Enter the Serious Games Initiative: an organization, founded by the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C., whose goal is to help usher in a new series of policy education, exploration, and management tools utilizing state of the art computer game designs, technologies, and development skills.

Since 2002 the Serious Games Initiative has published several papers and articles and hosted major workshops that resulted in design treatments for several serious games for parks, hospitals, and high schools. These treatments are now being shown to a number of organizations that may result in their development.

Developers are not the only ones riding the wave of serious gaming, however. The healthcare industry, in part, has welcome applications that aid in treatment for patients. The Serious Games Initiative founded Games for Health to develop a community and best practices platform for the numerous games being built for health care applications. To date, the project has brought together researchers, medical professionals, and game developers to share information about the impact games and game technologies can have on health care and policy.

Various researches have shown that most people, including elderly stroke victims and mentally challenged children, have the capacity to work harder when confronted with an engaging game. As a result of this research, developers are designing games to improve cognitive functioning in the aging brain; boost motor skills in stroke victims; focus the attention of brain-injured kids or those diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Other games that have been in development and testing use interactive scenarios to walk nurses, trauma physicians, and medics through real life situations including battleground medicine; educating children and adults on diseases and conditions such as diabetes, cancer, leukemia, and HIV; and helping children relax before surgery.

These therapeutic and educational games have garnered the attention of institutions such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the US Army and Navy. For example, a team at USC's Institute for Creative Technology designed "Virtual Iraq," a therapeutic game used in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder for US soldiers.

HopeLab, a non-profit group out of Palo Alto, CA that works with young, chronically ill cancer patients, is already seeing promising results from a game called Re-Mission, which the group released in April 2006. The game allows a player to fight cancer cells, help administer chemotherapy, and attack infections.

HopeLab conducted a randomized, controlled, multi-center trial to test the effect of Re-Mission on adolescents and young adults with cancer. HopeLab President Pat Christen said young cancer patients have said in trials that after playing the game, they were more likely to keep up with their drug treatments and had a stronger resolve to fight their disease.

The results taken from the study showed that:

• Patients' quality of life, knowledge about cancer information embedded with the game, and their self-efficacy to communicate about cancer and manage side effects increased in the Re-Mission group.
• Patients' overall composite score on the self-efficacy scale also increased significantly over time for the Re-Mission group.
• Young people who played Re-Mission maintained higher blood levels of chemotherapy and showed higher rates of antibiotic utilization, both suggesting that Re-Mission helps patients adhere to cancer therapy regimens.

While it is certain that serious games will never replace physi