I worked on a game called Remission that a company called Hope Lab did, and uh, I had quite a small role in that. A friend named Dave Warhol had quite a larger one. Uh, but something that we did in that game is, it’s a game to teach teenage cancer patients why they need to stay on their chemotherapy regimen, ‘cause quite a few of them were actually stopping taking these pills that were - they felt fine after their surgery or their radiation, then they had to take these pills that would make them sick all over again, and teenagers, more than younger kids who will listen to their parents, or adults who will understand the importance, are likely, or prone at least, to saying hey, I think I know what’s best for me. And, it turned out that one of the best ways to show them why it was important to do that was with a third-person shooter game, which you normally really wouldn’t think of for like a health game, and particularly for a game that they’re trying to reach a wide audience of kids, both boys and girls, for example. But by visualizing what’s going on in your own bloodstream, and seeing that if you miss even one cancer cell, that it becomes two, and then four, and then eight, and pretty soon you’re right back where you started, and you’re overwhelmed. And if you’re firing chemotherapy bullets using the chemotherapy that’s in the bloodstream, and the patient whose body you’re in stops taking their pills and you run out of reloads, and now these cancer cells are eating away at the tissues, and these, of course, the players were actual cancer patients, so it’s very easy for them to make that realization that, hey, this is going on in my own body, and by not taking these pills, I’m not giving my body the ammunition it needs to fight this cancer. So even though that’s a fairly violent-sounding analogy, it turned out to be a really effective one, and, you know, it-it’s funny when I hear people talk about first-person shooter games, and how awful they are, and they should all be banned, I find it amusing to think that, you know, here’s-here’s a case where, you know, you’re saying oh, you shouldn’t shoot at anything. Well, it’s kind of hard to be sympathetic about, you know, giving cancer cells a rich and fulfilling life, uh, or for that matter, to complain about a shooter game that’s actually been shown to help kids with cancer stick to their treatment regimen. So, you know, it’s really nice to see that there are those exceptions there that can make almost any type of game useful and very positive in the world.
