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Game design principles in everyday fitness applications

Published: 08 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The global obesity epidemic has prompted our community to explore the potential for technology to play a stronger role in promoting healthier lifestyles. Although there are several examples of successful games based on focused physical interaction, persuasive applications that integrate into everyday life have had more mixed results. This underscores a need for designs that encourage physical activity while addressing fun, sustainability, and behavioral change. This note suggests a new perspective, inspired in part by the social nature of many everyday fitness applications and by the successful encouragement of long term play in massively multiplayer online games. We first examine the game design literature to distill a set of principles for discussing and comparing applications. We then use these principles to analyze an existing application. Finally, we present Kukini, a design for an everyday fitness game.

References

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Brown, D. (2006). Playing to Win: Video Games and the Fight against Obesity. Journal of the American Dietetic Association 106(2). 188--189.
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Consolvo, S., Everitt, K., Smith, I. and Landay, J. A. (2006). Design Requirements for Technologies that Encourage Physical Activity. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2006), 457--466.
[3]
Consolvo, S., McDonald, D. W., Toscos, T., Chen, M. Y., Froehlich, J., Harrison, B., Klasnja, P., LaMarca, A., LeGrand, L., Libby, R., Smith, I. and Landay, J. A. (2008). Activity Sensing in the Wild: A Field Trial of UbiFit Garden. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), 1797--1806.
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Ducheneaut, N., Yee, N., Nickell, E. and Moore, R. J. (2006). Building an MMO with Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture 1(4). 281--317.
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Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann.
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Juul, J. (2005). Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Boston: MIT Press.
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Koster, R. (2004). A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Scottsdale: Paraglyph.
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Lin, J. J., Mamykina, L., Lindtner, S., Delajoux, G. and Strub, H. B. (2006). Fish'n'Steps: Encouraging Physical Activity with an Interactive Computer Game. Proceedings of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2006), 261--278.
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Mueller, F. and Agamanolis, S. (2003). Exertion Interfaces: Sports Over a Distance for Social Bonding and Fun. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2003), 561--568.
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Salen, K. and Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Boston: MIT Press.
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Sasser, C. Multiplayer Game of the Year. (2006). http://www.cabel.name/2006/08/multiplayer-game-of-year.html.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
    November 2008
    752 pages
    ISBN:9781605580074
    DOI:10.1145/1460563
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 08 November 2008

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    1. design principles
    2. everyday fitness games
    3. kukini

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    • (2024)Sports Participants' Intentions to Use Digital Technology for Sports Participation: A Behavioral Reasoning Theory PerspectiveIJASS(International Journal of Applied Sports Sciences)10.24985/ijass.2024.36.1.5636:1(56-76)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2024
    • (2024)CUPID: Improving Battle Fairness and Position Satisfaction in Online MOBA Games with a Re-matchmaking SystemProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869788:CSCW2(1-39)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
    • (2024)That's the way I (dis-)like it! - Effect of Gamer Types and Competitiveness in VR ExergamingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36771058:CHI PLAY(1-23)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
    • (2023)The Rationale Behind the Design Decisions in an Augmented Reality Mobile e-Health Exergame to Increase Physical Activity for Inactive Older People with Heart Failure (Preprint)JMIR Serious Games10.2196/50066Online publication date: 18-Jun-2023
    • (2023)The Application of a Serious Game Framework to Design and Develop an Exergame for Patients with Heart Failure (Preprint)JMIR Formative Research10.2196/50063Online publication date: 18-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Adapting Forests to an Uncertain ClimateProceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3588001.3609362(54-63)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2023
    • (2023)Improving Fairness in Adaptive Social Exergames via Shapley BanditsProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3581641.3584050(322-336)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
    • (2023)Effectiveness of cooperative and competitive gamification in mobile fitness applications among occasional exercisersBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2023.2246593(1-23)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
    • (2023)A Systematic Literature Review of Extended Reality Exercise Games for the ElderlyBiomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies10.1007/978-3-031-38854-5_17(333-352)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
    • (2023)A Dynamic Fitness Game Content Generation System Based on Machine LearningArtificial Intelligence in HCI10.1007/978-3-031-35891-3_4(50-62)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
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