Virtual Game Jam: Collaborative Pathway to Serious Games for Health

Game jams are collaborative competitions where participants make games from scratch within a short period of time. Occasionally, these games aim to promote meaningful learning outcomes by embedding functional knowledge into entertaining and engaging gameplay. We wanted to understand if a game jam during a global pandemic could be used as an effective method to facilitate a collaborative, multidisciplinary team's ability to design, develop, and implement a serious game on a health-related topic (i.e., COVID-19). We examined the 2020 game jam hosted by the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate one method to organize a serious virtual game jam and provide a roadmap for implementation using qualitative and quantitative data collection methods to evaluate its efficacy. In addition to identifying best practices and lessons learned from our tools and processes, our results demonstrate that a virtual game jam can in fact be a powerful tool for creating a scientifically sound, population-level, big picture-thinking serious game used for health education, facilitate collaborative multidisciplinary teams and be a practical learning experience for game jammers.

The untapped potential of Games for Health in times of crises. A critical reflection.

Given its promising role in public health to address hard to reach population groups, game-based interventions (i.e., Games for Health, G4H) have experienced growing interest in recent years. Therefore, it is surprising that they have played only a minor role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, the aim of this paper is to reflect the opportunities and challenges of G4H especially during the pandemic but also with regard to future health crises. As commercial video games (i.e., those that primarily aim to entertain its users) were often used to deal with the containment measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we call for greater cooperation with commercial game makers to distribute health-related messages via entertainment games. With regard to G4H we see a need to (i) strengthen the intervention theory underlying game-based applications, (ii) to enhance the appeal of games in order to maintain the interest of users in the long term, and (iii) to improve the evidence base using appropriate study designs. Finally, we argue for (iv) greater user involvement, both in terms of developing game-based approaches and as co-researchers in solving complex health problems.

Designing Spellcasters from Clinician Perspectives: A Customizable Gesture-Based Immersive Virtual Reality Game for Stroke Rehabilitation

Developing games is time-consuming and costly. Overly clinical therapy games run the risk of being boring, which defeats the purpose of using games to motivate healing in the first place [10, 23]. In this work, we adapt and repurpose an existing immersive virtual reality (iVR) game, Spellcasters, originally designed purely for entertainment for use as a stroke rehabilitation game-which is particularly relevant in the wake of COVID-19, where telehealth solutions are increasingly needed [4]. In preparation for participatory design sessions with stroke survivors, we collaborate with 14 medical professionals to ensure Spellcasters is safe and therapeutically valid for clinical adoption. We present our novel VR sandbox implementation that allows medical professionals to customize appropriate gestures and interactions for each patient's unique needs. Additionally, we share a co-designed companion app prototype based on clinicians' preferred data reporting mechanisms for telehealth. We discuss insights about adapting and repurposing entertainment games as serious games for health, features that clinicians value, and the potential broader impacts of applications like Spellcasters for stroke management.