The Quest for the Perfect ExerGame

This prototype game from my ISAGA 2009 interactive session was focused on a game intended to help people to quit smoking. It required an additional piece of hardware in the form of a portable sensor that could interface with a mobile phone which could measure the “air quality” of the smoker’s breath. (In fact a handheld carbon monoxide meter is routinely used as a easy measure of cigarette usage in a cessation counseling setting).

Regular breath measurements would be taken over time and the data uploaded to a server via a mobile data network. A particular breath reading would be indicative of a certain level of cigarette consumption and can be expressed in terms of number of minutes of life lost (or in case of a reduction) “gained” or added to the player’s life expectancy. It might even be possible to relate it to people around the smoker (e.g. children) who maybe affected by passive smoking.

The game play would be arranged in forms of leagues with the aim of achieving the highest number of minutes gained. Further consideration as to the nature of the process of quitting smoking lead to the idea that the teams would be comprised of individuals at different stages/length of experience in the cessation process and that it was possible to score points by means of offering tips and advice to other “players”. It would also be possible to score points by recruiting new “players” to the game and also by developing a form of “buddy” system whereby a fraction of the points earned by any recruit would also contribute to the score of the person recruiting them.

This was the title of an interactive session that I put on the final afternoon of the ISAGA 2009 conference. I took inspiration from things that I had seen and heard over the course of the week in Singapore. I adopted the Triadic Game Design methodology whereby the three components Reality, Meaning and Play are all incorporated into a Rapid Prototyping process after having attended a workshop on it earlier in the week (more Triadic design to follow). I also incorporated a number of pertinent local issues in Singapore including traffic jams and the need to conserve water. I have reproduced the abstract for the session here in order to give an overview of the background to the session. Two of the prototype games that were developed in the session will be described in a second post.

Computer games are a very popular form of entertainment that offer engaging interactive experiences via a highly expressive and potentially persuasive medium. Video game platforms have now evolved from traditional games consoles and personal computers to encompass a wide variety of different experiences on handheld devices including mobile phones. For many people their mobile phone is a constant companion which provides their access point to the digital world through which they experience an ever increasing amount of their daily lives. Furthermore, mobile phones now offer a ubiquitous computing platform which can utilize a variety of different types of sensors and forms of input to capture and provide situational and contextual data and information. As a consequence new forms of mobile games that take advantage of these functions have recently begun to emerge. In addition, mobile access to social media tools and services also provide several different forms of non-traditional game play including various forms of collecting and ranking via number of views or ratings. Given the engaging and interactive nature of game play, it is therefore proposed that the scope of mobile gaming should be widened to incorporate game play scenarios directly into users’ daily lives and activities under the heading of so called “Persuasive Technology”. It is therefore possible that this could provide a novel way to address some of the major social, health and environmental problems currently facing the world by utilizing game play mechanics to both increase situational awareness and help to facilitate positive behavioral change. This interactive workshop will start with briefly describing a range of software games and utilities that run on mobile devices that facilitate personal data collection and raise awareness and also some non-traditional forms of social media game play. Participants will then be asked to contribute further examples of both actual and conceptual games, utilities and services. Drawing on this pool of examples, participants will then be divided in groups and challenged with the task of coming up with ways in which they could utilize the functionality offered by the examples to develop mobile game-based approaches designed to address a specific social, health or environmental problem present in the world today.