Revealing Stealth Health

This poster presents a framework for analyzing games that are designed to impact players’ physical health in some way. Our analysis is grounded primarily in the notion of player agency (or, in many cases, lack thereof) relative to players’ own bodies, behavior, and health. We borrow the concept of “stealth health” from nutrition research to articulate this problem with agency, and analyze several examples of commercial games or research-designed games that represent distinctions among various kinds of player agency and motivation.