Serious Games for Health: Features, Challenges, Next Steps.

As articles in this journal have demonstrated over the past 3 years, serious game development continues to flourish as a vehicle for formal and informal health education. How best to characterize a "serious" game remains somewhat elusive in the literature. Many researchers and practitioners view serious games as capitalizing on computer technology and state-of-the-art video graphics as an enjoyable means by which to provide and promote instruction and training, or to facilitate attitude change among its players.

Building virtual worlds carrying on the legacy of Randy Pausch's "head fake".

The Carnegie Mellon Building Virtual Worlds course fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and invention. It helps provide students with a solid foundation by challenging them to create innovative, future-oriented experiences through a series of critiqued rapid prototypes. This process, combined with carefully designed peer evaluation, has led to a system that hundreds of alumni credit with setting them on the road to inventing the future of entertainment technology.

Stories in Games for Health: More Pros or Cons?

There has been a debate about whether entertainment videogames should incorporate story or narrative. A concern has been whether story cut scenes break game immersion, and thereby minimize the fun of gameplay. Alternatively, games for health (G4H) have an agenda that goes beyond just having fun.