Doctors can perfect their craft playing Level Ex medical video games, and even earn continuing education credits towards maintaining their licenses. Can playing video games be a prescription for good health? Two to three times a week, the UCSF/Stanford-trained internist and founder of the Turntable Health primary care clinic, is on his smartphone playing video games. "People who are good at video games are actually good at some aspects of clinical medicine." Instead, ZDoggMD, as he's known by his pseudonym as a producer of healthcare videos and live shows, is among the 400,000 medical professionals practicing the craft of medicine through a series of games from Level Ex, a Chicago videogames developer whose titles are specially designed for doctors, med students and other healthcare providers.

David Cage scoffs at the notion that videogames are fun. "They should trouble you, move you, make you react," he says. As founder of the studio Quantic Dream, the French developer has been stunning and confounding players for two decades with cinematic games that tackle heady issues of love, death, domestic abuse, oppression, and the afterlife. "Some people are shocked when a game evokes real-world issues," he says. "But this platform is about becoming the characters, not just seeing them from the outside like in a film."