Empathy & Information: Ingredients for a Children's Game on Diabetes

Abstract

Type 1 diabetes patients have to control their blood insulin throughout their lives. Mastering this process increases one's quality of life as well as one's life expectancy. Since the 1990s, video games have been successfully informing diabetic children about the impacts of dietary habits or providing assistance by logging, visualising and rewarding a balanced insulin level. In the long list of diabetes-related games, some design choices frequently re-occur: (1) The player's identification with the game's protagonist whose metabolism needs to be balanced, (2) the aforementioned log-and-reward mechanism that rewards the player's own compliance with insulin medication and proper diet with game-related bonuses, and (3) a focus on the biochemical basics of the disease. We have investigated numerous game titles and several reviews on diabetes-related games, but could not identify a single game that incorporated all three core mechanics. For this reason, we propose a game design concept that merges these mechanics but, despite these interwoven goals, remains accessible for kids.