Interested in investigating what could be the internet's most entertaining paranormal phenomenon? If so, then pay a visit to the Psi Arcade, where you'll find a series of ESP (or "psi") tests in the form of quasi-adventure games created by Dean Radin, renowned parapsychologist and senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). The first of these games is called "The Garden of Dreams" and features six different activities designed to assess-and potentially to help develop-players' psychic abilities. Want to test your intuition? From a selection of five different keys, try sensing the correct one that will unlock the gate to the game's Japanese garden. How about your precognition skills? While gazing into a reflecting pool, try to predict the future by choosing three words that best describe the picture that is going to randomly appear in the pool after you've finished describing it. And if your psychokinesis is in good shape, you can leave your hands at home and use your mental powers alone to help a small butterfly land in a tree-while a random series of wind gusts belabors your efforts by trying to blow the poor creature away.

Players receive immediate statistical feedback after each attempted puzzle, and a Hall of Fame gallery lets each player see how his or her abilities fare against those of other gamers. These stats, however, are more than mere entertainment. The IONS Research Department is collecting the data from registered users of the Psi Arcade to analyze psychic capacities among the general population, with a view toward understanding how these abilities vary between cultures. Radin recently told WIE that his previous online psi project, still hosted by the Boundary Institute at www.gotpsi.org, has recorded nearly forty million trials so far from people all over the world, and in its first year it recorded more data than sixty years' worth of experiments conducted by the famed parapsychologist J.B. Rhine. Radin notes in his statistical analysis of the Boundary Institute experiment that the benefits of online testing have not gone unnoticed by other, more mundane behavioral researchers, with results suggesting that "certain types of web-based psychology studies are at least as valid as laboratory tests, if not more so."

A new addition to the Psi Arcade, a series of games called "The Halls of Healing," will "test the roles of intention, attention, and intuition in intentional healing," enabling players both to guess the ailments of animated characters and also to mentally "heal" them. Fans of The Wild Divine will want to take notice, too, as the serene biofeedback adventure game (see WIE Feb-April 2004) teams up with IONS to create the next generation of interactive spirituality: an expansion pack of new Wild Divine adventures utilizing the best of both worlds-biofeedback controls and psi powers. Due for release by the end of this year, it will no doubt continue charting the evolution of video games into territory that Sony and Nintendo apparently haven't yet foreseen.