Deadline: 8-Nov-21
The Virtual Healthy Neighbourhoods Challenge from Nesta and InGAME is an ambitious competition to harness the potential of game design and game technologies to better understand and solve the challenge of healthy living and promoting healthy food choices, helping Nesta achieve its mission of adding two years of healthy life expectancy for 10 million people across Scotland and the UK.
In this open call, Nesta and InGAME are looking for superstar SMEs and teams from Scotland. Teams must have the advanced game design, game engine programming and data analytics competencies required to apply their knowledge and creativity to help Nesta better understand how food environments affect the access to healthy and more affordable food options.
This new understanding will then be used to imagine and de-risk systems-level interventions that shift dynamics within food environments to ensure healthy and appealing food options are accessible and affordable for everyone, whoever they are, wherever they live.
Objectives
The Proof of Concept should:
- Prove Nesta Playbox can provide a playful, entertaining and engaging experience while generating:
- an accurate understanding of how food environments shape access to healthy and affordable food options
- an accurate representation of the role individuals play in consumption decisions
- Prove Nesta Playbox can generate and capture meaningful, defensible and actionable data that helps Nesta better understand how food environments shape consumption decisions
- Prove Nesta Playbox can represent a specific food environment – with local relevance to Dundee – then accurately map its key variables
- Prove Nesta Playbox can provide an inclusive, ethical and safe environment to innovate and test radical new ideas and interventions
- Prove the value of Nesta Playbox to capture insights that might otherwise be missed by other approaches
- Prove the potential of applying game design technologies and techniques to a ‘wicked’ systems level problem, including and beyond obesity.
Outputs
The final outputs from the Challenge should be:
- Nesta Playbox Proof of Concept Demonstrator
- Nesta Playbox Showcase Pilot (delivered with support of InGAME)
- Nesta Playbox Learning Report (authored with support of InGAME)
- InGAME Insights ‘postmortem’ presentation (developed with support of InGAME)
- Next Steps document (authored with support of Nesta and InGAME).
Award Information
- Teams selected for Stage 3 will receive £ 5,000 for the duration of that phase. The monies will be released in two parts:
- After signing the contract agreement after selection
- On submission of the Playbox Pitch.
- The winning team selected for Stage 4 will receive £ 45,000 for the duration of that phase. Monies will be released in stages from the beginning of Stage 4, matched to milestones and deliverables.
Eligibility Criteria
The challenge is open to:
- SMEs and teams from Scotland only. Only organizations or teams based in Scotland are eligible to apply. This means your main place of business and / or operational activity must be within Scotland.
- They welcome applicants from across the games sector and adjacent media enterprise industries – eg advertising and digital agencies, design studios, animation studios or other screen and media industries.
- All applicants will need to evidence the core competencies and superpowers.
- Applicants must be available to participate in all required briefings and other challenge related workshops or events.
- Applicants are not required to be incorporated as a business to apply or participate but all will be expected to demonstrate the credibility and capability to undertake and complete the challenge.
For more information, visit https://www.nesta.org.uk/project/virtual-healthy-neighbourhoods-challenge/