Conventional wisdom paints games as mildly comforting but physically toothless palliatives when employed as agents in the treatment of life-altering illnesses. The Wii can help us lose weight but it won't cure genetic propensity toward obeseness. It can complement physical therapy, but in cases where someone's lost a limb, it won't grow new body parts. And it might ease the suffering of those with a terminal illness, but it can't magically sweep the illness away.
On the other hand, we know games are more than mere "bread and circuses." Playing online puzzlers from sudoku to solitaire is supposed to keep us mentally agile as we age -- pop an aspirin a day for your heart, then play a dozen rounds of Freecell for your brain (leading to silly neologisms like "neurobics"). And everyone's heard how playing games improves basic hand-eye coordination. In fact the link between gaming and real-world applications is so strong, the military's designing future combat systems with gamepads and game-like interfaces in mind. Check out this Popular Mechanics article published in late May of this year about Xbox 360 controllers used to fly UAVs and Wii Remotes potentially being used in basic training.
Now a new study from non-profit health researcher HopeLab (which blends custom-tailored video games with medical cancer treatment) published in the medical journal Pediatrics, suggests that playing games can actually alter your biology.
The study -- the largest randomized, controlled survey of a video game intervention ever conducted, involving 375 cancer-afflicted teens and young adults at 34 medical centers in the U.S., Canada, and Australia -- evaluated the impact of a game developed by HopeLab called Re-Mission, a third-person "shooter" in which players pilot a microscopic robot through the body of a fictional cancer patient, zapping cancer cells and mitigating the debilitating side effects of cancer treatment. Patients who played Re-Mission exhibited markedly improved behavior, from taking their antibiotics more consistently and learning about the disease more quickly, to increased self-confidence in their ability to attain certain goals.
"We now know that games can induce positive changes in the way individuals manage their health," said Dr. Steve Cole, vice president of research at HopeLab. "The game not only motivates positive health behavior, it also gives players a greater sense of power and control over their disease -- in fact, that seems to be its key ingredient."
The most intriguing result? The study showed that cancer patients who played Re-Mission actually maintained higher levels of chemotherapy in their blood. Chemotherapy generally operates by targeting fast-dividing cells: maintaining the desired level in a patient's bloodstream is critical in terms of maximizing a treatment regimen's efficacy.
But playing games is only part of the story. In fact, says Cole, "this study shows that a strategically designed video game can be a powerful new tool to enhance the impact of medical treatment by motivating healthy behavior in the patient."
The critical distinction? Strategically designed.
The study used the PC version of the action-adventure game Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb as its control, due to the game's play structure and control interface similarities to Re-Mission. Patients who played Re-Mission showed notably better results than patients in the control group, implying that the biological and behavioral benefits of game-playing depend significantly on the strategic design of the game itself.
Now take that one speculative step further. Last week I was reading a New Scientist piece about "epigenetics," a term which refers to changes in gene expression brought about by environmental factors (see "Rewriting Darwin: The new non-genetic inheritance"). Think "the ability to potentially impact your offspring according to nurture, as opposed to nature." While that impact in the form of certain characteristics acquired during your lifetime may not last beyond one or two future generations, it nonetheless suggests lifestyle alterations may at least be temporarily communicable to future offspring. And when I say "nurture," I don't just mean what you eat, i.e. diet, I'm also talking about everything from smoking to drinking to wildly capricious intangibles like "stress."
See where I'm going?
Imagine "strategically designed" games that could be shown to epigenetically impact you on a scale that ranges from stuff like your cholesterol and blood pressure levels to your mental health. Play a game, then have a kid and maybe pass on your gains. Extremely speculative, granted, and I suspect any research that might causally link certain games with positive epigenetic effects, e.g. better hand-eye coordination or enhanced auto-immune responsiveness, is far in the future. Still, it's fascinating to think about where something like HopeLab's results taken with speculative epigenetic research might lead us, especially when you consider the increasingly predominant role gaming plays in our everyday habits and interactions.
