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Game design principles in everyday fitness applications

Published:08 November 2008Publication 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.

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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

      Copyright © 2008 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 8 November 2008

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