commercial video games to distract patients and provide a means of pain management, a team of researchers and game designers developed a virtual reality game for burn patients called SnowWorld. In this game, players are immersed in a virtual reality world where they fly through an icy landscape of a canyon, cold river, and waterfall through gently falling snow. As they navigate their way through the canyon, they can shoot snowballs at snowmen, penguins, igloos, and robots. In contrast to games used for physical therapy and exercise, this game was designed specifically to minimize body motion during gameplay to enable wound care (debridement) by nurses (Hoffman et al., 2008). This was possible because players controlled their movements and activities in the game (such as throwing snowballs) by manipulating a fixed joystick. Studies of this intervention showed that it was effective in reducing pain perception among 11 burn patients in a pretest–posttest evaluation (Hoffman et al., 2008). One randomized controlled trial of the virtual reality intervention showed a 20% reduction in subjective reports of pain when compared with standard analgesic interventions (Sharar et al., 2007). Although it is not clear from the design of the evaluative studies of the game if the “cool” (temperature-wise) imagery of the game induced an extra level of pain tolerance, it does seem clear patients who felt themselves “present” in the cool world of the game reported feeling less pain. Furthermore, it was surmised that the increased reports of the virtual reality intervention as being “fun” also contributed to greater compliance with the painful procedures involved with treating burns such as burn debridement. Finally, the results of this work suggest that virtually immersive games may also have therapeutic effects in other patient populations with pain management needs. Diabetes. One classic video game for health is Packy and Marlon, which was originally made for the Super Nintendo game console system. The game is aimed at children with diabetes. The characters in the game are two elephants that are at a diabetes summer camp. They have to get rid of a gang of marauding rats that are keeping the campers from healthy food and diabetic supplies. To win, players have to successfully manage their insulin levels and food intake while keeping their characters’ glucose levels within an acceptable range. This game was evaluated in a randomized trial in which participants in the treatment group played the game for 6 months (Brown et al., 1997). By the end of the study, patients who had access to the game showed greater perceived self-efficacy for diabetes self-management, increased communication with parents about diabetes, and improved daily diabetes self-management behaviors (e.g., monitoring blood glucose levels regularly, taking insulin as needed, eating the right foods). More impressive, in terms of objective health outcomes, the treatment group had a 77% decrease in diabetes-related emergency and urgent care clinical visits compared with controls. These findings have clinical significance because they show that an interactive video game can have an effect on important health behaviors in children with a chronic illness. Asthma. Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus is a video game on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System platform that was made for young children with asthma. The game is set in prehistoric times and the world is covered in dust. A fan that usually keeps the dust at bay has broken. Players help the two in-game characters, Bronkie and Trakie, keep their asthma at bay by avoiding triggers such as dust and smoke while they go on their quest. There are some textual question-and-answer inserts in the game along the way that need to be answered correctly in order to proceed. A series of studies on the game found that patients’ asthma-related self-concepts, social support, knowledge, self-care behaviors, and self-efficacy improved after playing the game compared with a control group (Lieberman, 2001). These findings contribute to our knowledge about what video games can do to affect important health beliefs and practices among young children. The interactive game SpiroGame was developed for use with a device that measures and gives a readout of breathing function for spirometry. Spirometry is a measure of lung function, and it is used with patients who have diseases associated with compromised lung functioning such as asthma or cystic fibrosis. Spirometry is often difficult to perform with young children because it depends highly on patient cooperation and effort during the procedure; however, spirometry conducted with the measuring device paired with the SpiroGame was shown to promote the successful measurement of lung functioning in preschool children (Vilozni, Barker, Jellouschek, Heimann, & Blau, 2001). The game teaches 3- to 6-year-old children to differentiate between inhalation and exhalation and to control their breathing. Children controlled an animated caterpillar through their breathing. The caterpillar crawls to an apple over a period of 30 s as long as the child’s breathing reaches targets predetermined by a computer algorithm. Another minigame teaches children how to do a breathing test by pairing attainment of certain breathing targets with the movement of an animated bee flying from flower to flower. These