We hope that you’re all enjoying the summer so far. We have a busy few months scheduled and some exciting new projects getting off the ground…we’ll be able to share those details with you with soon. For now, we’re still celebrating the successful launch of Healthseeker, our new Facebook game that helps people living with diabetes improve their lifestyles. In case you missed it, we wanted to show you the piece that CBC News Vancouver aired on their 6 pm newscast. (We are very proud!)

We’re also excited that not only the media, but that other organizations have responded so positively to  Healthseeker. We think the message is clear: the fact that games have the potential “to do good” — whether that’s to modify behaviour or incent people to act — is inspiring. As Marke Andrews’s piece about Healthseeker (Vancouver Sun) sums it up,

“as social networks and hand-held devices expand online opportunities for developers, game content has also evolved beyond car races and shoot-em-ups. Games now can actually better a player’s life.”

..and we couldn’t agree more. We’d love to hear your thoughts about what you think the potential is for games “to do good.” You can email me at victoria [at] ayogo [dot] com or leave a comment on this post.

As many of you know and have so generously re-tweeted and blogged about it (thanks!), we’ve just launched our newest Facebook game called Healthseeker. Like all of our games, Healthseeker was designed with certain evolutionary and psychological game-oriented principles in mind. As you know from reading my previous posts, game developers can influence the meaning and intensity of their game by understanding the psychology behind great game design, so I thought I’d dedicate a post to a recent article I came across.

Courtesy of Flickr's Lisa Brewster

The article is a New York Times piece about the psychological game-oriented strategies that some drug companies and insurance agencies in the U.S. have been using to help patients overcome poor adherence to taking medication. It’s a lottery incentive program and it derives from a study that was conducted to improve Warfarin adherence. A lottery system was used to enter participants to win money (on any given study day participants had a 2 in 5 chance of winning $10 dollars and 1 in 100 chance of winning $100 dollars when taking their medication) if they took their medication on time. That’s $3 dollars a day.

How does this relate to Healthseeker?  Like Healthseeker, the study is based on using behavioural principles to motivate behaviour. For Healthseeker, a social game that helps people with diabetes make more purposeful lifestyle choices, the Diabetes Hands Foundation wanted us to develop a game that was fun to play, but also something that people could utilize in real-life. So, we designed a game that uses in-game incentives that to engage players while playing the game, and motivate them to actually modify their behaviours in real-life. Our design reflects our (we think, safe) assumption that incremental actions, no matter how small, are more effective in trying to achieve a goal, than doing nothing at all.

For the study that the article refers to, doctors used certain behavioural theories to their advantage to design the lottery incentive program. For example, they realized that a lottery incentive gives people a chance for doing something small and still getting a positive reward, it also gave them a chance to win a larger amount of money without having to do anything extra, the participants “played” the game because they wanted to avoid regret and also just the general gameplay aspect seemed to have been a motivator by itself.

According to the article, while the monetary incentive did motivate most of the participants to better adhere to the regimen, experts said the psychological effect was more important than the dollar amount. Although “economically irrational,” one doctor said, small sums might have even worked better as motivating factors than bigger amounts. Why? It all comes back to the psychology behind the thrill for humans of the game-like lottery scenario. Our brains are hardwired to try to predict sequences in random occurrences, see patterns where there are none and try to complete sets, all scenarios that some lottery games emulate (some would say “exploit”) — this is all in the name of survival from thousands of years ago.

While doctors interviewed for the New York Times piece agree that there needs to be more research if longer-running incentive programs will produce more dedicated medicine-takers or not, a recent study by Hopelabs, a non-profit organization that works with adolescents who have cancer, might provide other clues to offer. Their study was specific to the positive potential that video games and other popular technology might have to improve human health for cancer patients. The study found that video games promote a positive behaviour that also helped enhance the effectiveness of medication. Steve Cole, co-author of the study said that this shows how a strategically designed video game can be a powerful new tool to enhance the impact of medical treatment by motivating healthy behaviour in patients.

Can you see the potential of an approach like this to yield concrete health results? What are your thoughts? As always you can email me at michael@ayogo.com.

References:

http://www.physorg.com/news137260142.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/health/14meds.html

http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00904982

http://www.medicinenet.com/health_tips/article.htm

Courtesy of Flickr's kenjonbro

To our loyal Ayogo blog readers, thanks for all your recent comments and re-tweets. It’s good to know what you’ve been up to — we really appreciate it! In terms of what we’ve been up to, we’re getting ready for a huge summer.

