Adopting Best Practices from the Games Industry in Development of Serious Games for Health

Abstract

We describe how developers with extensive experience in the entertainment video game industry approach the creation of rehabilitative games. A key element a game for health shares with a game from the entertainment industry is the ability to engage over long periods of time: the longer a commercial game engages the more popular it becomes, improving its revenue; the longer a game for health is played the more extensive an intervention, improving patient outcomes. As such, having worked on a number of successful titles for over twenty years we explored transferring player engagement techniques in games for entertainment over to games for health. This we achieved in a series of rehabilitative games for different patient conditions and demographics. We present our findings as a number of design and implementation practises that bring a heightened sense of engagement and replay value to games for patients that do not distract from the main health benefit.