Today the first Games for Health Conference kicks off in Madison, Wisconsin, entertaining at least 100 delegates on the use of computer gaming in health education and healthcare.
This comes in a timely fashion, days after Joystiq reported a a survey of 2,100 parents and teachers which found that playing Pokemon helps children learn "important values and skills", including hand-eye coordination, social interaction and lateral thinking.
Before you make jibes about pick-ups or re-spawning, head to conference organisers Serious Games to see what kinds of positive things can come from interactive entertainment. Highlights include dealing with phobias with off-the-shelf gaming entertainment, developing biofeedback systems with gaming technologies, GlucoBoy, a Game Boy-based product to encourage kids with diabetes to control their blood sugar and a presentation by Dr. James Rosser, the sugeon who's study at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York suggested that daily gameplay (on Super Monkey Ball in this instance) has a positive effect on the ability to perform keyhole surgery.
While conferences like this one are fantastic and emphasise the breadth of goodness that can come from gaming, one niggling concern with suggesting that people can learn positive things from the PlayStation is that – rightly or wrongly – some might use this information as an excuse to extrapolate a counter-argument. However, throwing more constructive findings into the limelight should help to eventually readdress the public's view about computer gaming.
