Levelling up healthcare: Understanding games' life-changing medical potential | Playable Futures

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This series of Playable Futures articles considers how the design, technology, people, and theory of video games are informing and influencing the wider world. You can find all previous Playable Futures articles here.

Video games' relationship with training and simulation goes back decades. In the healthcare sector in particular, the applied gaming movement has generated all manner of training tools to guide professionals through different procedures and equipment.

And yet, thanks in no small part to a new generation of adaptable, user-centric game development tools and technologies, the future holds much potential and promise for our medium to have a profound and remarkable impact in the healthcare realm.

Over at facial animation specialist Speech Graphics, the team has served healthcare providers for some time through the Rapport platform. But there is increasingly an unmissable sense that the opportunities for game tech and game makers in supporting patients, medical professionals, and broad healthcare systems are about to get considerably more varied, impactful, and innovative.

Speech Graphics, which was founded in 2010 after spinning out of the University of Edinburgh's famed School of Informatics, has some proven tech within the video game sector, most notably its facial animation tools. It is this tech that drives the Rapport platform; this enables companies to create and animate characters, using AI to map recorded dialogue and messages to facial animation that matches the emotion of the original speech. Applicable in a variety of industries, this particularly offers an impressive breadth of potential in healthcare. But to co-founder and CEO Gregor Hofer, there's a cultural element that underpins much of games' rise in the medical space.

"We're absolutely seeing more going on in terms of what games can contribute to healthcare, and the future there is fascinating," Hofer offers. "And I think a core part of where this comes from is how present games have become