Biome Collective and Konglomerate Games were awarded £45,000 each from Nesta and InGAME, the Dundee-based research and development centre for Scotland’s video games industry, to develop their initial ideas after an open call to games makers in autumn 2021.

The Virtual Healthy Neighbourhoods Challenge called for Scottish video game makers to pitch ideas for developing virtual food environments, including high streets, supermarkets and fast-food outlets. The idea behind the project is to increase understanding of how our food environments shape access to healthy and affordable food. And to assess the viability of using video games techniques to test and shape new policy approaches to help ensure healthy and appealing food options are accessible and affordable for everyone.

Biome’s CityBox game is based on the Hilltown area of Dundee and was designed in conjunction with residents from the area who shared their experiences to help the team create realistic characters for the game.

Users in CityBox are given a span of ten years to improve the average BMI of residents using different policy levers such as advertising restrictions and incentivising healthy outlets to open in the neighbourhood.

Konglomerate’s Nesta Playbox allows users to build neighbourhoods from scratch, placing shops and takeaway outlets alongside homes to create virtual food environments. Users can then set different parameters such as household income, cost and calories of different foods available from different outlets.

Both proof-of-concept games use real data on what we eat, where we buy our food and the average calories in different settings and types of food, as well as what happens when we change the availability or promotion of different foods. Those details were used to inform their virtual environments and how characters respond to changes within the games.

CityBox and Nesta Playbox are both designed to be developed beyond this initial proof-of-concept to incorporate more complex data and additional policy interventions.

We see huge potential for game design thinking and technology to help us map and understand complex real-world food environments, allowing us to formulate, test and measure consequences in a virtual world before implementing them in the real one.