If you're anything like Houstonist, when you were growing up and heard the phrase "educational games," your eyes glazed over and your brain began to turn off. Because you were about to receive a message, and it was going to be delivered with all the subtlety of a very special episode of Blossom.
A lot has changed since middle school. Video games have become like motion pictures, with development, production, budgets, and audiences to match. Indeed, video games have outgrossed movies since the turn of the millenium, and with significant numbers of users in every demographic group, they are no longer the redoubt of suburban white boys with the complexion and social skills of Gollum.
Meanwhile, scientists and educators have been trying to determine whether—or rather how—to align their work with video games. Gamers might not want to admit it, but when they play video games, they are learning. They are learning the discrete set of skills and knowledge required to play the game successfully. They understand, of course, that this knowledge has little application in the real world (witness the dismal performance of rock stars performing their own songs on Guitar Hero and Rock Band). But what if it did?
Houstonist previously noted that the U.S. Army has already jumped on the bandwagon of serious games (games with purposes beyond mere entertainment), creating the hugely popular (and free) America's Army as a recruiting tool. The United Nations (Food Force) and mtvU (Darfur is Dying) have also gained considerable attention with overtly political video games.
Meanwhile, Houston has become a national locus for the development of health-oriented serious games, or games for health. As Houstonist discovered not long ago at the Games for Health symposium at Rice University, Austin may be the center of Texas's commercial video game industry, but games for health don't have a clear commercial path yet and therefore require technical support—and grant money—from medical partners. Hello, Texas Medical Center!
Are you already missing Gil Grissom on CSI? Fear not! You can still partner with Grissom in CSI: The Experience, so-called "Web Adventures" created by the Rice University Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning. You might think this would be a cheesy tie-in with little more than a Worker and Parasite-style animation of Jorja Fox and a syringe, but you would be wrong. According to Rice Senior Research Scholar Leslie Miller, the CSI producers were looking for some scientific credibility, and the academics were looking for some commercial appeal. Marriages have been built on less. Especially in Hollywood.
Houston's preeminent serious game developer, however, is the hybrid architecture and game design studio Archimage. Founded in 1983 as a pure architectural shop, Archimage was an early adopter of the computer-aided design software AutoCAD, and its national prominence as a technologically savvy design firm led to commissions for commercials, multimedia campaigns, websites, and, eventually, computer games.
With years of expertise in developing games for health, Archimage now applies for government and nonprofit grants directly, and then partners with Baylor, Rice, Methodist, Rice, or another TMC entity for technical support. They are curently in the clinical trial phase with two multi-million dollar efforts: Escape from Diab and Nanoswarm, both of which explicitly aim to prevent childhood obesity and diabetes by promoting healthier eating and exercise. It may sound like an outlandish goal, but if the games are designed with the same whizbang panache as the websites, we won't bet against them.
According to Archimage president and co-founder Richard Buday, there's an inevitable tension between game play and the need for evidence-based results. "It's not a natural fit," he says, noting that just as most game designers are unfamiliar with psychological theories, most medical professionals don't fully understand the role of fun and immersion in game design. Although Archimage hopes to find a commercial distribution model for its games, presently the "only way to measure success is by outcome results." More realist than huckster, Buday observes that "there's a lot of snake oil out there, with games promising health benefits if you play them but lacking any underlying evidence-based science." He calls such games "Tetris with fruit."
While the world waits to see what happens with Escape from Diab and Nanoswarm, Archimage has created a standalone website, Playnormous, featuring several small arcade-style games that promote healthy eating. The games, with such titles as Lunch Crunch, Brain Gain, and Juice Jumble, aren't likely to make you forget Half-Life, but they're well-designed and more clever (and fun) than you might expect. They're like the Lay's Potato Chips of web games: betcha can't play just one! We're guessing that's not their tagline, though.
Graphics courtesy of Archimage
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