NYC Health Games

Last night we were lucky enough to attend the NYC Health Games meetup organized by Kogito Interactive. The event was hosted by NYU, and was a great chance for us to talk to some people involved with really interesting games and research. Lit 2 Quit presented their games along with some really fascinating research: they’re trying to see if playing a video game can stimulate the same physiological effects as smoking.

We were lucky enough to get an ‘in’ to the academic community through Jessica Hammer, and it’s been refreshing to step outside of our Silicon Alley tech bubble and into a different one. The goals of academic research projects are very different from that of a tech startup, and as a result the approaches are very different. Jessica has been a font of useful information for us.  I hope she’ll write a book or two on game design once she finishes her dissertation. In the mean time I’ll just have to be satisfied with stalking her answers on Quora.

We started the first phase of “paper” play-testing, substituting email for paper. We’re 48 hours into a six week testing process, and already we’ve started ripping out bad ideas and replacing them with good less bad ones.