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Breath by Breath Gaming; or, How this Game May Save Lives

The game is called _Creep Frontier_. In it, players, called "Creep Riders," are tasked with saving their world's untouched wilderness from a vile sludge. Using a sort of bubble gun, the Creep Riders travel around together freeing various cute creatures...

The game is called Creep Frontier. In it, players, called “Creep Riders,” are tasked with saving their world’s untouched wilderness from a vile sludge. Using a sort of bubble gun, the Creep Riders travel around together freeing various cute creatures, who then tag along with their saviors Pokémon-style. It looks rather like a standard Flash or iPhone game, but with a very notable difference: players control their characters via breathing.

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Creep Frontier is one of several games developed between the University of Vermont and Champlain College for use as a therapy for Cystic Fibrosis (beating CF with CF, right?). Its gameplay is not coincidentally similar to the daily sludge war of Cystic Fibrosis itself.

Cystic Fibrosis, in brief: most common in children and young adults, the potentially fatal disease causes an excess build-up of mucus in the lungs and digestive tract. One element of day-to-day care is breathing exercises, forceful exhalations intended to clear gunk from the lungs and airways—gunk that, among other things, can cause dangerous infections.

Kids are kids, of course, and doing exercises sucks by definition (to a kid). Hence, the games. And a study presented yesterday at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting in Denver is saying that the games are finding success. “These are kids who are often lonely and frustrated with their medical treatments, and who turn to video games for fun,” said Dr. Bingham, associate professor of neurology and pediatrics at the University of Vermont. “Both parts of the study apparently got subjects focused on and involved with using the spirometer to do the recommended forced exhalations.”

“We aren’t sure why that improvement happened,” Dr. Bingham said, “but it could be that the player’s ability to carry out the vital capacity test improved simply because they were practicing this skill more often, and not because of an actual improvement in their lungs.”

Suggest other games in which blowing would make for a good control mechanism. Probably anything racing, right? A FPS, perhaps—like, the bigger the breath, the bigger the firepower.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.