Month: February 2016

Habitica (https://habitica.com/) is a free iOS, Android and web application which uses gasification as a way of creating habits. The app lets you input goals and, as you tick them off, gives you credits and experience points. This game allows a player to create a character and battle monsters as they complete their goals. This use of positive reinforcement, I think, is a really good and accessible use of gamification. Habitica has earned a lot of credibility and has been featured by Forbes, The New York Times and Discover.

Though this service has the ability to be used to influence a healthy lifestyle, it doesn’t primarily target health and fitness. If it did, it would be a great way of inspiring young children to live healthily. The fact that it gamifies aspects of life means that it would be a fun and potentially competative way of incramenting healthy habits and abolishing unhealthy habits in a child’s day to day life. Habitica doesn’t seem to be targeted toward the audience of 8-11 year olds whom I want to reach. The stylisation and optimisation of the app doesn’t appeal to allow ease of use for a young child, and I don’t believe would be entertaining enough for a child in that demographic. Though the app may be a good gimmick as an aid to change habits, I believe the gasification aspects of it could be more optimised toward the game side to make it seem like more of a game and less of a lifestyle app.

How could it be targeted to a younger demographic?

1. The registration process of the app requires a Facebook, Google or email account. Despite more and more children having access to these things in this digital age, I believe that this process is unessential and uninteresting for 8-11 year olds. Being able to immediately create a character and start playing for be far better suited for a younger audience.

2. By allowing more focus on character creation creation, it would allow the user to have a higher level of attachment to the avatar. Habitica’s current character creation isn’t heavily focused on and is a lot more passive, besides weapon and armour upgrades.

3. A higher focus on the game and gameplay itself instead of on lifestyle changes would make the app more entertaining and would help retain attention of younger players. Yes, some focus on lifestyle changes are crucial, but this should appear secondary in order to disguise the less exciting aspects.

4. If a competitive aspect was added (i.e. a way to battle and challenge friends or other players) it would give another motive for players to continue playing and level up. For example, if the way to level up the character, gain experience and ready the character for battle was eating healthy, then the player could battle friends with these characters it would give the player great initiative for a healthy lifestyle while having fun.

5. An issue with the app is that it can be exploited with false data. Though this is an issue that is extremely hard to tackle, there could be ways to at least help prevent it. If with each action photographic evidence had to be provided or even something as small as a written example of why experience was earned it would help with the prevention of cheating and griefing. Another thing that could be added is clear guidelines. With clear guidelines, the app would be more understandable and there would be less room for error in terms of the player reward system.

6. Though Habitica works well as an all-around habit altering application, if it was optimised towards one clear goal (like healthy living) there would be a lot less ambiguity and balance. If it were optimised, it could categorise activities which would make it easier for young players to follow, as well as incorporating suggestions for activities and possibly even daily challenges (like “do 10 push ups” or”eat a vegetable”).

7. The stylisation of the app isn’t fun. It’s simple and easy to understand, but it isn’t exciting. This is probably because it doesn’t necessarily need to be, as I imagine it’s demographic as it stands is probably teens and young adults who are looking to change their life styles in a more interesting way, as opposed to play a fun game. A less business-like layout would be more appealing to a younger demographic. It could be improved if it actually resembled a game more with original graphics and interface, opposed to looking like thousands of other application.

8. Adding more activities within the game/app would make it more immersive. Like telling the player to do exercise to earn an achievement or complete a quest. Instead of being a passive app which logs when you complete a pre determined action which the player has set, there could be challenges that the app gives the player. Again, there could be daily quests and/ or a storymode. If there where different levels of storymode, like different levels (in 2 sense) of physical activity that get harder as the player progresses. and the daily challenge was to have a healthy meal.

 

Overall, this application has provided a lot of food for though and inspiration in terms of a gamified application which could be used to get children to be more healthy and active.

