Playing Doctor

"Playing doctor" typically implies inquisitive kids figuring out their anatomy in tree houses or adults engaging in illicit sexual behavior. But those connotations and their subtexts are changing.

Medical play now has more to do with using video game technology to teach kids about health. Examples of this new role include games designed to teach kids the ways to avoid contracting infectious diseases and games designed to teach diabetic kids about the role of insulin in the body. The promised benefits of these technologies are enormous, but questions can still be raised about their usefulness, especially if the envisioned end result is a child glued to a computer monitor zapping the minions of evil Dr. Flu.

The Games Children Play

Using games to teach kids about medicine isn't new. One need only think of Hasbro's Operation, a board game that allows players to perform surgery on the prostrate patient, Cavity Sam, whose ailments include a "broken heart" and "butterflies in the stomach." Video games currently being developed to teach children about a disability or a disease share these playful aspects, but their objectives are more serious and ambitious.

Projects supported by the STARBRIGHT Foundation, for example, aim to teach children about the mechanics of a disability, and to support them through the loneliness, fear, or depression that often accompanies it. The foundation's projects include an online community that allows children with serious illnesses to connect with one another, and a CD-ROM game for adolescent asthma sufferers.

STARBRIGHT's asthma game also highlights its star power. The Chairman Emeritus of STARBRIGHT is director Steven Spielberg, and famous names providing voiceovers include Whoopi Goldberg, Kelsey Grammer, and Shaquille O'Neal. The latter is the voice of the Fuminator, a basketball-playing cloud that teaches asthmatic children about long-term and short-term control of their disease.

Meanwhile, SAGE (the Simulation and Advanced Gaming Environments for Learning project) has developed a prototype game called Contagion. This game teaches children how to avoid contracting infectious diseases such as the flu, SARS, and West Nile virus.

Other Benefits of Games

Unlike textbooks or pamphlets, video games have the advantage of directly engaging children in the learning process. And games have evolved immensely from the days of zapping asteroids and space invaders, or moving Pac-Man through a maze. Today's games are complex, often have underlying story lines, and require as much thought as they do deftness with a control stick.

According to research undertaken in 2004 by the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media at London University's Institute of Education, video games can also be a way to promote a child's social development, because playing and talking about games is such an important part of so many young people's lives. Moreover, the researchers say that "game literacy" is comparable to reading and writing as a tool for investigating and understanding the world.

Keep an Eye Out for Dangers, Otherwise …

On the other hand, as everyone who's ever been at a family gathering with their nephew and his Nintendo Game Boy knows, the walls could fall in, and it wouldn't distract the child from the game. Considering the social isolation which children suffering from a disability or a chronic disease often face, it's an aspect of video games geared to these populations that will need to be overcome to maximize their benefit.

Video games also don't require any physical activity. For a child that needs physical rehabilitation, playing a video game intended to teach them about their illness might, in fact, distract them, or discourage them from undertaking actual therapy, or even simply going out.

Not to be forgotten in all of this is the attitude of parents. The demands on parents with an ill child are immense, and some might view these video games as babysitters, so rather than providing a means of interaction, the games, while instructive, might serve to further isolate them.

While these are valid concerns, it must be remembered that the main point of these games is to educate children about their conditions or about preventive medicine. With more children surviving illnesses such as childhood cancer, and with rates of chronic conditions like asthma and diabetes growing, such games are a doubtlessly a useful tool for informing children and empowering them to improve or maintain their health.

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