![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/730232\/original\/file-20260415-57-l0gobv.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip\")
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The power of play<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
When I tell people I make health-related video games for a living, they\u2019re often surprised that this is a viable career choice. Many adults still see video games as trivial at best \u2013 and destructive at worst. For example, games that involve guns and shootings are widely blamed for gun violence in real life, even though there\u2019s no causal evidence supporting the connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Play is how intelligent and curious beings make sense of the constantly changing world and ensure they keep learning. It is an early factor in children\u2019s cognitive development. Peek-a-boo, for example, helps babies learn about object permanence \u2013 meaning that even if a person disappears for a short time, they aren\u2019t gone forever. Digital play can support many types of learning. Games like Minecraft teach resource management, planning and spatial reasoning, among other skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The game industry is also an increasingly large part of the world economy. Given the size and reach of the international video game market \u2013 US$300 billion in 2025 \u2013 games are often the way technological innovations are introduced to a mass audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Take motion capture technology, which enables a device to track a person\u2019s movement. Microsoft introduced it to the general public in 2010 through its Kinect console, in which two players can box or play tennis virtually by actually performing the movements with their bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Augmented reality \u2013 the ability to use a smartphone to see a virtual world overlaid on the \u201creal\u201d world \u2013 entered the mainstream in 2016 when people began playing and watching others play Pokemon Go. Games are also how many people first experience virtual reality \u2013 a full immersion in an entirely virtual world \u2013 by wearing headsets like Oculus (now called Meta Quest) and Apple Vision Pro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gaming also has a powerful social dimension. Massively multiplayer online games like Animal Crossing, Fortnite and World of Warcraft provide a means for socialization and togetherness for billions of people worldwide. This became especially powerful during the COVID-19 pandemic when people were social-distancing \u2013 people\u2019s use of such games soared during lockdowns, and they helped players maintain social connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In my own experience as the director of a university program in game design and development, I find that students who grew up playing complex digital games are better prepared to engage with technology and navigate an increasingly digital world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reading informational leaflets describing a health condition may not be the best way for patients to take charge of their health.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Early in my game design career, I realized that games don\u2019t just provide compelling entertainment, but they can also equip players with the knowledge and the agency to solve hard problems in real life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s especially valuable in health. Information for patients is usually conveyed through pamphlets or links to websites that often provide too much information in formats patients find difficult to decipher. These formats don\u2019t effectively address gaps in health literacy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Games, on the other hand, provide targeted information in a specific context that players don\u2019t just understand, but also, in some ways, inhabit. Such games allow players to try out different behaviors through avatars to see how they turn out. Conveying information through relatable avatars also triggers empathy, which further cements learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since 2010, my team has been testing how to deploy digital games in the U.S., India, Barbados and Ghana to communicate complex health-related information through animated graphics, audio and interactive experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2012, we worked with doctors at a hospital on Long Island, New York, to encourage families of critically ill children to get a flu vaccination. We found that family members who played a game we jointly developed called Flu Busters! were 40% more likely to get a flu vaccination than those who didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the game, players help an avatar navigate a school filled with children sneezing and blowing their noses in order to enjoy social interactions such as sharing a cookie without getting sick. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than telling people how they should behave, the game allows players to experience how difficult it is to avoid being exposed to the flu virus in everyday life and how the vaccine can help children stay healthy, equipping players to make informed decisions about their own health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our first international project, we collaborated with public health physicians in India on a game we developed to gather data about how teenagers there make decisions about family planning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to determining that a game was a very effective tool for anonymized data collection, we found that giving young people access to information about reproductive anatomy gave them the vocabulary and tools to understand and discuss their future reproductive choices..<\/p>\n\n\n\n Responding to rising vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 epidemic, my team developed Activate My Shield! The game demonstrates how vaccines protect against different diseases using the metaphor of armor that only works against specific types of attacks. To address misinformation that was widespread at the time \u2013 that COVID-19 vaccines contained injectable microchips \u2013 the game asks players to try putting a microchip in a vaccine needle and administering it to a person. Experiencing how impossible it is to do this helps players understand that it\u2019s not a legitimate concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our games are available to all for free, but in order to be able to widely distribute them on the app stores, my team and I founded SolitonZ Games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Several other research groups are developing similar games. They address an enormous range of health issues \u2013 for example, encouraging people with HIV to adhere to their treatment, helping teens avoid vaping and teaching children with asthma to manage their disease. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A video game called EndeavorRx was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration in 2020 as a prescription-based therapy to improve attention in children who have attention-deficit\/hyperactivity disorder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Overall, our research and that of other groups show that digital games can be easily integrated into health care, and that play is an effective way of delivering health information. Simply put, people find the games fun and engaging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even as these efforts gain ground, however, health campaigns and patient education efforts have been slow to embrace game-based patient education. That\u2019s perhaps partly because decision-makers such as hospital and clinic administrators are often unfamiliar with gaming and may be slow to buy into the idea of delivering health education through play-based technology. Plus, it\u2019s difficult to make changes in busy environments with a lot of moving parts, like health care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I\u2019m optimistic that by working together with public health experts and health care providers, game designers like me can help fit gaming into the industry and culture of health care. After all, it makes sense to try to reach digital natives on the technologies they are already holding in their hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elena Bertozzi<\/a>, Professor of Game Design & Development, Quinnipiac University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine you and your partner are sitting in the waiting room of your doctor\u2019s office, waiting for your<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[380],"class_list":["post-11746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","tag-video-games"],"aioseo_notices":[],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/video-games-1.jpg",1280,853,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/video-games-1-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/video-games-1-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/video-games-1-768x512.jpg",640,427,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/video-games-1-1024x682.jpg",640,426,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/video-games-1.jpg",1280,853,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/video-games-1.jpg",1280,853,false],"morenews-large":["https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/video-games-1-825x575.jpg",825,575,true],"morenews-medium":["https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/video-games-1-590x410.jpg",590,410,true]},"author_info":{"info":["admin"]},"category_info":"Health<\/a>","tag_info":"Health","comment_count":"0","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/video-games-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11748,"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11746\/revisions\/11748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\n\n\nGaming for health<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nReaching digital natives<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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