Games for Health Project Launches New Online Presence

Portland, Maine – November 20, 2010 – The Games for Health Project, which since 2004 has been working to support the use of videogames and videogame technologies in health and health care, announced the debut of a revamped online infrastructure that combines a new Web site with local presence on many leading social media sites.

“Games for Health is about sharing information and resources to aid a community of videogame developers, researchers, and health professionals. What we’ve done is not only revamp our site to better share resources, but also establish key means of connecting to our members elsewhere across the Web where people are sharing ideas with each other,” said Games for Health co-founder Ben Sawyer.

The revised gamesforhealth.org features an innovative “Community Hub” system that pulls media from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare, and Vimeo and integrates it into information streams that will prove useful for organizations and individuals attempting to learn more about the field of games for health. In addition, the site is creating a new knowledge base wiki and is making the archives of its 6-year-old email listserv community available for searching.

Joining the staff of the Games for Health Project Web site are a growing number of community leaders who will provide a constant stream of insight, news, and analysis. “Games for Health has always enjoyed being a more informal and decentralized, but well-connected effort to support innovators. We think the combination of our Community Hub and increasingly sourcing content from our community to share widely is in keeping with those ideals,” added Sawyer.

ABOUT GAMES FOR HEALTH
Founded in 2004, the Games for Health Project supports community, knowledge, and business development efforts to use cutting-edge games and game technologies to improve health and health care. The Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the lead conference sponsor and a major supporter of the Games for Health Project.

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, health care, and policy. A major effort of the Games for Health Project is the annual Games for Health Conference, which will next be held May 17-19, 2011, in Boston, Mass. Over three days, more than 400 attendees will participate in over 60 sessions provided by an international array of 80+ speakers, cutting across a wide range of activities in health and health care. Topics include exergaming, physical therapy, disease management, health behavior change, biofeedback, rehab, epidemiology, training, cognitive health, nutrition, and health education.

The Games for Health Project is 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.

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