What Video Games Know About Your Brain (And What Healthcare Can Steal From Them)
Highlights from Sam Glassenberg’s talk at INDEED Innovation, Hamburg
Some speakers open with a slide. Sam Glassenberg opened with a confession: while he spoke at our Hamburg office, a couple hundred AI agents were quietly working for him in the background: building games, analyzing his family’s genomic data, monitoring his kids’ screen time, and searching for ways to detect cancer in X-rays.
“When it comes to neuroscience and generative AI, the video game industry isn’t just years ahead of every other industry, it’s decades ahead. And what we’ve learned there, you can steal: to advance yourself, your career, your company, and society as a whole.”
That set the tone for the afternoon. Sam, veteran of LucasArts and Microsoft, Technical Emmy winner, and the game developer behind Level Ex, the studio that has turned over a million medical professionals into gamers, joined us at our Hamburg office for a talk that was equal parts neuroscience lecture, live demo session, and family comedy.
The industry that’s decades ahead
Sam’s core argument is simple and a little uncomfortable: when it comes to understanding human behavior, the video game industry isn’t years ahead of everyone else, it’s decades ahead. Games surpassed the music industry in 2002, then Hollywood, and are now bigger than both combined. They got there by distilling what Sam calls the neurochemical recipe for changing behavior and driving learning, tested on three billion willing subjects.
His favorite illustration is Angry Birds. You miss. The pigs laugh at you. You miss again, more frustrated now. On the third try you hit, and the game erupts in explosions, animations, and cheering music, all engineered to trigger a dopamine release that physically reinforces the neural connections you just used. It’s the same mechanism our ancestors used to learn to throw a spear: miss, miss, frustration, hit, dopamine. Angry Birds trains your brain to predict parabolic flight. But the same loop, Sam argues, can train a brain to manage any complex system, a city, a bridge, a ventilator, or a patient with multiple comorbidities.
And it changes behavior at scale. While public health campaigns spent years and billions trying to get Americans off the couch, Pokémon Go emptied downtown Chicago onto the streets within 48 hours, simply by rewarding people for walking around their neighborhoods.
An Emmy, a disappointed father, and an accidental company
How does a Hollywood game developer end up in healthcare? Not through strategy. Sam comes from a family of doctors, and when he called home in 2006 to announce his Technical Emmy, his anesthesiologist father replied: “An Emmy is very nice, but in this family we only recognize Nobel Prizes. Go to medical school.”
Years later, his father gave up on medical school and asked for something else instead: a mobile game to help anesthesiologists practice a tricky fiber-optic procedure. Sam built it in three weekends, out of guilt, and forgot about it. Two years later he checked the numbers: 100,000 doctors were playing — and hospitals around the world had independently run efficacy studies showing the game measurably improved physician performance.
That accident became Level Ex: top game developers from studios behind Star Wars, Mortal Kombat, and Words with Friends, paired with hundreds of physician advisors, building games that let doctors earn continuing education credits by playing. In the live demos, our audience removed a bleeding polyp in a fully interactive virtual colon (complete with fluid dynamics running on a phone), and navigated a guide wire through a beating heart under simulated X-ray, including a Philips intravascular ultrasound catheter, to the delight of the Philips folks in the room.
One insight resonated especially with the product people in our audience: these training games routinely become the first place doctors ever touch a new device’s interface, and more than once, that’s where a serious usability problem surfaced before launch. The game becomes an accidental test bed for the real product.
Fixing diabetes onboarding with a Candy Crush lookalike
The most personal part of the talk came from Sam’s daughter, diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age five. Families leave the hospital with a handwritten sheet of insulin ratios and rounding rules, and full responsibility for dosing a potentially lethal drug into their child many times a day. It took Sam, a Stanford-trained engineer married to a pediatrician, months to truly understand it.
So he fixed it. Level One, a free mobile game that looks deliberately like Candy Crush, trains your brain to manage type 1 diabetes, insulin dosing, carb counting, ketones, exercise, in bite-size two-minute levels. Within a year, tens of thousands of newly diagnosed patients and their parents were playing, effectively changing how diabetes onboarding works in the US and beyond. His request to the room: “Please build my competition.”
Then came the AI layer: an agent trained on thousands of photos of his daughter’s school lunches that now counts carbs from a single picture. A glucose-prediction model, built in his basement from five years of pump and sensor data, that recommends insulin parameters, and recently made it to a diabetes conference. And a homemade Guitar Hero variant, programmed in half an hour with his other daughter, that turned a boring (and expensive) vision therapy exercise into a game she actually played, until her convergence insufficiency was gone.
“Get over your imposter syndrome”
If the talk had one takeaway, it was this. Sam’s nine-year-old builds her own games with AI. His teams of entertainment developers learned enough interventional cardiology to build games cardiologists respect. The tools to solve these problems, he insists, are nearly free and available to everyone today; the only real barrier is the voice that says I’m not a programmer, I don’t understand AI, I’ll wait for someone to tell me what to do.
His answer to that voice was blunt, and we’ll keep it slightly more polite here: it doesn’t work. Not for you, and not for your company.
It was a generous, funny, occasionally jaw-dropping afternoon, and exactly the kind of cross-industry thinking we love bringing into our Hamburg office. Thank you, Sam, for showing us what happens when you point the most persuasive medium ever built at problems worth solving.
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Larissa Scherrer
Marketing Strategy
Brand Positioning
Social Media Strategy
