Study Shows Re-Mission Cancer Game Helps Patients Pop Pills

Mon, Aug 4, 2008

Over two years and 125,000 free copies since launch, the publishers of cancer-fighting third-person shooter Re-Mission have finally had their self-funded study published in prestigious peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics. And as wary as we typically are of videogame-related research — much less studies funded by organizations which clearly have something to gain — I can’t argue with HopeLab’s results.

Studying a population of 371 cancer patients over the course of three months, researchers found that those patients who had the opportunity to play Re-Mission were on-average 16% more likely to take their medication, more knowledgeable about cancer, and more self-efficacious than those who did not.

Though the grandiose press release attempts to make the absurd claim that Re-Mission changes patients’ biology, the actual study had one simple goal: to find out if the introduction of an educational game would make cancer patients more likely to take their prescribed oral medication. And here, HopeLab and partnering hospitals succeeded admirably, thanks to a well-designed, focused experiment whose qualities, I believe, should be emulated by all who attempt to do video game research.

Many behavioral studies employ a group of self-selecting college kids looking for class credit, so I assumed here I’d find a similarly lazy research attempt — perhaps a single ward of ten white teenage male cancer patients with no gaming background. I couldn’t have been further from the truth. With help from 34 different medical centers in three different countries, the researchers accumulated an incredibly diverse collection of 371 patients, ages 13-29, fully one-third female, from all walks of life and with a variety of different malignancies.

Then, rather than set up an experiment in a fixed laboratory setting, having one group of patients play Re-Mission and having the other perform some other sedentary entertainment activity, the researchers demonstrated considerable foresight by giving both groups of patients similar games, and plenty of choice in how or even if they would play them from the comfort of their own homes. Patients were given Shuttle PCs loaded with Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, a game chosen for its design and control similarities to Re-Mission, and one half of the patients were randomly chosen to get Re-Mission as well, before being asked to play one hour on the PC per week. Yes, the test group got both games, and was thereby allowed to proactively choose whether or not to expose themselves to the cancer game at any particular moment.

If the control group hadn’t had a similar game to play, it would have been easy to attribute effects to the simple act of playing a game; and if the test group hadn’t had the choice of whether or not to play Re-Mission each week, we could similarly claim that the forced gameplay session just served as a scheduled reminder to take the pills, but HopeLab admirably averts these issues.

Though the experiment did not find any significant increase in patients’ self-reported quality of life (unlike HopeLab’s earlier claims) and the significant effect they did measure on patients’ cancer knowledge was rather small — after three months, the control group was pulling high Fs, while the test group eked out a low D — there’s no denying that 16% increase in adherence to prescribed medication. Even if only as substitute for that time-honored spoonful of sugar, it seems that Re-Mission has what it takes to make the medicine go down.

You can peruse the full Pediatrics article right here.