Institute For The Future

Games as a learning tool

Back in April, I blogged about the Games for Health conference that was scheduled to take place in early May.

I had reason to re-visit the conference website today, and thought I would share this description of one of the key trends that was highlighted:

 

* The rise of games for first responders and medical professionals.

Conference attendees [had] an opportunity to play with 3DiTeams. Funded by the U.S. Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), 3DiTeams was developed by Virtual Heroes with Duke University's Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center, and lets people interact with a fully 3D simulation of emergency health care environments ...

Medical Cyberworlds is a startup in the process of creating an online multiplayer game to train doctors to communicate more effectively with their patients. Dr. Fred Kron, the founder and CEO of the company and Noah Falstein, the lead designer will present an update at the conference on the state of the project and discuss the challenging process of encouraging effective collaboration between physicians, academics, and game developers.

 

Virtual reality worlds have also been used for epidemiological work.  You can read my blog posts on examples of this here and here.  In the former, I mention Tufts University researcher Nina Fefferman, who gave a presentation at the conference about the "Corrupted Blood Syndrome" content of the popular World of Warcraft online game.

 

In September 2005 designers and programmers at Blizzard Entertainment created new game content for Blizzard's mega-hit massive multiplayer online game World of Warcraft that inadvertently unleashed an in-game epidemic. Later called the Corrupted Blood Disease, this virtual virus event was well covered in game and technical press but little else about this event and what insights it might offer to epidemiologists has been presented. Fefferman will present her work looking into the Corrupted Blood Disease as an epidemiological event. The talk will cover what knowledge of the event exists outside of Blizzard, developer of World of Warcraft, and based on interviews with Blizzard staff. While this is not the first game-based epidemiological event in a game or virtual world the Corrupted Blood Disease event is one of the most famous and interesting to date and provides an outline of the roles games can play in improving our understanding and possible responses to such events in the future.

 

Food for thought on the role of games as a health tool.