HEALTH GAMES
“Games tap into
strong characteristics
people already have.”
—Ken Kleinberg
Even a few commercial start-ups are
wading into the industry.
Big-ticket undertaking
A major financial hurdle facing any game
company is development costs. They can
be staggering, Falstein says. “Anywhere
from the tens of thousands for a small
iPhone game to hundreds of millions for
big Xbox title.”
Personnel costs usually account for at
least half of the development budget, and
programmers and designers do not come
cheaply. “It’s hard to find good people,”
Falstein says. “A 22-year-old designer can
get a job right out of college. And games
can get really complicated.”
He cites one major commercial game,
“World of WarCraft” an online game with
12 million international users who sub-
scribe to play.
Training Firm Eyes Health Care
PARTNERS WITH ACADEMIC CENTER IN SMoKINg CESSATIoN gAME
NAME:
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With over a decade of experience in developing educational
games for schools and training games for corporate settings,
Muzzy Lane Software is just beginning to enter the health
care market. The firm is working with Memorial Sloan Ketter-
ing Cancer Center to develop a smoking cessation game, says
David Martz, vice president of marketing. The firm got a start-up
$750,000 STAR grant from the National Institutes of Health.
MSKCC will provide clinical expertise while Muzzy Lane will
handle game design and development, Martz says. “The grant is
enough to make a critical mass first version of the product,” he
says. “We can test, prove and deploy.”
The smoking cessation game could ultimately be sold to
insurance plans and self-insured corporations, Martz says. Build-
ing the game taps into Muzzy Lane’s capacity for game design
and supporting technology. “We rely on third party experts to
help us with what to measure and what games should teach,”
he adds. ‘Whenever someone has a problem to solve, we’re the
experts at the building the games to solve them.”
The economic value of the smoking cessation game, he says,
David Martz,
Vice President
will derive from reducing future health care costs associated with
nicotine consumption.
“The goal will be to show that people who use our game have
less chance of resuming smoking. People already spend millions
to help themselves stop smoking. There is clearly a consumer
market.”
Martz is confident the company’s background in developing
games for schools and corporations will translate to the health
care industry. “The needs in health care are very similar,’ he says.
“You want to teach about a disease state, measure what users
do, pass to a scoring system and record the data. The mechan-
ics of how the game will be used in health care is very similar to
training and education.”
Health care foundations targeting certain diseases—such as
autism and irritable bowel syndrome—have also approached
Muzzy Lane about game development, he notes. “A founda-
tion with the job of preventing disease might not want to make
money with a game, but just want to uphold their mission and
show progress in helping people manage the disease.”
