Dear Changemakers Community,

We invite you to participate in “Why Games Matter: A Prescription for Improving Health and Health Care”—an online collaborative competition running now through September 26, 2007. This competition is the third in a series sponsored by the Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and Ashoka’s Changemakers initiative.

The Changemakers open source competition model has helped RWJF this year to access a broad, exciting array of new ideas and approaches through two competitions addressing important challenges—ending intimate partner violence and finding disruptive innovations in health and health care. We’re now looking to stimulate similarly diverse and creative solutions that merge two distinct but increasingly interconnected worlds—computer and video games and health and health care.

Computer and video games have captivated the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world. Games today, in fact, are the fastest growing media form. People are interacting with them in arcades, at home, in schools, online, and on the go, using portable game players and mobile phones. No longer do they only constitute sedentary activity. Innovations like Nintendo’s Wii wireless console get people on their feet and playing the game with their whole bodies, and several games are being used in physical rehabilitation exercises with patients.

RWJF’s Pioneer Portfolio has supported work in this area for a couple of years now, and we have tapped a groundswell of interest in moving games beyond the entertainment realm to help them become powerful tools that help people learn about, manage, and improve their health. The sophisticated graphics and technologies that go into such games also provide a wealth of opportunity for helping doctors and nurses, public health officials, emergency responders, researchers, and others to deliver better care.

We hope that you will submit an entry and become part of a larger dialogue on how best to encourage and facilitate the connections between games and health. In sponsoring this competition, Pioneer Portfolio seeks to bring forth provocative ideas that demonstrate the imaginative and therapeutic ways that games can be used as means to improve health and health care.

We also want to better understand today’s health games landscape: who are the players; what kinds of games are under development; how might we invest to advance this unique and growing field of games and health; and, finally, how should the field start to measure the efficacy of games on improving health and health care.

For all its dynamism, the games for health field is still in a nascent stage, generally fragmented, and facing significant barriers to developing into a coherent, widely accepted and understood field. For the past two years, the RWJF’s Pioneer Portfolio has invested in Games for Health, a program under the Serious Games Initiative at the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

One of the major barriers in the development of games for health is the lack of evidence of the efficacy of games in improving health and health care. Through Changemakers’s collaborative competition, we hope to tap the collective wisdom of those on the forefront of game applications in health. We also hope to further build and energize the community of people who see the potential of games for health.

We expect this competition to shake up conventional wisdom about what constitutes a health game, the market for such games, and the approaches one ought to take in designing great health-related games. We anticipate a wide variety of entries (e.g., existing games, research about games, conceptual game designs that are past the programming stage of development, public or private initiatives for game-based approaches to health and health care, etc.).

Some of the games will likely have been specifically and carefully designed to address health conditions. But, we also hope to discover games that were not originally designed or marketed to improve health but whose application to health and health care has been demonstrated or show significant potential. Highly popular commercial games like Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution, for instance, only later became known for their health impact because, as players got better at the game, they burned off more and more calories.

This competition also seeks to showcase the creativity and talent of the video game industry. We invite game developers to bring what they do so well—exciting interactive components, stunning visuals and graphics, and consumer-focused design principles—to this competition, and more importantly, to health and health care.

We hope that you will submit an entry to this competition. In doing so, you will be contributing to this burgeoning field, which promises to make a profound difference in health and health care. As a member of the Changemakers global community, we encourage you to get involved and help RWJF test and refine the ideas surfacing through this competition by using the online review option that accompanies each entry.

Tell us what you’re thinking, how you see the field, where its challenges and opportunities lie. Share your thoughts and reactions throughout the competition. The goal? To catalyze a community of self-identifying “games” changemakers for health who never thought of themselves in that way before and who have a vision—and understanding—of games’ impact for good.

All competition finalists will win the opportunity to go to Baltimore, Maryland, in May 2008, to present their work at the Changemakers Change Summit held in conjunction with the RWJF-sponsored Games for Health Conference. Competition winners will receive a cash prize.

We look forward to participating with you in “Why Games Matter.”

Game on,


Chinwe Onyekere
Program Officer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation