Playbox Glasgow
Nesta is a UK based innovation agency for social good. We partnered with Nesta to help them with one of their current major objectives in the UK, reducing obesity by half in the UK by 2030. Konglomerate Games plan to help them reach that goal through the power of games! Meet Playbox Glasgow.
Food Environments
One major factor of our eating habits and therefore our health is our food environment. What exactly is a food environment? A food environment is simply your exposure and proximity to food throughout your daily life.
Are you surrounded by fast food and takeaways on your route to work, advertisements for fruit or chocolate or even local health food stores? All of these factor into your food environment. Nesta are interested in how this environment affects your eating habits and how changing the environment could have major benefits to your health.
Games, Simulations
and Data
Now testing food environments impact on health in real life would take many years, a large number of participants and a lot of money. However, using data from peer reviewed research that has already been published about decisions people make regarding their eating habits allows us to create a simulation where human behavior regarding food choices can be recreated. Using real world data we can build an AI agent by layering data like how often we eat takeaways, how our wealth affects our decision making, if discounts in supermarkets have an impact and more.
With the underlying simulation created we then added gameplay elements which took the form of the city builder, Playbox Glasgow. Implement your own food policies like a High Fat, Salt and Sugar food promotion ban and see your population’s health change! Monitor neighbourhoods, run experiments and view data! The potential of the game’s development is massive and one of the areas we believe the game excels is the ability to test policies on your environment. Being able to test how a sugar tax would affect a population’s eating habits and therefore health over generations could be invaluable to policy makers within the government.
Data visualizations and tailoring
The power of games can often come from the data that we can collect and process whilst you play. Test policies and then see the changes to the populations health in real time over a period of years with 3D visualisations and accessible data displays. The game allows you to visualize trends and impacts of your decisions easily and in combination with the ability to control variables that would be impossible to account for in real life testing you can compare and contrast solutions with much greater control.
Rapid iteration
With all of our projects we want to make sure that we are creating the right game for you. With Playbox Glasgow we first underwent a rough prototype to do internal testing within Nesta and amongst the stakeholders. This allowed us to focus and refine on exactly what the game could be and ensured an excellent result which came in the form of Playbox Glasgow. You can see some of our version one images on the left which show the rough first prototypes. If this is something you and your project needs click here for more.
What is the point?
We believe that this type of game which utilizes real world data to drive AI is the next step in helping to solve a lot of big issues in a fun, accessible and innovative way. Testing on the scale the game allows would cost millions to do in a real life setting and would be extremely difficult whereas the game lets you run infinite scenarios for free. Some AI modelling exists which also solves the problem of cost but these models are usually inaccessible and hard to understand for anyone other than the specialists themselves. With a game we can make the learning, study and problem solving surrounding food environments open to anyone with a computer to easily show what certain factors contribute to a populations health both as a community and as individuals.
Where can I get this Game?
This game has finished its initial prototyping phase and is being used internally at Nesta. If you would like to get access to Playbox Glasgow reach out at contact@konglomerategames.com or head over to our Commission Us page if you would like us to build a similar solution for your problem!