NANOSWARM: the obesity prevention game that became a novel

NANOSWARM began as a video game funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. Archimage, a Houston design firm, and Baylor College of Medicine developed it, and the scientific collaborators included the USDA/ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center. Its subject is healthy eating and physical activity as a route to preventing childhood obesity.

In April 2010 the story became a book. NANOSWARM: Invasion From Inner Space was among the first novels available on Apple's iBookstore during the iPad launch weekend. At launch the ebook sold for $4.99 at the iBookstore and Smashwords.com, and a paperback for $14.99 through Lulu.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other retailers. A classroom curriculum completed the set.

The setting is the year 2030, a time with no war, no crime and no hunger. Five teenagers intern at MECHS, the world's leading research center, where each struggles with the strict diet and exercise rules. Scientists are close to eradicating all disease when a mysterious infection spreads. After one of the interns falls ill, the other four pilot a miniaturized vessel inside his body to find the source of the outbreak.

The novel is aimed at tweens. Game, book and classroom lessons are all designed as approaches to changing diet and exercise behavior.

Archimage described itself in 2010 as a 27-year-old visual design studio that had won 50 local, national and international awards, from architectural projects to broadcast commercials, computer imagery and print graphics. It developed games for the web, PCs and mobile phones, and its clients included the National Cancer Institute, Rice University, Time Warner Communications, Knowledge Adventure, Ziff-Davis and IBM.

The address that the 2010 announcement gave for the game, archimage.com/nanoswarm.cfm, no longer exists. The archimage.com home page now presents the firm's history as 1983 to 2016, in the past tense, as a practice that began in architecture and moved into software, graphics, film and interactive media, and it lists Baylor College of Medicine among its clients. It does not mention NANOSWARM. The page says the practice began in 1983 as Houston's first fully automated architecture practice, expanded into software development, computer graphics, film and web design, and counts more than forty design awards, with its work culminating in research on media-based behavior-change technology.