Going beyond gaming

Ma Xiao's son was diagnosed with amblyopia, or "lazy eye" symptoms, during his kindergarten physical checkup two years ago. Ma thought his condition would improve as he got older, but found that his eyesight had dropped significantly at the beginning of the year.

Luckily, a friend recommended Vision Planet, a gamified training program that can help treat amblyopia at home.

"I was extremely worried because we had already tried other methods. We were skeptical of the program because it just looked like a shooting game. But we had no other choice, as we wanted to solve the problem as soon as possible. With one month of non-stop training, we were surprised to find that my son's vision in both eyes improved," she says.

According to Chen Hang, head of Boke Medical, which launched the product in 2022, the program's built-in AI utilizes the tablet's camera to recognize the patient's posture during the 30-minute training. It reminds the patient to adopt the correct posture when sitting, such as being too far from the screen or not focusing. If the training requires eye masks or red-blue glasses, the AI will automatically monitor if the patient is wearing them correctly.

"The difficulty in treating amblyopia in children often lies not in the technology itself, but in persistence and understanding. The training is tedious, and patients' compliance is low. Parents frequently struggle to determine whether the treatment is effective. Addressing these problems, our program combines gamified mechanisms with clinical standards, making amblyopia treatment more user-friendly, transparent, and trackable," says Chen.

The product is currently used in hospitals in Shanghai, as well as Shandong, Henan, Guangdong and Fujian provinces. Following its debut at the 2025 American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting, the product has also entered trial use in regions including Kazakhstan.

Established in 2020, Boke Medical is a subsidiary of Boke Technology, a Shanghai-based gaming company founded in 2010. According to Boke Technology's top management, a large number of gaming industry professionals have reached the consensus that the core capabilities developed through games, such as engine technology, interaction logic and user incentive mechanisms, can be transferred and applied to education, healthcare, culture, and industry.

Similar to the internet and AI, games are capable of sparking comprehensive and cross-sector transformation, according to the management team.

Their ideas align with Shanghai's long-term vision for the gaming industry. According to the 10 measures released in early April to build the city into an international highland for gaming, the municipal government underscored the broader influence of the gaming industry, thereby advocating an in-depth implementation of the "game plus" strategy.

Specifically, gaming and e-sports companies are supported in using their technological skills and game mechanisms to empower medical, education, media, sports, tourism, design, traditional manufacturing, and new infrastructure industries. The government will support investments in foundational tools, such as gaming development engines and their collaborative adaptation with core hardware, including domestic graphics processors. Up to 2 million yuan ($292,645) will be granted to support innovative and pioneering projects.

Shanghai has already been pioneering such attempts. In June 2022, Tencent Games and Tencent Cloud began providing digital twin services for the hot-rolling division of manufacturing giant Baosteel by integrating real-time cloud rendering, visual motion capture, and virtual-real interaction, all of which are technologies widely used for games.

Using the gaming engine technology, Baosteel can track and monitor data and the status of key equipment. Visual recognition technology is adopted to perform real-time 3D modeling of critical operating conditions during production. A plant-level digital twin has enabled remote maintenance and high-risk operations.

This marks the first time that gaming technology has been deeply applied to the steel production process.

Wu Hequan, an academician from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, says that the gaming engine can integrate technologies such as physical simulation, 3D modeling, and real-time rendering. It can enhance the capabilities of traditional industrial software in areas such as 3D visualization and intelligent interaction, thus evolving into a new type of industrial software.

Games are of great value for testing AI technologies, as they entail significant complexity, says Cui Shifeng, an analyst at Eastmoney Securities.

"The development of AI worldwide has entered the phase where mature application competition has become fiercer. The digital content of games can integrate various frontier AI technologies in all aspects, helping AI to immerse itself in industrial chains more deeply," he says.

AI chipmaker Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has stated on multiple occasions that games comprise the biggest source of demand for GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). The hundreds of billions of dollars in annual purchasing power from gamers worldwide have supported Nvidia's R&D investment for two decades.

The computing power that drives large language models such as ChatGPT can trace its technological roots back to the sustained demand from the gaming industry for graphics processors, according to Huang.

In a public speech in September, Hu Zhipeng, executive vice-president of NetEase Group, emphasized that gaming technologies were never a medium for entertainment, but always the best incubator and testing ground for the evolution of cutting-edge technologies.

Apart from facilitating the development of emerging technologies, gaming technologies should also be better used to rejuvenate time-honored brands originating from Shanghai.

Gaming and e-sports companies are encouraged to work more closely with local legacy brands to create consumer activities based on game IPs. These are part of the city's efforts to roll out new models to coordinate the development of the cultural, commercial, sports, and exhibition industries, according to newly released government policies.

Shengqu Games, a 27-year-old local gaming company, has been proficient in such collaboration. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of its signature licensed game, The World of Legend, in 2023, Shengqu collaborated with Shanghai Yuyuan Garden, re-creating the latter's iconic landmarks, including the Nine-Bend Bridge and Mid-Lake Pavilion, to build an immersive in-game exploration map.

During the 2024 Mid-Autumn Festival, Aion, a game distributed by Shengqu, partnered with Shanghai's time-honored brand Zhen Lao Da Fang to release a custom mooncake gift box. When its Dragon Nest game celebrated its 15th anniversary in July, Shengqu worked with a local retail complex to host an e-sports final and meet-and-greet for e-sports teams. These activities have facilitated two-way traffic between game content and offline commercial districts, according to Shengqu's management team.

Zhu Keli, founding director of the China Institute of New Economy, says that time-honored brands must leverage the latest trends to seek long-term development and revitalization. The synergy among policies, platforms and enterprises can preserve the "roots" of century-old craftsmanship while boosting innovative development, he says.