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Serious Gaming For Health
TecnaDigit writes "The Games for Health Conference, is being hosted this month by the Serious Games Initiative at the Maryland School of Medicine. The writers at GamEnlight have posted an editorial about the Serious Games organization. The organization has an uphill battle facing them, with the way games are so readily scorned these days. But they recognize the potential for this area as well, and work with honest dedication to develop games for a better, more knowledgeable future. The article also has an insightful look at how the uses of technology and gaming changes as we become older."
A more useful question, it seems to me, is what one gets out of such games. It seems like their "educational" value is limited to demonstrating the correctness of the underlying ruleset, which is to say, the correctness of the developers' prejudices. Passing that off as "learning" seems entirely counterproductive to me.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This can be a job for only one man - Serious Sam!
Fortunately the trend is well established. Thus, I predict that future videogame players will all be lean, flexible, well-muscled, finely-trained athletes able to beat up football players and steal their lunch money.
I play Nerd-Folk!
They've got a serious David and a serious Ben. But no Sam?
Way back in 1995 or 1996, my dad brought home a game made for Galaxo (Smith & Kline) (he works with kids). It was supposed to teach little kids that they had to use their inhaler at regular intervals.
I guess it could actually inspire small kids to use their inhalers.
But it was utter boring, with nothing new at all efter 2 minutes playing.
Officially: "No comments"
Frankly, I've seen some very outlandish game setups before. Including a couple which were basically all about intelligent design, with you as the intelligent designer. Ironically they were passed off as evolution, except the animals didn't actually evolve through natural selection: you got to choose what you want to change them into. _You_ picked the design that's fit for the climate or challenges ahead. That's ID any way you want to look at it.
Basically the whole question I'd have, and the only question for that matter, is if a game will have good gameplay. If they manage to make it fun to play, sure, give me a game about medicine or whatever.
I still have Theme Hospital, and it was a fun game. OK, so it wasn't supposed to be educational, but there's nothing to keep one from swapping in some real disease names and cures.
The only real problem I have with educational games is that they usually forget about being a game. They either are more of a homework simulation than anything even vaguely resembling a game, or just have to preach, lecture, or give you an interruption to do some homework in the middle of the game. (E.g., "Genius Unternehmen: Physik", although it did have other plusses, had lots of those interruptions.) I'd like to see one where the "educational" stuff integrates more seamlessly with the game.
E.g., just as an idea, a lot of us love to tweak our cars, mechs, etc, in games, or even "design" our own models if the game is about producing them. Except usually it's just a mix-and-match of predefined parts. I'd actually like to see a game where they actually simulate the physics behind those tweaks, and let me play with the exact number of cylinders in the engine, wing shapes and angles, etc. Seems to me like a good opportunity to give people a lot of knowledge of physics (at the very least aerodynamics, mechanics, and thermodynamics) in a fun way. You don't shove it down their throats, you let them learn it by themselves as a side-effect of their tweaking their perfect munchkin vehicle.
I'm not sure how one would do the same for a medicine game, since I'm not a medic, but I'm sure someone else can figure it out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The author certainly mentions Games for Health and what's going on, but two-thirds of the article is more talking about where the educational games went. Maybe he's never heard of Leap Frog, but he does bring up a valid point.
If according to Mr. Popularity himself, Jack Thompson, violent games cause violent kids because the interaction level of aggressive games teaches them aggression far better than any other form of media, shouldn't it follow that educational games teach children educational themes far better too?
What about a game that makes a child do math problems to win? Or a game that requires chemestry, or biology? Honestly, is there any subject you couldn't stick into a game and make a billion times more fun for kids? Imagine what would happen if you hooked all their computers together, and for Billy to beat little Jimmy he'd better be quick with the algebra! Children are brilliant creatures, all you have to do is give them something they're interested in and they'll be experts in no time. What's more, you'll have to drag them away from it.
The most impressive and intelligent thing I've ever seen a child do was when my nephew learned how to play the original Warcraft. He was six years old and he understood the different units, the different buildings, and the different resources he needed to collect. He can't even work the mouse that well and he's sending a pack of water elementals down to decimate an orc town because he knows they're powerful and don't cost any wood or gold. I don't care if the game is technically about waging war, I feel he showed more organizational leadership potential than half the people who voted in the last election.
I pretty much regard it as inevidable that children will eventually be taught through interactive media. People in the not-so-distant future will actually laugh at the suggestion that you should stand in front of a group of children and lecture, much in the same way we laugh at using leeches now.
If I actually had to literally run around as much as I do when playing an FPS or GTA, then I think I'd be very fit indeed by now.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
NPR had a story on this topic this morning. The featured "game for health" was a piece of pain management software. A virtual reality scuba diving game (complete with helmet and surround sound) that kids can use to distract themselves from the things in hospitals that cause anxiety and increase perceived pain. During trial tests, tolerance for painful events (sticking hand in ice water) increased 3-fold when the game was being played vs. nothing distracting them. Piece also mentioned gluco-boy, the gameboy glucose meter for diabetics and how the game would give you tangible benefits if you actively monitored your blood glucose and kept it within acceptable levels. Given how technological kids are these days, I think this can only be a positive thing.