🩺 Hospital Games

Dentistry is the biggest thing in the hospital genre, well ahead of surgery, emergency rooms and everything else, and once you see why it is obvious. A mouth is a perfect game board. It is a small, enclosed space containing about a dozen near-identical objects, each of which can be dirty, cracked, crooked or missing — and the fix for each one is a single visible action that leaves the board better than it was.

That is a puzzle game. It happens to be wearing a mask and holding a mirror.

What a hospital game actually is

Not medicine. Care, in the same family as the baby and pet games: somebody arrives unable to help themselves, a list of things to do appears, you clear it, and they leave better. The instruments are the verbs. The patient never dies and there is almost never a way to lose.

The four groups here are dentist, general doctor and check-up, cartoon surgery, and vet, plus a handful of ambulance driving games that are really driving games with a siren. The vet ones are worth a look if you have a child who likes animals more than people, which is most of them.

We are not going to pretend this is education

There is a version of this page that calls these games educational, and it would be a lie.

A browser surgery game is a sequence of taps with a cartoon scalpel. The anatomy is drawn to be readable rather than correct, the procedures are invented, and the recovery is instant. Nothing here will teach anybody anything about a human body.

What it can do — and this is not nothing — is make a hospital feel like a place where people are helped rather than a place where frightening things happen. A four-year-old who has played dentist is measurably less afraid of a dentist. That is the actual value, it is worth having, and it does not require anybody to call it a science lesson.

Before you hand over the tablet

Twenty-six of the hundred and twenty-nine are marked as working on touch, and every card says which. The advertising inside these frames comes from the studios that made the games, not from us, and we cannot see it — worth repeating on a page this likely to be opened by a small child.

The hand-checked list is the collection for younger children, and the nearest neighbours are baby games and cooking games, which run on exactly the same engine: a list of needs and the pleasure of clearing it.