This paper is a study of a multi-player group based health game. The paper focused on the behaviour and motivation of individuals that can effect the participation of themselves and influence others in a group health game.
The researchers studied the American Horse Power game competition among 15 middle schools. The research did not focus on the effect of the physical activity on the individual's body, just the step count. The researchers interviewed 200 people including the participants and teachers from the school. This paper was able to identify 5 prominent categories of participants.
Achievers: They focus on game related goals and behaviours to achieve these goals. They concentrate on personal performance and are not competitive in nature. They are mostly are not athletic and set regular activities as goals (such as walking). Moreover, they fear social pressure and negative views of others on their activities therefore they do not influence others by sharing their step count.
Active Buddies: These players have a small group of friends with whom they interact and enjoy activities on regular basis. Therefore, they can influence each other towards positive reinforcement. They enjoy a friendly competition among themselves.
Social Experience Seekers: These players are motivated more towards the sharing of their activities and profiles with friends and classmates. Since, with this system they could modify their avatars with no relation to their physical activity, they did not concentrate on their step count. However, we did see in the Ubigreen system that this can be used to motivate such players. They have the ability to influence others, because they promote themselves and their activities.
Team Players: These players are motivated by a sense of belonging to a team. They kept track of the schools progress with other schools. They shared their participation with the teachers and were very enthusiastic towards their goals.
Freeloaders: Freeloaders are people who participate just not to feel left out or get the secondary benefits from participating(e.g a t-shirt, free lunch). Therefore, they do not care about the physical activity or the schools performance. They have negative influence on the groups motivation.
The paper gave suggestions on how to influence the low participating players into more active participation. For example, for social experience seekers, if they could buy things for their avatars based on increase in step counts. Moreover, there should be preference setting for players to share step count information.
No real time communication between players and no real time feedback - only when to login to the website .
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