Game design principles in everyday fitness applications

Taj Campbell, Brian Ngo, James Fogarty
2008 Proceedings of the ACM 2008 conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '08  
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
more » ... ve, 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.
doi:10.1145/1460563.1460603 dblp:conf/cscw/CampbellNF08 fatcat:az6gxehmy5ax3jm33uojysjgli