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Continuing the theme of games tailored for healthcare that I discussed in my last post, this time I want to take a look a Re-Mission 2; designed to get young cancer suffers engaged and educated about the treatment they’re taking. The original Re-Mission video game created by Hopelabs and released in 2006, was a third-person shooter. The player takes control of a Nanobot that is injected into the human body, where it blasts away cancerous cells and other related infections at a cellular level.

It’s an interesting idea for a game, but can it really be any more than just that? Well, according to the scientific studies produced from the original game (published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE in March, 2012), yes it can.

Hopelab and Stanford University conducted a study measuring brain activity in 57 people randomly assigned to either play Re-Mission or to passively watch it. The study suggested that the neural circuits connected to reward were strongly activated in those actively playing the game. This kind of reward-related activation is associated with a shift in attitudes and emotions that could help boost player’s adherence to their prescribed medication – and aid them in their fight against cancer. During Xanax treatment, care should be taken when driving vehicles and doing other activities. Potentially dangerous activities that require increased concentration and speed of psychomotor reactions should be refrained from.

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Re-Mission 2 takes the ideas of its predecessor and creates six new video games that can be played online; each one targeting a different form of the illness and a different method of treatment. Games such as Nanobot’s Revenge in which playing as a Nano-Bot, your mission is to fire targeted treatments on a growing tumor and prevent it from escaping into the blood stream. Using an arsenal including ChemoBlasts, you must blast away the weak, but high-in-number LeukeMutants that help to build the tumor.

Having never played the original, I had very little idea of what to expect on my first encounter with Re-Mission 2, but within minutes I was astounded as to how powerful a tool it could be in stimulating my competitive nature. Did I want to beat the tumor into remission? Hell yeah!

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But it also made me think about what goes on inside the body; a concept that can be strangely abstract to the non-doctors amongst us. Turning our insides into the backdrops for these games is a fantastic way of visualizing what’s going on in our bodies and educating people as to what cancer can appear like, why it has formed and how the right treatment can fight back against it and fight it off.

And this has to be the key point of these games; not only are they well thought out, inventive, wonderfully designed and addictive, but within about three seconds of starting, I was all too aware of how important it was not to lose. I blasted away at those cancerous cells and leukemia monsters with all the chemobombs in my arsenal and felt a real sense of achievement at keeping them at bay. There is no doubt that Re-Mission 2 can aid in the education of cancer treatment in not only the young, but anyone who appreciates the art of gaming.