A few episodes ago I had the pleasure of speaking with Sue Bohle about the Serious Play Conference. The conference in its sixth year was hosted at UNC Kenan-Flagler business school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The conference moves around every year so I was very excited that it was in my own backyard this year. While the conference wasn’t exclusively about creating serious games for healthcare there were a number of speakers there talking about the games they were developing.

In today’s podcast, I have an interview with for brilliant minds who are using gamification, a term will be discussing shortly, to help individuals with learning, education, engaging, and managing health and behavioral challenges. My four guests are Doug Watley with breakaway games, Lynn Fiellin with the Yale Center for Health and Learning, Dan Scherlis with the “Breathe Free” game, and Randy Brown of Virtual Heroes.

This is just a small selection of the many speakers and attendees present at this conference. I encourage you to find out more about “serious play” and “serious games” Give a listen to my interview with Sue Bohle.

My first interview is with Doug Watley the CEO of breakaway games. His game “Vital Signs”, was just awarded one of two best in show awards.

One of the sessions that fascinated me was the discussion of how a 2-D player game was created to help at-risk middle school-aged children work through scenarios of behavior choices and what the consequences would be. Let’s learn about Lynn Fiellin’s Play2Protect game.

I had a really interesting conversation with Dan Scherlis he is both a professional game developer and now a health games executive producer. It’s very interesting thoughts on the word game of vacation and told me about a game he’s working on “Breath Free” to help smokers try to quit. We even talked about good versus evil.

My last interview is with Randy Brown of virtual heroes is a fascinating spinoff of Epic Games Unreal Engine creating virtual worlds to help teach and connect individuals in a variety of professions from the military to public service to healthcare. His company, Virtual Heroes is working with the Duke School of Nursing on an IRB study for Type II diabetes support in a virtual world. Let’s hear what Randy has to say.

Thank you for listening to get social health I hope you found serious games for healthcare as interesting as I did. As a reminder go give a listen to my other podcast with Sue Bolla the executive director of the Serious Play Conference.

I’ve published over hundred episodes of Get Social Health. There have been a lot of fascinating, fun and interesting conversations with healthcare practitioners, digital health thought leaders, physicians nurses and healthcare professionals who are actively using social media to further their healthcare messages. When you visit the get social health.com website you’ll find on the right-hand side a search bar so type in a topic and will be able to find some really great interviews.

If you have a suggestion for an interview either a topic or an individual I’d love to hear about it please reach out to me via [email protected] one thing I would ask is for you to take the time to give me a review or rating it helps other individuals find the podcast and we could always use a few more listeners. I appreciate your listening today have a great week.