Institute For The Future

Get a second opinion -- Is Kaiser's new video game good for kids' health?

Several weeks ago, I wrote about a new video game designed to teach kids about nutrition. Developed by Kaiser Permanente and targeted at 9-10 year olds, "The Incredible Adventures of the Amazing Food Detective," shuts down for an hour after each 20 minute session, ostensibly forcing kids to go be active and play during that time. I wondered what would keep kids from simply popping another video game into the machine.

 

The other day, I found a review of the game authored by Ian Bogost, who participated in our Spring 2007 Pre-Conference event on Gaming and Health. In the article, entitled, Kaiser Permanente's Health Game Flatlines," Ian comments,

The game is competently produced for its style, with good production value in art, animation, and voice over. And I want to be encouraged by large corporate investment in health games. Unfortunately, this game is a conceit that risks sending the whole health games arena back in time. . . .

 

The game insults the kids it is intended to serve. It does so by preying on the idea that kids enjoy games, . . . no matter the nature or quality of games, rather than taking advantage of the representational power of games in the service of health topics.

Ian goes on to explain that the power of games "is the ability to create models of the way things work in the world and to ask players to make meaningful decisions as actors inside those models." However, he chides Kaiser for creating a game that gives its players obvious, non-meaningful choices, and notes that even if the game experience was meaningful, the rewards are "crappy, second rate," and amount "to folly at best, insult at worst."

 

With regard to the 20-minute automatic cut-off that I found so amusing, Ian observes, "I don't think Kaiser has anything to worry about. I strongly doubt any child is in danger of playing this game for more than 20 minutes."

 

I share Ian's dismay at the amount of money Kaiser has invested in promoting this game, and how it is using Scholastic Press to get game-related material into the hands of school kids. He closes with,

Kaiser Permanente, a private company in one of the most eggregiously broken industries around, is buying their way into schools so they can start building a "relationship of trust" with your fourth grader. Of course, if they left the game to sell itself it wouldn't. The fact that they paid for school placement before they even brought the game out is an admission of how poor they'd expect it to perform on the open market.

 

Kaiser is a big company with a lot of money, and it's good that they are seeing value in games and choosing to invest in them. But they are trying to buying legitimacy they have not earned. As Spider-Man would say, with great power comes great responsibility. This game is not education and it's certainly not health advocacy. It's unadulterated and nefarious public relations. If you use it for anything, use Amazing Food Detective to teach your kids how corporations vie to buy their attention, not to teach them to eat carrots instead of potato chips.

Ian is a serious gamer, and I take what he has to say seriously. You might, too.