How serious games can promote health
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The spread of online serious games, and more broadly gamification, was quick to make health and fitness an early stronghold. Early popular apps such as MyFitnessPal, released in 2005, proved an enormous commercial success, demonstrating the appetite a lot of people had for learning about healthier eating choices. Along came the likes of Strava and Nike Run Club, gamified apps that continue to encourage users to keep training through applied game mechanics – leaderboards on defined segments of the real world, challenges relating to streaks and distances, sometimes with real world prizes attached. Games like Zwift and Rouvy, on smart treadmills and bike trainers, fulfil the criteria to be considered serious “exergames” in that technically, participants haven’t cycled or run anywhere except within the games’ online environments, with the core serious purpose being healthy lifestyle promotion and motivating users in their physical training.
More recently, gamified apps, some of which fulfil the criteria of serious games, have moved into the realms of encouraging healthier sleeping and lifestyle habits, and “femtech” – tech-enabled, customer-focused apps that specifically target women’s health. Serious games and gamification have their place in both training healthcare providers through their ability to provide simulated experiences, encouraging good behaviours in patients, and in the prevention of common ailments related to sedentary lifestyles and poor diets when released to the public. You could even consider how serious games for health can benefit businesses: a healthier, happier workforce means less sick days and more productive hours on the clock.
The potential of the serious game for healthy lifestyle promotion is boundless, and the idea of a game is intrinsically linked to the nature of healthy living. It’s been hardwired into the human condition that sport, physical activity, and play are keys to being healthy and physically in shape. Afterall, the origin of the modern Olympic Games dates back 3,000 years. Play and health as concepts have been hand in glove for some time.
Serious games create engagement
Serious games have serious purposes as their core aim – not entertainment. The key to a successful serious game is finding where a user’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivations merge. What is the serious outcome of the game? How can this outcome be complemented by game mechanics within the game? Most people would describe being healthy and well as states they’d be motivated to achieve if they weren’t already there, and even then, who doesn’t want to feel better, be fitter, faster, and stronger? Who doesn’t want better mental health, or have a better understanding of how their body works? What healthcare professional or medical practitioner isn’t motivated to be even better at their job?
The extrinsic motivations across all aspects of health are easy to tap into. Every January the “New year, new me” mantras take over. And every February the majority of them fade away. In modern society, where everyone’s attention is battled for by multiple screens and distractions, clearly something is missing.
This is where online serious games can be effective. Their ability to engage participants or players in areas such as health can be very great, as it mimics a lot of the mechanics of video games. It adds an extra layer of engagement that modern society has frankly come to expect. It offers interactivity, demonstrates progression, and can illustrate the real-world outcomes of correct or incorrect decision making within a simulation.
Make health into a game for specific objectives
So to what end can this partnership of health and play be harnessed to achieve defined objectives? Fundamentally, the applications are limitless. Serious games for health have as much utility when applied to patient care as when applied to medical education, and can offer incredible gains when thoughtfully applied by businesses for the benefit of their employees.
For a happier, healthier, more efficient workforce
Think about how productive you are after a good night’s sleep. Pair that with a good breakfast, and suppose your mental health is also in a good state. Conversely, think about how productive you are when you’re stressed, eating late, sleeping less than six hours a night, and constantly looking at screens. Between these extremes it’s easy to appreciate the value of good habits. All added up, those little habits make you healthier, and a better performer at your job. Imagine if all your employees were making good decisions, putting in sensible routines for quality sleep, getting their eight hours, and eating the right foods and minimising bad habits. Not only would they be happier because they felt better, but they’d be more productive at work as they’d have more energy, and collectively, they’d miss less sick days because they’re healthier. So why not create a serious game that can benefit your workforce, and subsequently benefit your business?
In the pursuit for work advancement and juggling family commitments, it can be easy for people to fall into bad habits. Customising a serious game around the Dynamic path™ format on the Drimify platform allows you to create a serious game that can not only engage participants, but educate and train them to manage their own free time better. The Dynamic path™ gives you access to every game in the Drimify catalogue, so you can create a series of modules with content and interactive elements that can engage your teams to not only identify their own bad habits, but also learn about the long-term harmful effects they might be having on their health. Conversely, through gameplay they might identify some elements in which they’re performing well, but still fundamentally discover many areas of their lives which could be improved upon.
You could start the game with a customised Quiz, which can serve as an initial assessment of their healthy lifestyle habits. Utilising multiple choice answers to questions such as: “How late in the day do you have your last coffee?” with their answers leading to intermediate screens which give more information on best practices and the negative effects of the less positive habits. This will not only be educational for participants, but through data collection in your dashboard, you can make a rudimentary assessment of your overall workforce’s health and wellbeing. Subsequent modules could focus on specific areas of a healthy lifestyle, providing video and text content to educate participants on tips and lifehacks for things like better sleep and time management, and the game could end with another Quiz to see how their habits have changed over time. A serious game in this format could be used to positively affect the psychology of your employees.
To educate patients, promote positive behaviours, and facilitate recovery in healthcare
While interactive games can go a long way to helping the general population who could be described as relatively healthy to lead healthier lifestyles, serious games have arguably more utility when it comes to patient rehabilitation. It must be considered that a recovering patient who has required bed rest and medical attention carries with them a more serious purpose to be applied to a game. This is especially true in cases where the patient’s condition has been brought on by an unhealthy lifestyle, or in cases where the potential for long term recovery is massively enhanced by adopting healthy lifestyle choices, such as when recovering from a stroke or cardiac events.
In a similar format to customising a serious game to promote employee health, the Dynamic path™ format could be customised to not only educate patients about their condition, but also provide a playable, interactive experience that can help to instil the kinds of habits and behaviours that will aid in their recovery and long term health.
Motivate and train healthcare practitioners
Serious game based learning can also be used for medical education and the training of healthcare practitioners. Because the serious game format is a game in and of itself, with any outputs outside of skills and knowledge development being kept in-game, patient safety is ensured through simulation. Practitioners have a risk free environment in which to practise, make mistakes, and learn and develop.
Serious games: the preventative solution
Whether you’re a HR professional or business owner looking to improve the overall health of your workforce, or if you’re a member of management for a healthcare provider looking for training opportunities for staff, or educational tools to help patients, serious games represent an innovative and engaging solution to a lot of challenges.
They provide learners with engaging, risk free environments in which to learn about real world outcomes, and experiment with habits, strategies, and skills that can benefit them in the real world. Because the value of health and wellbeing is universally acknowledged as being priceless, it’s not hard to tap into learners’ internal motivations, and capitalise on them to bring about real world outcomes through the power of the game.
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