Kotaku
At the start of my tour of duty as guest editor here on Kotaku, I mentioned the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's announcement of an $8.25m grant call to support games for health. I also said I hoped the RWJF incentive might produce better health games, rather than just more health games.
To drive this point home, I want to share a recent, high profile health game that represents just how these things can go very wrong.
The HMO Kaiser Permanente created Incredible Adventures of the Amazing Food Detective earlier this fall. Here's their PR boilerplate on the title:
the Amazing Food Detective takes children through activities that show how to choose healthy foods and get more active. Children playing the game follow the routines of eight culturally diverse children whose activities or conditions would benefit from healthy food and exercise choices. The game, aimed at children ages 9-10 and available to everyone at www.kp.org/amazingfooddetective, complements Kaiser Permanente's nationally recognized childhood obesity clinical strategy.There are two parts to gameplay. The first are "investigations." The player can read the "nutrition files" of each of eight kids who have a particular nutritional problem, such as not getting enough exercise or eating too many sweets. The player moves a magnifying glass around an animated scene trying to find the correct object(s) to "solve" the case. For example, Michael doesn't exercise enough. The correct solution to his case is to click on the soccer jersey resting on a chair. Miraculously, Michael goes outside and juggles a ball. Case closed!
The second part are minigames. These are unlocked for each case after you complete it. So, you get a simple soccer game after helping Michael, as well as the charming "Zap the TV" game, a kind of Asteroids perversion. There are a bunch more of these too.
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. Let's talk about why.
The game insults the kids it is intended to serve. It does so by preying on the idea that kids enjoy games, and no matter the nature or quality of games, rather than taking advantage of the representational power of games in the service of health topics.
That power 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. When Kaiser claims their game "takes children through activites that show how to choose healthy foods and get more active," they make a promise to present actual nutrition and exercise choices within the contexts in which kids might experience them. This is something videogames are certainly capable of doing. But clicking on a soccer jersy instead of a remote control is not a meaningful decision. It is an obvious one. And even if it weren't obvious, all the kid needs to do is click on all the objects until they get the right one. And even if that experience were meaningful, "rewarding" it with crappy, second rate minigame versions of games that one can find better examples of anywhere online amounts to folly at best, insult at worst.
One of the features the creators and supporters of Amazing Food Detective are most proud of is an "automatic shut off" that engages after 20 minutes, reminding kids to "get active." 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.
Serious games don't need to compete with commercial games or even with web games. They need to present compelling versions of complex topics in convincing ways, ways that can't be done better with books or cartoons or coloring pages. At Persuasive Games, we've been working on a game about the politics of nutrition called Fatworld. It's something like Animal Crossing meets Super Size Me. It doesn't have the same goals as Amazing Food Detective, but it does share some overlap in topic. The difference is, we gave nutrition a context. It's a game about the relationship between nutrition and socioeconomics. There's a world. It has an economy. There are rich and poor people, not just lighter and darker people for political correctness. Decisions have trade-offs. Some choices are less accessible or less obvious than others. You can do the "wrong" thing on purpose and see what happens. Whether or not our game will succeed is an open question. But we have tried to take advantage of the medium in a way that Kaiser has not.
Worse yet, Kaiser has spent a fortune promoting this travesty. They created a PR staff to bombard the press in and out of the serious games space to cover the game (I get regular telephone calls and emails). They even paid the book publisher Scholastic to produce and distribute textbook materials to 5,000 public schools. Think about that for a minute. 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 buy legitimacy that 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.
Comments
$8.25...grant...cheap fucking bastards
Interesting. Only $8.25...
I don't think anyone should play this game, even if it paid you to do so.
PROTIP: Any video game born in an executive boardroom is going to be on par with low-grade sewage.
I would call 8.25 million somewhat substantial...
@mikeloxlong and monkeybiz
for some reason ian keeps forgetting to through the million representing 'M' behind $8.25. it should read $8.25m like the headline of the original article.
