Gaming for Health, Playing to Win

On Dec 11 and 12, 2010, nearly one hundred people gathered at frog design’s San Francisco studio for Health Games Camp. This diverse group of people included healthcare practitioners, game developers, user experience designers, entrepreneurs, and more, all with an interest in improving healthcare behaviors. This quasi-unconference, quasi-workshop used multi-level game play as the framework to create practical game-based solutions for real health problems. Julian Keith Loren from Innovation Management Institute and David Schafran played the role of Game Masters of the weekend’s activities, setting the structure of the event and tirelessly corralling, engaging and challenging the participants to push to improve healthcare games.

frog design was happy to collaborate with Julian and David because of our longstanding interest in applying design in the healthcare space to effect positive behavior change. Our experience in this space has taught us that designing for behavior change is often very difficult and requires a multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted approach. We’ve also found the current trend of gamification promising, as games have the ability to engage and motivate people to push themselves and perform difficult, even frustrating tasks. Imagine this level of energy — applied to behaviors of medication compliance, nutrition, obesity, and fitness — and the potential benefits for both patients and health care providers.

Games within a Game

In order to get a multi-disciplinary group of people to actively collaborate on multifaceted problems, all of the participants became players in a larger meta-game to design healthcare games. Elements of game-play such as rules, points, currency, role-playing, levels, teaming, and competition were all applied to create a setting that provided the players with the right level of tension and engagement to bring people together and push ideas forward.

Multiple rounds of play hinged on the need for passionate collaboration, something that was achieved by allowing the players to self-select behaviors they wanted to change, à la the Barcamp model. These topics ranged from tackling obesity and compliance to stress relief and motivating multiple sclerosis patients to socialize. This approach allowed the players to shape the course of the weekend’s events according to common passions and the synergy of their diverse expertise.

Tangible Results

The meta-game structure put participants in a pressure cooker of iteration and design, rigorously testing the solutions through multiple facets that would ultimately be important in bringing a successful game to market. Games were put under the scrutiny of different lenses, including user experience, patient care, distribution, marketing, monetization and fun.

Some of the most fascinating concepts that emerged included a betting game that let you set healthy goals and incentivize your friends to help you keep those goals, a multiplayer game that rewarded healthy behaviors with additional currency that could be used in existing social network gaming platforms, and a story telling game that took place around a virtual bonfire where Multiple Sclerosis patients could visualize their stories and connect with other patients.

The winning team created a social game that let you take pictures of food that you plan to eat and rewards you with points by letting your friends rate them as healthy or unhealthy choices. Extra points were earned for resisting unhealthy foods, allowing your character to get to the next level in a Facebook-based virtual world.

Game-On

We were excited and impressed that the meta-game pushed the players in such a way that relationships were forged in the trenches between players from completely different industries and expertise. As with many games, a level of frustration was intentionally introduced to push teams to hone their concepts, with the ultimate rewards ostensibly being given to the patients and healthcare providers who would use them.

We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to play!