Part 8 of 8.

I cannot believe we are to part eight of eight in our series!  It’s been quite a journey, but here is the last piece of the puzzle.  Great Game Tenet #8: a great health game needs to be intelligently designed.

Designed to do amazing things.

This is an excellent tenet to wrap things up because an intelligently designed health game must have it all: great art, great feedback, great content, great re-playability.  In other words, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan!  The game must flow or you’ve got nothing but a static set of health information that no one sees.  The content must match the gameplay.  This is harder to do than it sounds and is the subject of research being conducted by one of the Health Gamer authors, Dr. Cynthia Phelps.

Health games that do it well.

To name a health game that is “intelligently designed” without having personally witnessed the design process, one must look at the data.  Two sets of data to be specific:

1. Did the target audience actually play the game and enjoy it?
2. Did the target audience change their health behavior(s) during and/or after gameplay?

When looking at these two sets, no one beats the type-1 diabetes game Packy & Marlon for Super Nintendo created back in the mid-90s.  The goal of this game was to improve self-management among diabetic children and adolescents (age 8-16) by playing the part of a diabetic elephant that must save a diabetic summer camp.  The player must manage their character’s blood glucose, insulin use, and food selection in the game.  Did this game answer our two questions well?  You be the judge:

1. Participants played an average of 1.5 hours per week during their spare time for 6 months.
2. After a 6 month trial, the treatment group (those that played Packy & Marlon versus a traditional video game) had a 77% decrease in diabetes-related emergencies.  There was also a significant (that’s scientifically valid) improvement in daily diabetes self-management behaviors along with increased self-efficacy and communication with parents about diabetes.

Content matched gameplay for a fun and effective health game.  This is what every health game developer hopes for.  Furthermore, one of the Investigators of this game, Debra Lieberman, is now the Director of the Health Games Research Institute in Santa Barbara.  All in all, I’d put Packy & Marlon in the “success” category.

I’m sure there are many other health games out there that belong on this list as well.  Feel free to list yours.

Recommended readings.

• Brown, SJ, Lieberman, DA, Gemeny, BA, Fan, YC, Wilson, DM, and Pasta, DJ. (1997). Educational video game for juvenile diabetes: Results of a controlled trial. Medical Informatics 22(1), 77-89.