The Evolution of CDC\HHS Health Game Jams: Lessons Learned 2013-2016

Background:  Games have tremendous potential as a vehicle for health communication and education.  Games are played by 58% of Americans—by both genders and by a wide age range. Positive health outcomes from the use of computer games have been documented.   Game development challenge events known as “Game Jams” are often held to bring game developers together to address a specific theme in a competitive, collaborative atmosphere, constrained by location and timeframe (i.e., single venue and 48-hour duration) to produce game prototypes.  Despite its potential as of 2013, a health focused game jam had never been attempted.  We held two such events in 2013 and 2014.

Program background:  CDC held the first federal game jam: a 48-hour competition to produce a game in support of CDC’s Winnable Health Battles. It was an opportunity for game developers, (designers, artists, and programmers) to work directly with CDC subject matter experts to develop games that address CDC’s and HHS’s public health priorities. For this event, the CDC partnered with academic and private partners.  Due to our success HHS provided funding for a second event focused on HIV prevention.  At the second event CDC and staff from our sister HHS agencies HRSA and NIH were subject matter experts.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  In addition to collecting demographic information via registration, evaluations were administered to participants pre- and post-event to capture key metrics such as interest in public health careers at both events.   In 2013, 331 developers entered the contest, producing 29 game prototypes. Prior to the contest, 95.0% had never created a health related game.  The event boosted interest in public health careers among contestants rising from 12.0% to 50.0%.  In 2014, 291 developers entered the contest, producing 41 health game prototypes.  Only 23.4% had ever created a health related game.  Only 16.6% had considered a career in public health prior to the event, 65% reported interest 48 hours later.  We tested one of the games from the 2014 event in a trial, using a waitlisted control design with a pretest and a posttest at 30 days.  Repeated measures T-tests indicated gains in the experimental groups in HIV/STI knowledge, intentions to engage in HIV/STI protective behaviors and reduced HIV stigma.    

Conclusions:  These two events demonstrated the viability of using Game Jams to efficiently and efficiently develop inexpensive demos of for HIV prevention and other public health topics. We spent $10,000 in HHS funding in 2013 and $50,000 in 2014.  Furthermore, these results indicate our events improved awareness and interest of public health careers among developers.  Finally, our results show that these events can produce games that lead to the adoption of health behaviors and lifestyles.    

Implications for research and/or practice:  Results of these events are encouraging: Event attendance and number of games produced and robust growth in interest in public health among participants. In this presentation, we will describe the compelling state of the computer game industry and how the authors leveraged federal funding with private donations to introduce a new population to fundamentals of public health.