Recently one of the foremost resources on HIV/AIDS, AIDS.gov, published an interview with a Yale School of Medicine researcher on the usefulness of health games. After giving a brief overview of the Games for Health conference, the post delves into the interview with Dr. Lynn Fiellin – Principal Investigator for an NIH-funded project to develop a behavioral changing HIV prevention video game.

According to Dr. Fiellin:

The goal of our project is to provide young teens the opportunity to practice and acquire skills in order to avoid or reduce their risk behavior. The hope is that this reduction in risk would then translate to preventing new cases of HIV.

From the rest of the interview, I picked up on some key points about health games as they relate to diseases such as HIV/AIDS:

• Young teens are already engaged in game play
• Games allow for repeated practice and play
• Highly engaging (if designed well)
• Portability – can be applied to various mobile platforms
• Opportunities to improve knowledge, prevention efforts and increase adherence
• Global application increasing

Although we don’t have an official name for the game just yet, I’m looking forward to seeing what the folks over at Yale come up with as far as design. Last year, we highlighted a game called +Click that looked at helping HIV positive teenagers make positive choices. Hopefully this will motivate other groups to think outside the box with this disease.