Today starts the eighth annual Games for Health Conference - a big week for those in the health games field. For three days (June 12-14) game designers and developers, researchers, medical professionals, educators, entrepreneurs, and policy-makers will come together in Boston, Mass., to discuss and share information about the impact games and game technologies can have on health and health care.

Founded in 2004 with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, the Games for Health Project exists to make large breakthroughs. Initially that just meant increasing belief in the notion that games could result in healthy outcomes. We tried to build a greater sense that games could improve health, and then integrate others into the fold, resulting in the emergence of new work in this field. With this in mind, I thought I’d take a moment to look back on how far we’ve come in the past few years and reflect on where we need to go.

It didn’t appear on the lightning strike map, but lightning did indeed strike a young medical student inside the Washington Convention Center right in front of about 1,500 amazed spectators on the first day of The Health Data Initiative Forum III: The Health Datapalooza. Everyone is fine—though our medical student may never be the same again.

Actually, this story began long before Datapalooza, of course. Fourth-year medical student, Craig Monsen, and his Johns Hopkins Medical School classmate, David Do, started collaborating on software applications soon after they met in first-year anatomy class. Craig graduated from Harvard with degrees in Engineering and Computer Science and David from University of Minnesota in Bioengineering.

They’re not quite Jobs and Wozniak—neither dropped out of anything—yet—although Craig, at least, is planning to skip or delay residency. You see, after seeing the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Aligning Forces for Quality Developer Challenge last year—they got very serious about bringing to life their vision of new applications that could help patients and consumers make great health care decisions.

Calling all app developers! On March 31, ISIS, TechSoup and Health 2.0 are teaming up for a free, live hack-a-thon event in San Francisco to design apps to address youth health-related “unmentionable” activities, including dating violence, depression, sexually transmitted diseases and substance use. The event, sponsored by an RWJF grant, aims to create apps that will excite young people to share honest, real-time, private information about their taboo, embarrassing or “unmentionable” activities with researchers and program experts who work with youth.

The hack-a-thon will bring together developers, designers, innovators and entrepreneurs for rapid development of progressive concepts and prototypes to be developed by the participating teams following the event and at future hack-a-thons. ISIS and TechSoup will partner in the future development and distribution of the concepts and designs. The grand prize winner will be revealed at ISIS’ annual Sex::Tech conference and take home $1,000 cash.

Interested? Register now.

I recently had the good fortune of sitting down with Bill Ferguson to discuss the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s pivotal role in health games research for the inaugural issue of the Games for Health Journal. In our talk, I detailed the Foundation’s early investment in the field, the challenges to advancing health games and some grantee findings to date.

Thinking about our conversation, I’m struck by how far the field has come since the early days of our health games support in 2004. Back then, there wasn’t much intersection between the games space and the health space, but Pioneer saw potential. So we worked with Ben Sawyer (@BenSawyer) of Digitalmill to do some community building within the gaming industry around health interests and funded the first-ever Games for Health Conference.   

Now, with seven conferences behind us and the eighth scheduled for June 12-14, 2012, in Boston, Pioneer can proudly claim we helped create and sustain a way for the games and health communities to come together. But we didn’t stop there.

Pioneer expanded its support to the Health Games Research national program, directed by Debra Lieberman at UC Santa Barbara (who is featured in a roundtable discussion of health games experts in the Journal), where we are seeing our 21 grantees test some fascinating ways health games can be optimally designed. They're exploring game features such as competition, collaboration, social comparison, social support, nurturing of characters, immersion in fictional worlds and alternate realities, interacting with a human-like robots to motivate exercise, using a mobile phone game as a substitute for a cigarette, and much more. And there’s more to come.

Health Games Research's work to identify a broad range of features that make for effective health games will help to further expand the creative horizons of future developers. Well-designed and well-implemented games can motivate and support prevention, lifestyle behavior change, and self-management of chronic conditions, and Pioneer is proud to be part of this work. We are excited to see a journal devoted to the research, development, and clinical application of games and health.

Check out the inaugural issue and read about the work of Pioneer’s grantees and others in this important field on the Pioneer Health Games homepage. Tell @pioneerrwjf or @gamesresearch what you think.

In the spirit of continuing to discover pioneering ideas, RWJF’s Chief Technology and Information Officer and Pioneer team member Steve Downs is heading to Austin for SXSW, the annual music, film, and interactive conference taking place March 9-18.  

Steve is one of the judges for the Health Technologies session in the exciting SXSW Accelerator competition where finalists will showcase incredibly cool products that just might change the way people think about their health and health care. 

Watch the Health Technologies session streaming live on March 13 at 11 a.m. CST.

Follow Steve @stephenjdowns and Pioneer @pioneerrwjf. For up to the minute coverage, follow @SXSW.