I don't understand the need to give this kind of grant money to completely unproven teams. Why not ask established companies with a string of hits with children in the video game market to work with health specialists in designing something? I don't care if it's "Pokemon Health Center" or "Monster Rancher Dietary Guide".
It's not that these games need the branding that Pokemon brings - but the experience of those companies in making entertaining games.
I'm sick of edu-tainment video games hitting kids in the face with obvious truths and then forcing them to play Galaga rip-offs where you shoot burgers and fries. If these people can't make good games, kids aren't going to play them and aren't going to get anything out of the millions of dollars going towards their health.
Meanwhile, DDR is incorporated into phys-ed classrooms all over the world. Hey look! A successful design! Why not copy THAT instead?
Also: Ian, try not to promote your game in an article on a respected site about your competitors in the same field. Valid or not, it's not good journalism.
Crecente would be ashamed...
Wii Fit ftw.
I'm not sure "healthy" video games really serve anyone. I mean, isn't the whole point that maybe the kid should eat better and go play basketball? I understand the mission, I just think video games aren't a good way to get the message across. I'd rather them teach kids early in school about the food groups and nutrition. Which they did where I went. I don't know, maybe some character running around eating vegetables and battling donuts would work with some kids, but I'd rather kids not have to learn it or have it reinforced from a game. That seems weird.
Wow... I just sent 10 minutes of my time playing that game... and all the "investigations" that I played involved me using some "science machine" to make the kids do what they should do on their own. In one game the machine made the kid exercise faster, which was apparently the cause of him being tired. The other one was a laser to shrink down the portions of a girl that apparently ate 24hrs a day (demonstrated the clock spinning wildly out of control in the background).
What is this suppose to teach kids about eating right and exercising? That it is hard without the use of some psuedo-scientific device? Not only that, it rarely explains how what is going on actually is helping the child.
Don't even get me started on the minigames... they were the most poorly designed pieces of garbage I have played in a long time on the internet.
*Sigh* At least with the uninformed, obese, and computer-literate future-adults this type of "edu-tainment" will produce, there will be plenty of script kiddies to help make even more of this drivel in future :-/
@darkthanatos: Maybe if they play it they'll get so bored and frustrated that they just run outside. Maybe they had scientists come up with a game to do exactly that.....
@MJDeviant: Hehe... let's hope it works... cuz any child that plays that game for a prolonged period of time really might need to have their head checked ;)
@MJDeviant: I think part of the problem is finding the best media to really deliver the messages. Some kids might get more from a well thought out program at school that weighs benefits and risks of foods, exercise, etc. Others might need more of a visual association with things, something where they can see a direct connection between doing an activity and seeing it's side effects or benefits.
Really, the more ways we reach out to kids, the better. Though I think a lot of it should come from, you know, parents. And giving them access to a healthy eating planner, an activity book, a video game, something that a whole family can sit down and check out is a much better idea.
I knew it was 8.25 million, I was just being facetious
How about a Streets of Rage game where you are a diet bar hitting hamburgers in the face with lead pipes?(which are now replaced by liposuction tubes)
Run slimfast ads or whatever else they're sponsored by all over the background.
I told you it would feature a colorful character who runs around avoiding french fries and collecting veggies.
I don't get how this isn't the open market. Buying yourself into schools is something someone on the open market can do. It may be stupid, harmful or unsettling, but there's nothing "closed" about it.
Take Pepsi and Coke, two of the biggest supporters of the open market. They compete for monopolies in schools to the point that in instances where people are fighting to get both beverages in the area of one or the other (say getting Coke into a Pepsi school, to have both options), these companies have fought against their own interests to maintain the monopoly system (in other words, people wanting Coke in a Pepsi school are told to stop by Coke in order to prevent people challenging the idea of a monopoly). Yes that does prevent competition, but the only way to stop companies from doing this would be to uhhh, regulate them.
