Picture this: you and your partner are sitting in your doctor's waiting room ahead of an appointment about birth control. Instead of flipping through dog-eared magazines or staring at the ceiling, a nurse hands you a tablet and suggests you play a game.
You tap the screen and find yourself pulled into a story: Can you help two characters named Laila and Caleb figure out which contraceptive method best fits their lives, given their routines and Laila's specific physiology? As the scenario unfolds, you notice it mirrors your own situation. Could guiding them toward a decision help you and your partner make a more informed one yourselves?
As a designer and developer of health-focused games, I collaborate with physicians, public health researchers, artists and programmers to build exactly these kinds of experiences. My work concentrates on sensitive topics — vaccine hesitancy, sexuality, reproductive health — where people often struggle to ask the right questions or speak candidly with a clinician.
Laila and Caleb are the central characters in a game my team is currently developing called What's My Method? We are investigating whether playing it helps people select a birth control method and empowers them to have more productive conversations with their health care provider. Our findings — alongside a growing body of research on games designed for health education — suggest that interactive play is a powerful, and still largely untapped, tool for not only conveying health information, but giving people a safe space to explore the consequences of their choices before making them in real life.
The power of play
When I tell people I make health-related video games professionally, the reaction is often surprise. Many adults still regard video games as frivolous at best — and actively harmful at worst. Games featuring guns and violence, for instance, are routinely blamed for real-world gun violence, despite the fact that no causal evidence supports that link.
In reality, play is one of the fundamental ways that curious, intelligent beings make sense of a changing world and keep learning throughout their lives. It plays a foundational role in early cognitive development. Peek-a-boo, for example, teaches infants about object permanence — the understanding that a person who vanishes briefly hasn't disappeared forever. Digital games extend this learning into more complex territory. Minecraft, for instance, builds skills in resource management, spatial reasoning and long-term planning.
The game industry is also a formidable economic force in its own right. With the global video game market valued at US$300 billion in 2025, games have repeatedly served as the entry point through which major technological innovations reach mainstream audiences.
Consider motion capture technology. Microsoft brought it to living rooms in 2010 via its Kinect console, letting players box or play tennis by physically performing the movements themselves. Augmented reality went mainstream in 2016 when millions began playing — and watching others play — Pokémon Go. Virtual reality headsets like the Oculus (now Meta Quest) and Apple Vision Pro have similarly found their broadest audiences through gaming.
There is a powerful social dimension to games as well. Massively multiplayer online games such as Animal Crossing, Fortnite and World of Warcraft provide connection and community for billions of people globally. That social function became especially significant during the COVID-19 pandemic, when physical distancing left people isolated. Game usage surged during lockdowns, and research showed these platforms helped players maintain meaningful social bonds.
In my own work directing a university game design and development program, I've observed consistently that students who grew up immersed in complex digital games arrive better equipped to engage with technology and navigate an increasingly digital world.
Gaming for health
Early in my career as a game designer, I began to see that games don't just entertain — they can equip players with knowledge and the confidence to tackle difficult real-world problems.
Nowhere is that potential more valuable than in health care. Patient information is typically delivered through dense pamphlets or links to websites that overwhelm readers with clinical language. These formats consistently fail to bridge gaps in health literacy. Games, by contrast, deliver targeted information in context — one that players don't merely read about, but in some meaningful sense inhabit. By trying out behaviors through an avatar and witnessing the outcomes, players engage with material far more actively. That engagement is reinforced by empathy triggered through relatable characters, which deepens learning and retention.
Since 2010, my team has been testing how digital games can communicate complex health information across vastly different cultural settings — the United States, India, Barbados and Ghana — using animated graphics, audio and interactive storytelling.
In 2012, in collaboration with physicians at a Long Island, New York hospital, we set out to encourage families of critically ill children to get flu vaccinations. Family members who played our co-developed game, Flu Busters!, were 40% more likely to get vaccinated than those who did not. In the game, players guide an avatar through a school full of sneezing, nose-blowing children, trying to enjoy simple social moments — like sharing a cookie — without falling ill. Rather than instructing people on what to do, the game lets players feel firsthand how hard it is to avoid flu exposure in daily life, and how a vaccine can make a difference.
Our first international collaboration brought us to India, where we worked with public health physicians on a game designed to understand how teenagers approach decisions about family planning. Beyond proving effective as a tool for anonymous data collection, the project demonstrated that giving young people access to clear reproductive health information provided them with the vocabulary and confidence to think and talk about their future reproductive choices.
When vaccine hesitancy surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, my team developed Activate My Shield! The game uses the metaphor of armor to explain how vaccines defend against specific diseases — protection that only works against particular types of attacks. To counter the widely circulated falsehood that COVID-19 vaccines contained implantable microchips, the game invites players to actually try inserting a microchip into a vaccine needle and administering it. The exercise makes viscerally clear just how implausible the claim is — more effectively, arguably, than any fact-check article could.
Reaching digital natives
All of our games are available free of charge. To distribute them through major app stores, my team established SolitonZ Games.
We are far from alone in this space. Other research groups are developing health games that span a remarkable range of conditions and behaviors — from supporting medication adherence among people living with HIV, to helping teenagers resist vaping, to teaching children with asthma to manage their condition. Most notably, the video game EndeavorRx received FDA authorization in 2020 as a prescription-based therapy to improve attention in children with ADHD — a landmark moment for the field.
Taken together, this body of research makes a consistent case: digital games can be integrated into health care settings with relative ease, and play is a genuinely effective vehicle for health education. Patients, simply put, find these games engaging and enjoyable.
Yet despite this momentum, health campaigns and patient education programs have been slow to adopt game-based approaches. Part of the resistance likely comes from hospital and clinic administrators who are unfamiliar with gaming culture and skeptical of the idea that play belongs in a clinical setting. There is also the practical challenge of introducing change into complex, high-pressure health care environments.
Even so, I remain optimistic. By working closely with public health experts and clinicians, game designers can demonstrate that this approach fits naturally within the culture of modern health care. It makes intuitive sense to meet digital natives where they already are — tablet or smartphone already in hand.
Elena Bertozzi is co-founder of SolitonZ Games, which produced two of the games referenced in this article. Her research has received funding from the Gates Foundation and Connecticut Innovations.
