Announcing Health Games Research

Today marks the Foundation’s official launch of Health Games Research, a new national program to support research to enhance the quality and effectiveness of interactive games that are used to improve health. Debra Lieberman, communications researcher at UC-Santa Barbara, will direct this new initiative.

Pioneer has been exploring the potential for games to improve health and health care and has been working with Games for Health to forge connections between the games and health fields. We’re now looking to build a body of evidence that helps demonstrate how a game – used alone or in combination with other innovations – can improve people’s health. We hope it shines the light on specific design elements and strategies that are demonstrated to benefit health among those playing the games, and that can be applied to an ever-growing array of health-related games in the future.

The first Health Games Research call for proposals will award up to $2 million to support studies that investigate principles of effective health game design. The proposal deadline is January 29, 2008.

This new program will foster some very exciting (and fun) research.  The total grant size is $8.25 million; beyond fostering new research, these funds also will sustain and expand the work of Ben Sawyer’s Games for Health Project to bring folks from the games and health worlds together to learn, share best practices and bring the field to new levels.

Thanks to those, namely Ian at Kotaku, Leigh at Gamasutra and Dean at The San Jose Mercury News, who have already engaged in what will certainly continue to be a very interesting conversation.

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[John Redford]

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