Online Video Games in Brazilian Public Health Communication


Simão de Vasconcellos Marcelo Soares de Araújo Inesita
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

Based on an ongoing doctoral dissertation, this paper discusses online video games’ potential for public health communication in Brazil. Brazil is a continental country, with wide variance of habits and cultures, presenting great challenges for public health policies. Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), one of the largest public health systems in the world, serves entire Brazilian population guided by the principles of universality, comprehensiveness and fairness. Brazilian government places great importance in health communication strategies, using both traditional (print, radio, television) and new media (websites, social networks). However, most of this communication is centralized, prescriptive, unidirectional, focusing dissemination of peremptory norms and behaviors, ignoring local contexts and population knowledge. This limits communications’ effectiveness and potential for change, particularly among youngsters, resistant to less interactive and dialogic media. There are already some efforts to occasional use of video games in Brazilian public health; however, we still lack a rigorous analysis of the potential of this medium as a means of public health communication. We suggest that video games can play an important role in reaching such young audiences, combining entertainment and interaction. The primary focus of our research is online video games, specifically MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), where the links created between avatar and player would allow incorporation of in-game learned notions of self-care into players’ offline lives. Such games could enable contextualizing health communication content, since the player experiences the virtual world at his/her own pace and according to individual interests and limitations. MMORPGs also encourage players to act over the environment, emphasizing notions of personal effort and responsibility in maintaining one’s own health. In addition, these games provide immediate feedback and players see clearly results of their actions, which would portray powerful links between cause and effect in everyday behavior and health consequences. Finally, these games allow the emergence of entire online communities with a rich panorama of communication flows, where each player would receive the health content presented by the game system, and also mediate, interpret and re-contextualize this content. In Brazil, this space for socializing and joint creation provided by games thrives today not only in richer homes, but also among lower classes, thanks to the proliferation of Internet cafes in low-income neighborhoods. MMORPGs could provide opportunities for mediation flows more dynamic than traditional media and their use in public health communication may represent a powerful channel for transmission of information, for contact with public and a fruitful environment to foster creativity and social participation of young people. However, appropriate conditions for the design and production of such games are essential to this outcome. In the Brazilian context, games like MMORPGs for health would originate through support of public agencies, as the Brazilian government is the largest investor in this field. This fact introduces special difficulties in the process, such as government’s typical bureaucracy and slowness, which do not match the efficient production of cultural goods required for a fast market such as the games’ one. This further widens the gap between academic thinking and development of products to the public. From this preliminary analysis, we aim to propose some production guidelines to facilitate the creation of such games mixing health content and dialogic characteristics that would enable players to learn and express themselves more freely in the interactive environment: 1) Teams should be multidisciplinary and dedicated to each project, incorporating academic researchers (who will provide data and content about public health) and also representatives from the target audience of the game; 2) tools should be open-source or free, to keep costs down, but also there should be special attention to content’s efficient distribution such as online games accessible through common browsers; 3) the primary attraction of such games should be fun, regardless of any serious content; 4) these games should incorporate features for measuring and analyzing online behavior, which, respecting players’ privacy, could provide developers with useful data for improving the game and at same time provide invaluable information for researchers assessing the effectiveness of health communication portrayed in game; 5) such games should give broad channels for players’ communication and expression, inside and outside the game, from customizing the avatar up to virtual spaces for socialization as chat channels, guilds and clans, with the virtual environment encouraging players’ creative participation through its history and visuals; 6) these games should be in constant refinement, in short production cycles, preferably with many means of communication between public and developers through abundant use of social media like Facebook, Twitter and others. We believe that game projects that incorporate these practices will have a greater chance of success and may represent a major advance in health communication for the Brazilian society.