Ben Sawyer, the self-styled guru of Serious Games, is at EIEF to talk about how videogames can be crucial for therapy and helping people to recover and education.

The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy.

An example of one of the games that Serious Games have been involved in is 'Catch the Sperm' in which you shoot sperm from a condom into a vagina, if one STD gets through the game is over so it has significant health message as well as being fun.

Showing off a Nintendo DS to doctors with a copy of Sega's Field of Magic Sawyer said that he realised just how crucial games could be for therapy. 'In Field of Magic you blow a sailboat across the water using the DS mic and it was these doctors that pointed out that the game could be used for people who have breathing problems', he said.

[advert] Serious Games already have a group of doctors, that are looking at the 'paperdoll' RPG engines and thinking about the whole way they display medical information for patients.

More and more corporate clients are using game developers to help them create theraputic games. A therapy tool called 'Virtual Iraq' currently helps soldiers relive Iraw and Afganhistan to help them overcome the mental battle scars of war and takes them back to the frontline, via sights, sounds and smells under a tightly controlled environment

A game called 'Re-mission' is another example of a game that has proved to be a success and can be used for children undergoing cancer treatment. Re-mission is a third person shooter where you have to destroy the lymphoma cells and has been tested on 375 cancer patients. It works by improving their self-effacy, knowledge of cancer and improves their ability to cope with the illness.

Whilst a few of the audience members thought that Serious Games initiatives were some sort of mind-control technique we think that there's plenty of scope for their games to help people across the world.