Policy Games: Designing Interventions on Structural Determinants of Inequality in Health

Policy games can frame in silico interventions in public health. The design of live and digital policy games starts by establishing a solid domain {knowledge base. The knowledge base stages the big picture of the problem to be solved, sketching out the social structures in which the problem is embedded. This paper, focusing on the design of digital policy games to combat inequalities in health, delves into the significant role of WHO's action-oriented framework in informing game design. Recent research within social epidemiology has theoretically strengthened the term structure in the WHO framework on inequalities in health. This approach allows us to examine health outcomes from simulated interventions in a policy game. It paves the way for exploring how the structural determinants of health are created, maintained, and disrupted. This novel approach shows great potential for designing simulated interventions on non-player characters agency, adaptation and environments in policy games on inequality in health. This work demonstrates how a solid knowledge base can harness the design and theoretical base of interventions in policy games on inequality in health with particular emphasis on rigging the game system and dynamics of non-player characters.