So what do you want? An open market in which companies do whatever they want, including sell to a "captured audience" and work towards monopoly, or a regulated market set to prevent companies from taking easy advantage of loopholes and maybe even (gasp) children?
Personally, I opt for option C, parecon but since nobody knows what that is (too many articles to read, too hard to make snap judgements without hours of study), but it is really important if you're working to create persuasive games that you're aware of the differences yourself.
That last bit sounds like flamebait, but it's more meant as a probing question based on the language you're using in your articles, not based on what you may actually very well understand when the keyboard is away.
weird. anyone play that diabetes platformer? what was it, captain insulin or something? captain novolin, i think.
i think that the key to successful health games is by glamorizing easily accessible physical activity. like a high-def, bad ass jogging game.
or picture this. a physical meta-game introduced at the end of a narrative game's chapter or level; the rules are flashed on-screen (like, "hey, pikachu loves to play 'kick the can!' you can, too! here's how...") with a flashy video tutorial to accompany it. sometimes, i think kids just don't know have an outlet to learn the cool outdoor games-- and if the backyard classics are somehow superficially linked to their consumer livelihood, be it naruto, be it yugi-oh, kids might be persuaded to drop a couple pounds in the name of card-slinging ninja-dom.
Well, look, there's going to be a fundamental problem here, because what's cool for kids is dangerous. In fact, part of what sucks kids into a completely sedentary lifestyle is the fact that, deep down, their parents kind of *want* that. They want their kids watched over and part of a structured activity when they're not around, and doing something that won't get them hurt when they are around. You go outside and get dirty or scratch yourself up and Mom's instinct is to tell you to not do that anymore. You spend some time in front of the TV and you're less likely to do something that will get you yelled at. I think there's very *clearly* existing cases where games do something positive. For instance, playing something like EVE has a very real possibility of teaching practical experience for working with an economy, in terms of supply and demand, and manipulating markets and working with other people. Guitar hero has opened the possibility of kids getting into playing an instrument--I know it seems like it does the opposite, because it's easier, but because it *is* easier, it also trains some of the skills that are useful later (like finger independence and strength, and memorization, and what is, essentially, rudimentary music reading), as well as entertaining, it shows people the value of learning guitar and brings it in range. Obviously, rock-band's drums will be essentially teaching someone to play the drums. End of story.
.
Tony Hawk can help get kids into skateboarding, and I know plenty of kids who like playing games which resemble actual sports they're involved in. The missing step is an RPG-like element which shows the relationship between effort and outcome. For instance, a Parcour game that requires you to care for a virtual self that needs good nutrition, exercise, and *practice* in a safe environment doing various stunts before trying them in a real environment where they can get hurt. But that's parcour. And parcour is supposed to be hair-raising insanity. It's all about jumping between buildings that are 2 or more stories high and learning how to land from a fall of 18 feet without hurting yourself. On concrete. So making that compelling scenario is going to anger all the people who want you to make this crap in the first place. These people are stuck with with the following mandate;
Make Boredom Fun.
and that is madness.
It has less to do with making a game than with being able to tell people that "We are doing something for the children. Look at how much we spent on this thing that kids like." It's tax-deductible PR.
@IAN BOGOST: Nice reporting, Ian. You can come again, as far as I'm concerned :0)
The depth and commitment is *thumbs-up*, my personal opinion is that if more of the journalists at Kotaku wrote well-considered posts like this it would improve substantially - perhaps sacrificing reporting on every single rumour that's reared its head over the course of the day and instead spending that time spell-checking and reading through their work before they post it.
Once again, sterling work. Thanks!
This is the reason I applaud Nintendo for things like Wii Sports and Wii-fit! It's no lie when I say alot of gamers are some of the most out of shape consumers I've ever seen. Especially the young guys! Even if they aren't over weight, they still look un-healthy! I usually stop by my local GameStop and it's always a sad sight to see the conditions of most of the gamers who come there to buy games or hang out on the kiosk.
What a great essay... Thanks, Ian.
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