Do serious games for health HAVE to be digital? No! The aim is to use game design approaches to educate and train. Analog games such as board and card games can be a perfect solution in many contexts. They are also really fun to make and have benefits over digital games.
Ready Rufus: Find Professor Tapps is a board game for young children with hemophilia and their families that I worked on.
Here’s how it happened, what we did, what we learned, and how board games for health have an edge over digital games.
What is Hemophilia
To give you some basic background, hemophilia is a genetically inherited condition mostly affecting males and is often discovered when they are very young. People with hemophilia lack a clotting factor in their blood which stops it from bleeding. Treatments have improved life expectancy and other outcomes, but many can be painful for young children. In addition to treatments, young children with hemophilia have to avoid activities with where there is a high risk for injuries (e.g., boxing, rugby). At the same time, patients work with physical therapists to ensure they are active and strong, especially around the joints, to avoid injuries and prevent unexplained bleeding.
How It All Started
I was Chair of the Games for Health UK Conference in 2016 when I was Professor of Serious Games at Coventry University. Alex Tarling, founder of Aktiv Technology and a user experience expert, approached me during an intermission between sessions. He was helping Pfizer work on a digital game project to address needs of young patients with hemophilia. Their early interviews with clinicians revealed that developing relevant skills for young patients with hemophilia inherently needed to involve their family members. A multiplayer game therefore made sense.
Knowing that multiplayer digital games could be expensive and complex, Alex thought that a physical board game might be just as much fun and an easier way to impact patients and family members. He thought my team and I might be able to partner with them to make a fun and impactful board game based on research. I had always wanted to work on an analog board game for health. I was all in.
Alex Tarling pitched the idea of a hemophilia board game instead of a digital game to Pfizer. It fit in well with an ongoing initiative they were working on to provide non-clinical support for children with rare diseases, especially hemophilia. They especially liked the idea of using a research evidence base to back up a playful game approach to help these patients and their families. We got the green light!
Research
My colleagues and I at Coventry University kicked of the project by doing rigorous background research to inform the focus of the board game. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of published research on evaluating the effects of board games for health on various outcomes. This research (published in Games for Health) gave us a solid idea of what a board game could do for players. We were confident that we had a good chance of impacting knowledge as well as some health-related behaviors with a board game approach.
We also reviewed the research literature on non-medical interventions for patients with hemophilia. This review reassured us that supporting the needs of very young patients with hemophilia and their families would be a unique and very much needed contribution (note: this paper is currently under review for publication).
In addition to understanding the research literature, we also conducted research with key stakeholders to get the most updated and relevant advice. We collected data in one-on-one interviews, focus groups, user tests, and surveys with healthcare professionals (psychologists, nurses, physicians) and the target group of patients and their family members. These efforts helped us translate our “cold” research findings into more meaningful and appealing content for the game.
Design
I worked on the basic game design using “Snakes and Ladders” as a basic board game approach. In addition, players had to answer questions correctly if they landed on certain spaces to win Factor cards that they could keep and use later to get ahead or protect them from slipping backwards in the game (a metaphor for clotting Factor in their blood). Here’s my very first stab at the layout of the game.
A talented design team in London (DDB) stepped in to make the the visual design consistent with other material they were developing for the patients. They introduced visually engaging characters (Rufus and Louis) that had a backstory. They also introduced imaginative concepts (the Slippery Slopes and the Leaky Lakes) in the visuals of the board game to keep the young players engaged even when it wasn’t their turn in the game.
What We Learned
Here are a few basic design rules we found were relevant to serious game health whether they are digital or analog (board) games.
- KEEP IT SIMPLE! Have a basic game mechanic (e.g., roll dice and travel forward the number of places on the dice) that people can grasp quickly and get started right away. The flow of the game, the goal, and the rules should be as visually intuitive as possible so that the need to refer to an instruction manual or tutorial is minimized. Challenges in the game are necessary for engagement and should be relevant (e.g., answering questions correctly, strategizing moves). However, unnecessary challenges (e.g., not knowing which direction to move on the board, not understanding what an icon means in a game), should be addressed as much as possibly visually (e.g. arrows). Requiring users to refer to textual instructions (e.g., “always move in a counter-clockwise direction across the board) unnecessarily promotes a feeling of complexity.
- BALANCE! The most challenging but fun part of designing games for me is balancing the needs and capabilities of range of players. A good game needs to feel simple and easy to play (see above). The challenge is that it also needs to be complex and interesting enough for more advanced players. Our play testing with families of young patients (ages 6 to 11) and their family members suggested that we were able to do this with Ready Rufus. The young players particularly enjoyed it when the disease-related content was presented in a fun way (e.g., What should you remember to take with you when you spend the night with a friend? 1] a tooth brush or 2] a toilet brush). Parents enjoyed the opportunity to discuss the content of cards related to the history of hemophilia or how to talk about it with each other.
- IT IS HARD TO MAKE LEARNING FUN! While we want players to really enjoy playing the game and have fun, being confronted with things you don’t know is often not “fun” for people. We did a user test in which we asked patients, family members and clinicians to answer the questions on the game cards (we could see if they got the answer right or not), rate how hard each question was and tell us if they thought the card should be included in the final game or thrown out. There was a very strong tendency for people to want to throw out the cards that they as individuals answered incorrectly and/or thought were too hard. However, if we only included questions that people knew the answers to, they wouldn’t learn anything new! This is a ubiquitous challenge in creating serious games. We used a combination of keeping things simple (#1 above) and balancing challenge with fun (#2 above) to address this issue in the best possible way.
BENEFITS OF BOARD GAMES
In addition to the commonalities outlined above, we experienced some major benefits of working on a board game for health compared to a digital game.
- Quicker development, turnaround, and delivery. Implementing and making changes to art and game design can happen very quickly and more easily with a smaller team compared to digital games.
- Minimal concerns about adverse effects. There were virtually no concerns about screen time, addiction, isolating behaviors, eye strain, or carpal tunnel syndrome that arose during this project. We did make sure the game pieces conformed to international size standards to avoid risks of choking.
- User enthusiasm for delivering an activity away from screens. Several parents and family members thanked us for making something that the whole family could play together and did not require their child to focus on a screen.
The Game Today
Ready Rufus: Find Professor Tapps has already won an award and been on exhibit at an art museum. It won a PM Society Silver Craft Award in the UK. It was also included with my other games for health in the First Grand Exhibition of “Play Beyond the Game” at the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Beijing, China.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Ready Rufus: Find Professor Tapps, please contact James Steed (James.Steed@pfizer.com).
References
Gauthier, A., Kato, P. M., Bul, K. C., Dunwell, I., Walker-Clarke, A., & Lameras, P. (2019). Board games for health: A systematic literature review and meta-analysis. Games for Health Journal, 8(2), 85-100. http://doi.org/10.1089/g4h.2018.0017
Mary Anne Liebert (2018, October 22). Preliminary evidence for use of board games to improve knowledge in health outcomes. Medical Press. Retrieved 3 December 2018 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-10-preliminary-evidence-board-games-knowledge.html
Sue Wang (2018, September 12). How to Review “Games” in a New Perspective: The First Grand Exhibition “Play Beyond the Game” was unveiled at CAFAM. CAFA Newsletter. http://en.cafa.com.cn/how-to-review-games-in-a-new-perspective-the-first-grand-exhibition-play-beyond-the-game-was-unveiled-at-cafam.html
You can cite this article as:
Kato, P. M. (2019, March 01). A Board Game for Children with Hemophilia: Find Professor Tapps [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://wordpress.com/post/pamkato.com/8341
