September 6, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Video games often get a bad rap for encouraging unhealthy, sedentary behavior. But the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is looking for novel ways that video and computer games can actually promote health and well-being.
The Princeton, N.J., foundation is co-sponsoring an online competition called “Why Games Matter: a Prescription for Improving Health and Health Care.”
“It’s about trying to understand how gaming technology might be used, whether for social marketing, educational purposes, physical activity, promoting exercise, or something even more specific, such as physical therapy,” says Nancy Barrand, a senior program officer at the foundation.
A panel of experts — including Janice Nall, director of E-Health Marketing for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Skip Rizzo, a research scientist at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies — will select roughly a dozen finalists.
Then members of Changemakers — a program run by Ashoka, in Arlington, Va., that uses the Internet to bring together social entrepreneurs to collect and share potential solutions to difficult social problems — will vote to select three winners. Each will receive a $5,000 cash prize from Changemakers, and all of the finalists will be invited to present their proposals at a special summit held in conjunction with the 2008 Games for Health conference.
The competition is the third to be co-sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Changemakers. The first contest, which solicited ideas to combat domestic violence, received more than 250 entries, and the second, which called for innovative ideas that had the potential to revolutionize health care, received more than 120 entries.
The foundation is experimenting to see if competitions could be used “to do the first environmental scan of a field and understand who’s doing what out there, and who thinks which ideas really can show some significant impact,” says Ms. Barrand. She stresses that the contests are not a substitute for the foundation’s traditional grant-making procedure.
Says Ms. Barrand: “The jury is still out as to what they might be best at.”
Entries for the video-game competition are due September 26.
For more information: Go to http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competition/healthgames.
