Aged Care Insite Issue 100 | April-May 2017 | Seite 41

technology
narrative and storytelling idea. Any game that you play has got
a start, a middle and an end. It’s a story of some sort. There are
lush, beautiful, creative digital experiences that you can engage
in with a game. There’s the notion of competition and points and
levels. I think all of the elements of game play can be mapped
onto the kinds of health behaviours that we want our patients
to engage in. I think it’s a really powerful vehicle for health
behaviour change.
There’s an addictive quality to playing video games, but you
said that could be funnelled or turned into a positive. How
might that be done?
Absolutely. A lot of the bad press around video games is often that
video games incite violence or video games make people fat and
lazy or people playing video games might actually kill you. There
are numerous reports of people that die from long exposure to
video game play. There is something about video game play or
interactive digital game play that is addictive, that does draw us in.
If you’ve played games like Candy Crush or Fruit Ninja or whatever,
then what you’ll find is that you’ve kind of lost time.
Suddenly, you’ve played the game for 20 minutes and you don’t
know that you’ve done that. I think we can harness some of those
qualities of engaging in games and turn it into something that can
be useful when we do want to get our patients engaged in some
health-related behaviour over a long period of time.
What do you think the future of healthcare gaming holds?
I think with the emergence of Internet of Things, suddenly we
could have the environments through which we walk and navigate
and play and experience turned into almost a game platform.
Imagine that walk past a park bench and the park bench was smart
enough that it knew you were there. It might reach out to your
phone and say: “Hey, if you do 20 sit-to-stand transitions on me
right now, you’ll earn points.” Maybe those points might be points
in some coffee-redemption-card program or it might be some
other kind of game that you’re playing. I think we can take the built
environment and the environments through which we navigate,
pair that with mobile technology an d sensing technologies and
gaming to get us all to engage in a little bit more physical activity.
In the meantime, what should healthcare organisations or those
interested in spearheading any gaming programs keep in mind
when it comes to using video games in healthcare contexts?
Move beyond your preconceptions of what games are about.
As I said, often games get really bad press for all of the negative
attributes of games. Just start thinking about how games might be
useful in your organisation. Talk to digital creatives. Talk to the kids
around you that are playing games. Start to think about the world
and your patients’ journey from the perspective of game design.
I’m sure that you’ll find that there are very interesting ways that you
can integrate games into your practice. ■
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