Games have medicinal value
Several hundred US game developers, medical workers and government policy makers were set to collaborate in Maryland in September at the Games for Health Project devoted to putting video games in the US medicine chest.
"We think there is a huge potential for games to be used for good," said Richard Tate of HopeLab, the company that created Re-Mission game for children being treated for cancer.
"It is just a matter of designing them thoughtfully and targeting what you want to achieve with the design."
Re-Mission combined biological accuracy with animated heroine "Roxxi," billed as "a gutsy, fully armed nanobot that seeks out and destroys cancer cells throughout the human body."
Patients that played the game were more apt to take their medicine, undergo needed therapy and believe they could beat cancer, according to HopeLab, which is based in Palo Alto, California.
HopeLab had filled more than 30,000 orders for the game from 55 countries since launching Re-Mission in April. The company is also working on games to treat autism, depression, sickle cell anemia, and childhood obesity, according to Tate.
HopeLab planned to share what it learned about researching and designing the game at the Health Games gathering at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. The third annual conference was informally referred to as "the exergames" in the spirit of meshing exercise and play.
Among those expected to attend were representatives from the US National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, according to organiser Ben Sawyer.
"What is great there is that our conference is becoming a platform for federal and non-government agencies to meet and find ways to use this technology to address health and health care," Sawyer told AFP.
"Part of our goal is to show that a technology as powerful as video games has a use far beyond entertainment, while on the other hand entertainment is part of a healthy lifestyle."
A study is underway in public schools in the US state of West Virginia to determine whether playing the game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) made by Japan-based Konami Corporation helps children get fit.
Known as Dancing Stage in Europe, DDR is a music video game played on a dance pad featuring four pressure-sensitive panels with arrows pointing up, down, left, and right. To score points, players synchronise their steps to tunes by stepping on the appropriate arrows as symbols scroll along a video screen.
Arcade-quality DDR games were made available in a portion of the schools in the state in the spring and should be in many more by the fall, according to Emily Murphy, who was helping conduct the study.
While it was too early for clinical results, some students who had previously refused to even dress for gym class were eagerly hopping on DDR, according to Murphy.
"That is a lot more than we were doing before," Murphy said, noting one overweight girl who took to DDR lost 30 pounds.
"It’s the gaming culture. Kids have three or four different game consoles in their homes. If they are going to be playing video games they can at least be somewhat active."
Sawyer was also excited by word of Nintendo’s soon-to-be-released Wii gaming console with motion-sensing controllers that allow players to move as if really playing tennis or performing surgery.
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