To start, Pet Pupz, a community-based virtual pet  app (originally a Facebook game launched on Facebook awhile back) is now available in the Apple AppStore – and therefore your smartphone and the iPad! You can download it here.

As for coming attractions…

We have an exciting announcement to share with you on June 14th and then one more later on in the month. The first announcement involves a topic on serious games and health, and coincidentally, it was also the topic of a panel Michael was recently a part of. Terry Lavender from the Vancouver Observer covered the panel at last week’s Vancouver Digital Week. I also attended the event and I was excited to see the enthusiasm for “serious games.”

On the panel, Michael spoke about game design for casual social games, and in particular about game design in games that aren’t just played for fun, but also may encourage and incentivize certain “serious” behaviours. Here is an excerpt from Terry Lavender’s post,

Why do kids willingly do chores in FarmVille (a Facebook-based game) and World of Warcraft, but not in real life, asked Michael Fergusson, CEO of local casual game company Ayogo. The answer, he said, is the appeal of competition and challenge. Ayogo is working with a large health research institute to see whether a health-based videogame can actually motivate people to develop a healthy lifestyle. But in order to work, the game has to be fun first, with the health benefits strictly secondary, according to Fergusson.

As for some cool statistics that I picked up from the conference, did you know that….

* 1 billion people see a Google page every day
* 55% of people online are women
* Social media users are more positive about brands than non-users
* There are 5 billion mobile phones in the world, compared to 1 billion personal computers and 1.1 billion televisions
* 75% of Canadians have mobile phones
* Canadians send 100 million text messages every day

Oh, catch us at Launch Party 9 on June 17th in Vancouver. Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington is just one of the celebrity judges at the event. In the meantime, please show us some love and VOTE for our video!

Courtesy of Flickr's C-Ali

I attended the Inside Social Apps Conference a few weeks ago. You can see the notes from each of the presentations to get a better feel for what went down. For me, I thought it was a good conference to get insight into the future of social apps and to meet some amazing people. The panel on monetizing games really struck me. Unfortunately, it’s the one thing that I couldn’t find in the notes, so I thought I would tell you about it.

The main idea is that right now monetization through “offers” is through a complete separate “offerwall.”  An offerwall, like Superewards and OfferPal, is a separate page in the app that shows offers. The user decides which offer to complete and then eventually they will be awarded the offer currency.

This is very convenient and easy to integrate, which is why it was adopted so widely, so quickly. The problem with the offerwall? It lacks context. It’s a daunting wall of random offers, many of which are not interesting and the user has seen before. A simple solution is to use context-awareness improve both the usability and overall effectiveness of the offerwall:

• Amount of offer currency: For example, if I have 4 favor points and I need 16 to get the 20 point platinum hunting rifle, I should be presented with offers in the 10-20 range, not a wall of offers from 1 to 200 pts.
• Timing of the offers: If the game popped up an offer for just the right amount, right at the moment when the user desire for the item is most acute.
• Look and feel: The offerwalls use the offer providers chrome (or “look and feel”). So game designers don’t have a way of  customizing the look and feel of the offers presented. As a result, we quarantine the offerwall off in a corner of our application, so we don’t break the overall aesthetic feel of our games.

To do these things, the offer providers need to give us an API into their offer system. Then we can decide which offers to present to a user at which times. If we can have an offer presented in our apps look and feel, that is timely and relevant to the user, we’ll look for opportunities to show the offers more often, and our players will get offers they’re more likely to accept. Seems like a win for everybody.

Courtesy of Flickr's kohtzy

One of senior team members, VP of Engineering, Dave Orchard flew down to San Francisco last week to check out two conferences, f8 and Inside Social Apps. He has written a detailed blog post about the take away messages from f8, including some really cool technological announcements that were revealed. For a more detailed read, you can read his blog post on our tech blog.  I’ve cross-posted a sneak peek of the post below…

I think the biggest announcement is a combination of announcements, so let’s start with the top-down view. What Facebook can now do is be the gatekeeper for all aspects of personal information. If you like a movie, song, restaurant, article, person…whatever…on a 3rd party site like imdb.com or yelp.com, that site will notify Facebook. Then Facebook will update your profile in real-time! That itself is simply amazing, that the profile you statically filled out on sign-up and never revisited is now real-time with you. But wait, there’s more. Applications that you have added can subscribe to your profile and changes, and will be notified, typically in less than a minute. In fact, they will try up to 5 times and keep the callback for up to 24 hours.