"Always a Tall Order"
Jinghui Cheng, Cynthia Putnam, Jin Guo · 2016
Serious games for health utilize game media to help players attain health-related goals. Game designers play a crucial role in this growing game genre; they focus on particularly challenging design problems that are not well represented in the literature. In this study, we interviewed 11 professional game designers focused on games for health to explore how they perceived and approached their work. Our findings revealed how our participants considered "success" and the challenges of designing games for health; we also identified various methods and tools used in their practice. Additionally, we found that our participants were very user-centric and tended to focus almost equally on the problem and the solution spaces when approaching game design. The insights presented in this study will be of interest to games for health researchers and designers. This work also contributes to bridging the research-practice gap in the community exploring games as purposeful media.