Serious gaming for health
Health and gaming industries have recently seen a closer relationship. Dance Dance Revolution got people sweating for points and it was only time before people began to realize the potential of the Wii as exercising device, and for Nintendo to capitalize on it with the Fit.
Reuters has an article Health games become serious business drawing on the recently growth of serious games:
“Healthcare is 18 percent of the GDP of the United States and so games for health is probably the largest sector of activity in the serious games field long-term,” said Ben Sawyer, co-founder of The Games for Health Project.
“If you add up the 18 month sales of “Wii Fit” and the sales of “EA Sports Active,” Konami’s “Dance Dance Revolution” and other healthy games, the worldwide retail numbers are over $2 billion.”
July 15th, 2009 at 12:16 am
In Europe SmartUs has been doing some interesting things in the category of playgrounds, with a similar goal: have kids exercise and include adults (i.e parrents) in the process.
http://www.smartus.com/index.php?Lang=EN&Site=SmartUs&Menu=Corporate&PageId=180