Welcome
Games for Health is a project produced by The Serious Games Initiative, a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars effort that applies cutting edge games and game technologies to a range of public and private policy, leadership, and management issues.The Initiative founded Games for Health to develop a community and best practices platform for the numerous games being built for health care applications. To date the project has brought together researchers, medical professionals, and game developers to share information about the impact games and game technologies can have on health care and policy.
In addition to the Games for Health conference, the Initiative is working to catalog use of games in health care, to assist current development, collect best practices, share research results, and explore ideas that might improve health care administration and policy.
Our Goals
The goal of the Games For Health is to help foster and support a community of researchers, developers, and users of applications that use game, game technologies, and game development talent to create entire new ways of improving the management, quality, and provision of healthcare worldwide.As part of that goal Games For Health also plays a greater role in helping to organize and accelerate the adoption of computer games for a variety of challenges facing the world today.
Our Interests
We are most interested in working to address four interrelated questions:- Can games improve the provision, and quality, of healthcare?
- What existing and emerging game technologies (such as multi-user, virtual environments) might be particularly useful when applied to healthcare issues?
- How can we expand the application of computer-based game technologies to face key challenges in the healthcare sector?
- 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?
Director
David RejeskiDavid Rejeski is the Director, Foresight and Governance Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
Rejeski was appointed the first Flum Scholar at the Wilson Center in July 2000. He heads The Serious Games Initiative which is housed at the Wilson Center. Prior to his work at Wilson Rejeski worked at the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Policy (EPA), and in 1994 was assigned to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).
Rejeski's focus at the Wilson center concerns long-term challenges facing the United States as well as finding ways to make policymakers and government leaders think more insightfully about long term decision making. He feels that games are one tool that may help immensely in building long-term thinking skills among not only government officials but the general public at-large.
Co-director
Ben SawyerBen Sawyer is president of Digitalmill, Inc. a Portland, ME based consulting he helped found in 1997. Digitalmill has worked on a number of game projects and served as producer for the Virtual U project, a serious game-simulation about university management that was an Independent Games Festival finalist in 2001.
Sawyer is also the author and producer of several books on games and game development and now serves as the at-large editor on game industry book titles for Paraglyph Press. In addition Sawyer's firm produces market research on the games industry for private clients and DFC Intelligence - a well known research firm focused on the games industry.
Sawyer was the volunteer producer of the first Serious Games Summit held at the 2004 Game Developers Conference.