Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are central to the Games for Health push to help foster and support a community of researchers, developers, and users of applications that use entertainment-education strategies - games, game technologies, and game development talent - to create new ways of improving the management, quality, and provision of healthcare worldwide.

Through its interactive website, Games for Health is working to catalog use of games in health care, as well as to facilitate current development, collect best practices, share research results, and explore ideas that might improve health care administration and policy. For example, an email discussion listserv seeks to bring together individuals and organisations building computer/console/mobile games for applied purposes in the field of healthcare, with a particular focus on patient care, education, training, policy, and management exploration initiatives.

Face-to-face information- and experience-sharing opportunities are also integrated into Games for Health, largely through its annual conference (held September 28-29 in 2006, in Baltimore MD, USA). Government programme managers, policy advocates, educators, and researchers come together to explore topics such as health messaging with games, health advergaming and marketing, general health education and information, and health imaging and hardware. To cite only one of the many sessions planned for the 2006 conference, Games for Health Steering Committee member Debra Lieberman will present results of a study of healthy young adults who were randomly assigned either to (1) play the cancer education video game Re-Mission for one hour, or (2) play an entertainment video game with no health content for one hour. Those who played Re-Mission developed a stronger sense of the seriousness of a diagnosis of cancer as well as stronger beliefs that that there are effective ways to help prevent cancer, and, as a result, developed stronger intentions to engage in cancer prevention and self-care behaviours. (To read about additional strategies/projects scheduled to be presented in the sessions, click here; to submit content and/or to register, click here.)

Health, Technology.

Games for Health is an effort to explore 4 interrelated questions:

1. Can games improve the provision, and quality, of healthcare?
2. What existing and emerging game technologies (such as multi-user, virtual environments) might be particularly useful when applied to healthcare issues?
3. How can we expand the application of computer-based game technologies to face key challenges in the healthcare sector?
4. How do we identify and proactively deal with any social, ethical, and/or legal issues that might arise through the application of game-based tools to healthcare issues?