Shoot ‘em Ups with Life-Changing Lessons

How can an action-packed, shoot-or-be-shot video game help kids, you ask? The more research that's done, the more optimistic the outlook for games as tools for helping kids learn to cope with problems like disease and behavioral issues.

In West Virginia, Dance Dance Revolution became part of the state's fitness and health program after a very successful trial period. Debra Lieberman, a professor at University of California at Santa Barbara, worked with HopeLab to create a scrolling video game for Nintendo called Re-Mission. The game asks you to battle cancer. The plot involves a microscopic "nanobot" that you guide through the body, blasting away at cancer cells. Bacteria, chemotherapy, and antibiotics make their co-star appearances. You can read more about the research at HopeLab's site, but basically they found that the test group that played Re-Mission were more likely to take their medicine on time and had a stronger belief that they had their condition under control.

Lieberman worked on a similar strategy for another video game, Packy & Marlon, that teaches kids to manage diabetes while fighting off all sorts of evils. When studied, it was found that the Nintendo games Lieberman helped design improved children's self-management of asthma, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses, and decreased their emergency and urgent-care visits by as much as 77 percent. The Federation of American Scientists created Immune Attack, a game that confronts bacterial and viral infections.

It's not just about shoot ‘em ups, though. It's called decision training, and Will Interactive takes the gameplay a step further by using real actors and movie scenarios in its games such as Generation RX. Generation RX deals with the growing problem of teenagers who abuse prescription drugs. Kids watch a story unfold and reach critical decision points. Based on those decisions, the story moves along, with kids exploring the various consequences.

Researchers are so serious about understanding the power of serious games that there's an entire serious games initiative.