They may be on your Christmas gift list: video games.   

Sometimes the games are criticized for being too violent, but what if they taught your kids something worthwhile?

Say video game, and we think of animated action, sound effects and long lines to get the latest releases.

“There’s more money generated from games than from movies,” Baylor College of Medicine researcher Dr. Tom Baranowski said.

It’s become an enormous industry, but in Houston, what video games are about, who’s making them and for what reason may not be at all what you think.

“They start the game having had a Category one come across their town,” weather researcher Robert Harriss said.

Harriss developed a video game they call Hurricane Landfall. It teaches college students how best to govern coastal cities such as Galveston.

The students are asked to rebuild a city after it gets hit by a storm, learning that if they fail to fund things like drainage improvements, they — and the town — lose.

“And the typical recovery and reconstruction is back to business as usual,” Harriss said. “And therefore when the next hurricane comes, we’re just as vulnerable as we were to the previous hurricane.”

But if you’re saying this looks like pretty tame for a video game, check out the production.

The actors look like they’re in a futuristic city, but in reality they’re in a studio in downtown Houston with nothing more than a blue screen behind them.

Artists at a company in the Montrose area use computers to create the rest, but here’s what makes these games different than what your kids are playing: “Our games are funded by the National Institutes of Health,” an artist said.

The federal government is spending millions on developing video games with serious themes.  One under development with Baylor College of Medicine shows the evils of eating too much and not exercising.

It’s aimed at reducing the epidemic of kids who are overweight and diabetic.

“What we’ve done for years hasn’t been working,” Dr. Baranowski said. “We need to find new ways of reaching people.”

“Doctors says, ‘do something,’” Dr. Clifford Dacso said. “Never gets done.”

Drs. Baranowski and Dacso are medical researchers both working on video games with health themes.

“We’re competing with shoot ‘em ups, and we’re hoping kids want to play our games,” Dr. Baranowski said.

Making it look cool enough for kids is up to Richard Buday’s company, Archimage.

“That’s the goal: if it’s not fun, it’s not a game,” Buday said.

The games will undergo a year’s worth of testing to see if they work, if they really do change kids eating and exercise habits.

The researchers say early indications are that they do.

Now Houston is using video games not just to entertain, but to tackle serious problems — from hurricane recovery to staying healthy.