Most likely, you won’t play this game…
by Steve "Slurms" Lichtsinn
I came across this story the other day on Kotaku and GamePolitics. A couple years ago a would have seen the posts, skimmed through them, nodded that it was a good idea, but soon filed it somewhere in the dark recesses of my brain. Which is, most likely, what many of you reading this will do, and I don’t blame you. I’m merely passing this story on in case someone else is in a situation which may warrant interest. Unless you or a loved one has type 1 Diabetes, then there is really nothing in this game that will trip your trigger. It did mine though, because my daughter is type 1 diabetic. She was diagnosed last summer at the age of 2. For those of you not aware of what this means, without getting too technical, it means that she takes injections of insulin (currently 5 times a day) to keep her blood sugar levels (which are checked before every meal) in check. It also means we have to constantly monitor how much of exactly what she eats so that we can calculate how much insulin she will need. She’s a normal kid, almost 4 years old now. So she’s a bit of a drama queen but also a bit of a gamer like her dad. I figure maybe by the time she can start calculating her own insulin, that this may be a tool at our disposal. No, the game probably doesn’t look like something any of you would play, but it’s something that could help out kids like my daughter. So I thank Game Equals Life for doing this.
Type 1 diabetes was formerly referred to as Juvenile Diabetes. As the name implies, the disease affects primarily children. What a great learning tool this could be, making diabetes education a little fun. It might be a good tool for parents as well. Great idea!
That’s really cool, great idea.
The thing I like about this is that they took the time to make what appears to be an actually fun game that people will play. Too often it seems like games of this type are just a lot of information with a poorly designed and not fun game wrapper around it. I think it’s neat that this seems like a game you could play even if you didn’t have to worry about diabetes and blood sugar management.