce the sync phenomenon, you might need a game where the controllable character with good "physicality" -- a tight feedback loop between its movement and inputs, to convince the player's brain to treat their on-screen character as an extension of their body. Give the player a character they can't control, and their brain isn't convinced the character is a part of them, and doesn't sync to it in the same way. But if you give the player a character they can control, different people playing the game at different times will have different inputs, meaning the phenomenon could be there but you have no way to measure it. That is, Player A's and Player B's brain waves might sync to their individual games, but you can't measure that with similarity analysis anymore, because in Player A's game the vehicle took a different track than in Player B's game. One way to solve this problem is to give them a character with a physicality they have to consider but can't control. For example, shooting targets from a vehicle -- your brain has to simulate the vehicle's path to aim your shots, but you can't control its movement directly. The players' brains' simulations of the vehicle might end up in sync, leading to their brain waves being in sync. Another way to solve this problem is to create a game with little margin for departure from the correct path -- think about a Mario Maker speedrun level with a tight timer. Successful runs by different players will have very similar character paths and controller inputs, because significant departure from the optimal path results in failure. See if brain waves of different players may end up in sync as they're executing the same moves with the same timing.

amelius 4y ago

I would be more surprised if it occurred without means of communication. Now it is just high level cognitive interaction shows low level correlation, which is not very interesting.

capitainenemo 4y ago

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-11-games-brains-alike.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-11-games-brains-alike.ht... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131121091439.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131121091439.h... Some older research along these lines.

radu_floricica 4y ago

For some reason this really reminds me of Evangelion.

lambdaloop 4y ago

There has been a series of recent in the past few decades on brain synchronization. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell whether it's due to the similarity of the task itself (so two people see and pay attention to the same stimulus as the game naturally progresses) or due to some similar predictions by separate people (so that they are "on the same page" and anticipating each other's actions). I wish there was some sort of control to disambiguate between synchrony due to sensory processing or due to action prediction. Perhaps different games that emphasize the sensory aspect or the action prediction aspect? Uri Hassan has done some really thoughtful work exploiting the brain synchrony from sensory processing to understand the processing itself, such as finding when people pay attention (more synchrony) or figuring out which brain regions process meaning rather than sound (synchrony from Russian vs English version of a sentence).