My Own Private Neuromancer VII

View part VI here.

World Order: "Machine Civilization"

LOVE this choreography! I could watch these guys all day, they're so magnificently precise.

Bonus: excellent choice of locations. I'm such a sucker for industrial chic, especially when combined with suited guys dancing with a dry wit.

Bonus bonus: check out all the bewildered people going by who suddenly realize they're walking into a video. O, the joys of low-budget filmmaking....

video games for health

I'm so sad that little media + tech + health (outside of Bayer's Didget) seems to be moving out of research and into the market. But hey! Since we're here, let's watch a kid review the Didget games:



I don't know about you, but I find this pretty dang inspiring. Is there any reason we're not doing more of this for adults, in addition to exergaming (exercise gaming)? Sure, there's the Wii Fit array of games, but most folks I know are letting their Wii Fit games/devices collect dust, mainly because the workouts just don't seem worth it:



It's really in the best interest of insurance companies to unite healthcare with entertainment providers, because the more fun people are having with maintaining their health, the less sick they get, and the more money the insurance companies make. Perhaps, as an example, you could tie games to pedometers, and even get discounts on your insurance rates the more you walk.

Or am I a crazy person?

Not your parents' Fantastic Voyage

Robot Can Crawl Through Human Body

Once they figure out how to put a camera and transmitter on this thing, WOULD IT NOT MAKE THE AWESOMEST VIDEO GAME EVER?

And wouldn't it be furtherly awesome if you earned huge discounts on your health insurance for every minute you've spent playing with this?

Yes. Yes, it would.

Slay yon cancer with mighty video game

So, Re-Mission™ looks pretty badass. You kill purple things, which I presume are cancers. You learn a ton, have fun in the process, and can immediately apply your knowledge to your own real fight against cancer (which I hope you never get, or at least have battled into remission). From the site:

Results showed that a specially designed video game can have positive impact on health behaviors in young people with chronic illness. Specifically, playing Re-Mission improved treatment adherence and produced increases in self-efficacy, and cancer-related knowledge for adolescents and young adults with cancer.

I think that's fantastic. I used to volunteer in a pediatric oncology ward when I was in undergrad, and the kids were always desperate for fun ways to distract themselves; they all would have eaten up this game with a spoon, assuming the quality of gameplay isn't too shabby. This may have given each of them a greater sense of control over the disease, and armed each of them with correct information to help fight the good fight.

Also, you get to look like this:


I haven't played Re-Mission™ yet, although the visuals look immersive without being too scary. I think the purple helps.



Per their website, HopeLab has handed out over 142,000 copies of this to kids with cancer all over the world, free of charge. Here's the best part: it seems to work. I say 'seems to' because I do not have a subscription to Pediatrics, so I can't read the data that HopeLab published. I'm assuming it reads like a battle scene from Harry Potter, only with torpedoes and a side effect of healthiness.