Video Games x Healthcare

Video games are experts at teaching you the rules of a game and building mastery. If your goal is to relay complex information about how to do some set of tasks for an end goal (aka. all of healthcare), then there are lots of lessons to learn from games.

It sucks when you start a game and you’re playing with people 10x better than you. Finding people at approximately the same skill level going through the same issues as you makes it way more inviting. Healthcare companies can think about better matching patients in similar parts of their healthcare journeys and similar types of journeys (e.g. by di... See more

I’m not going to pretend like video games are paragons of ethical design either. All of the above taken to the extreme leads to design choices intentionally meant to get people hooked. But the reality is that healthcare companies are competing with video games when it comes to attention, lifestyle choices, and allocation of time.

An interesting thing to think about is how the worlds of healthcare and gaming have begun to blur already. We’ve begun seeing it with digital therapeutics - Akili Therapeutics is quite literally a video game to treat ADHD.