On the evening of October 18, in a brand-new simulation and training center on the campus of Sheba Medical Center, teams of developers worked through the night on problems most of them had never previously considered: how to teach a childhood cancer patient to swallow a pill, how to ease fear surrounding MRIs, how to treat phantom limb pain.
The Sheba ARC Healthcare Game Jam, was a 30-hour, in-person hackathon where approximately 100 participants, including a high school gaming class, built 25 games for clinicians, patients and caregivers. Teams started jamming at 11:00 on Sunday and kept going until demos the following day.
To the organizers, the event served as evidence that medical gaming has the potential to be considered a genre in its own right, and that the games industry is sitting on an opportunity it has long allowed to fly under the radar.
“While the industry is overwhelmed with existential angst from studio closures, publishers scaling back, diminished console sales, oversaturation of mobile, etc.,” said Sam Glassenberg, the event’s organizer, “there’s a huge adjacent opportunity for the industry that’s ours to lose.”
Glassenberg is the founder of Level Ex, a company that pioneered games for medical professionals with a stated mission to advance the practice of medicine through play. He also developed a game for diabetes management after his own daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. He now holds an advisory role at ARC as Head of Emerging HealthTech Initiatives, where, according to ARC’s announcement of the role, he leads efforts to integrate AI and videogame technology into clinical care.
Glassenberg’s case rests on how people learn. “Games are the most effective way to learn, especially when you need to develop a mental model of a complex system, like a medical device, a biological system, etc,” he said. “We’ve evolved to learn through play. Video games just take advantage of this. There’s no better way to understand how a city works, or how to build a bridge, or how orbital dynamics works than to play a video game.”
The jam was held by ARC, the healthcare innovation arm of Sheba Medical Center, together with GameIS, the Israel Game Developers Association. Sheba’s medical staff sent in about 40 problem statements, among them phantom limb pain, MRI anxiety, helping kids in oncology swallow pills, pre-operative anxiety in children, surgical tool recognition for operating room nurses, and knowing when to trust AI.
“We received a number of requests from clinicians for things that were really just ‘tools’ or ‘visualizations’ and we turned them all down to make sure we had a rich set of game design challenges you could really sink your teeth into,” Glassenberg noted.
Rehabilitation was an obvious fit for the jam. The more surprising problems produced some of the most interesting results. “It’s some of the less-obvious ones that led to some of the most intriguing solutions,” Glassenberg said, “like helping doctors understand how AI works under-the-hood, diagnosing things like color blindness in toddlers, etc.”
The clinicians were not just handing off problems. Many attended the kickoff and pitched their challenges directly to the teams of developers, which turned out to have real influence over their final products.
Why squeeze this into 30 hours? Glassenberg says the jam’s time limit was designed for speed. “You can get to a playable, testable mechanic far more quickly than with a standard production process that involves weeks of planning,” he said.
“Game jams are a great way to explore a direction in the solution space quickly, in a no-consequence environment,” he said. “…and with AI, you can achieve a shocking amount of progress in 30 hours.”
AI was involved in a great number of the jam’s projects. Developers used ChatGPT and Claude to confirm medical accuracy and relevance from the beginning, which Glassenberg credits with avoiding the kind of disconnect that might otherwise have caused friction with clinicians. “There wasn’t much clashing,” he said. One team had “GPT Astra precisely modeling dozens of surgical instruments for the OR Nurse training challenge,” and others used AI to generate reference medical cases, “the kind of thing that would be super-time-consuming to do by hand.”
One team came from a high school gaming class. Asked what younger participants brought that veteran developers might not have, Glassenberg laughed. “They slept the least, I think,” he said. “Many of us older folks conked out by 11pm. I was pretty jetlagged having just flown in from Chicago. The high schoolers worked through the night.”
The results of the jam didn’t just make for a feel-good story. “They produced some very impressive work,” he said, “including games you could deploy in the hospital immediately.”
Sheba’s clinicians marveled at how quickly the developers were able to move through their projects. “The clinicians were totally shocked at the velocity and creativity of the game devs,” Glassenberg said. “When you come from healthcare you see things move incredibly slowly. Ask a product team in healthcare to make a small improvement, and you’re lucky if you see it in months. These teams were making changes in realtime.”
Glassenberg showed several of the games days later in a keynote at the ARC Summit, in front of hospital CEOs from around the world. Two things impressed him most.
The first was the level of polish. “In my experience with Game Jams, most of the games end up pretty rough-around-the-edges,” he said. “Not true here. There were at least a dozen that felt ‘complete.’”
The second was sheer volume of content, best demonstrated by a team that built a game for children entering the hospital’s pediatric burn unit. “Think about that for a second,” Glassenberg said. “They turned an intimidating and confusing experience into an adopt-me-style game with full character customization (including where your burns/bandages are) and dozens of complete minigames for every activity in the ward.”
So why has the games industry not treated health as a core category? Glassenberg points to stigma first. For decades, a talented developer who wanted to work in healthcare had one option, “simulation” or “serious games.” “We all have a picture in our heads of what that looks like: second-life graphics circa 1999, ugly UI, and no meaningful gameplay to speak of,” he said. “Serious games rarely take game design seriously.”
The second barrier is the lack of a roadmap. A console or mobile game has a well-worn path of publisher funding, distribution and business models. “For medical games, there’s been little to copy-paste,” he said. At Level Ex, he says, “we had to carve out a business model with the life science and med device industries; they didn’t have a ‘games’ budget until we came along.” Companies like Akili paved the way for digital therapeutics, or FDA-approved video games.
Glassenberg describes a world where every life science company with a new treatment, every device maker with a new product and every medical society with a new guideline asks the same question: “For this to be successful, does the user need to understand a system? Then we’d better let them play with it. We need a game.”
In that world, most doctors could earn CME credit toward renewing their licenses by playing video games. Pharma would spend real money on playable ads and digital therapeutics would offer an alternative to pharmacological treatment for conditions such as ADHD, PTSD, depression, anxiety and OCD.
Some of the jam’s games will be developed into commercial health tech through ARC’s tech transfer arm. What separates a strong prototype from a viable product? “The usual business-case-study-stuff,” Glassenberg said, “market size, capital requirements, revenue potential, defensible competitive advantage, etc.”
The path is often much longer for games that treat or diagnose. They require clinical studies, which Glassenberg says are “much easier for games than procedures or drugs,” followed by FDA review. After that, insurers can pay. “You’re a game studio, making bank like a pharmaceutical or medical device company,” he said. It is higher risk and higher reward. Educational games, by contrast, need medical peer review and possibly CME approval.
Who pays? “All of the above,” Glassenberg said: hospitals, pharma, insurers or patients. His own preference is clear. “My personal preference is not to charge patients, and to find alternative business models so it’s free for patients, but that’s a personal preference.”
To Glassenberg and the team behind the ARC Healthcare jam, the opportunities within the realm of medical gaming are not to be taken lightly:
“There is no shortage of 9-figure problems in healthcare that can be solved with games.”