“The UK has the third-highest rate of excess weight in western Europe behind Iceland and Malta. 67% of men and 57% of women in the UK are overweight or obese according to the study which uses a Body Mass Index (BMI) of over 25 to define ‘overweight’ and a BMI of 30 or more to define ‘obese'” -The Guardian (.2014)

While this is an issue for the whole of the UK, for this problem I plan to focus on targeting children because “children are the future”. I believe if we tackle the issue of childhood obesity for this generation of kids, they will hopefully pass the message on to future generations.

 

The following extract is copied from the NHS (2015). It shows the prevalence of children who were either overweight or obese ranged as follows:

For boys:

2-5-year-old boys – minimum 19.5% prevalence in 1995, to maximum prevalence 26.0% in 2007.
6-10-year-old boys – minimum 22.6% in 1994, to maximum 33.0% in 2011.
11-15-year-old boys – minimum 26.7% in 1996, to 37.8% in 2013.

 

For girls:
2-5-year-old girls – minimum 18.3% in 1995, to maximum 24.4% in 2008.
6-10-year-old girls – minimum 22.5% in 1996, to maximum 32.2% in 2005.
11-15-year-old girls – minimum 28.3% in 1995, to maximum 36.7% in both 2004 and 2012.

 

While the NHS also claim that childhood obesity rates in the UK are “stabilising”, that means overall, annual rates did not increase significantly during the second decade, 2004 to 2013. Though the childhood obesity rate is reaching a point of equilibrium where it is not increasing, it is not decreasing either (at least for now).

Obesity is caused by 4 primary factors.

1. The biology of the individual (metabolism, genetics, ill health)

2. Low levels of physical activity.

3. High (or unhealthy) food consumption.

4.  Psychology of the individual (motivation to eat healthy and exercise).

Obviously, it’d be very difficult to tackle the biological factors. The other factors can be addressed, however. It’s been psychologically proven that the best kind of reinforcement (way of motivating someone to do something) is positive reinforcement, rewarding them for completing an action. This reward can be something physical or even simply saying “well done”.  This is opposed to negative reinforcement, like angrily yelling at someone for not doing something. With this in mind, theoretically, the solution is to positivity motivate children to exercise. So what’re the best ways to do that? According to the Mirror (2015) “65 per cent of 8-11 year olds in the UK own a smartphone”. This means that they have internet access, which means they have access to online media (websites, videos, apps, games ect).

 

What’s already available then? A new popular smartphone application is Change4Life’s “Sugar Smart” app (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/change4life-sugar-smart/id1015850256?mt=8). Aimed at young children and parents, the app calculates how much sugar is in a drink or food item and gives the user an allowance of how much sugar they are allowed. Though this app may be great at calculating sugar, which is a great start, it doesn’t account for carbohydrates, calories or anything else in fact. Although sugary foods contain lots of sugary carbohydrates, the amount of carbohydrates in burgers and chips (for example) can be very large while not necessarily containing much sugar (unless you go to McDonald’s). Carbohydrates turn into glucose, which your body burns immediately or converts to glycogen to be stored in the muscles and liver for between meals. If you eat more calories from carbs or other sources than your body can use, the cells store the excess as fat. With this in-mind, although “Sugar Smart” is a good start, as sugars are one type of carbohydrate, this app doesn’t address the total issue.

 

While looking for games aimed at children, inspiring them to be healthier, I found HealthEating.org. The website has a selection of games aimed at teaching children about exercise and nutrition (http://www.healthyeating.org/Healthy-Kids/Kids-Games-Activities.aspx). Despite having a ton of great info on it, the games are outdated and boring. After 30 seconds of playing I was bored very quickly, so imagine a child’s attention span. I think these games focus very heavily on education, but forget to be entertaining. There needs to be more motive to play instead of only education, otherwise interest is lots and it’s unlikely that much learning will be done. So what could improve these games? For a start the graphics are really boring. More thought-out colours would make the games more visually appealing and interesting to watch, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a character that the player can sympathise with. The gameplay isn’t very rewarding or exciting. I personally wouldn’t use the style of play that these games use, click based games aren’t particularly appealing to a younger demographic, this is why I think a more dynamic game would be better. A more dynamic game where the education is more subtle would be more effective, as it would be more enticing to play.

 

Browsing YouTube for videos’s that inspire children to be more active, I found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4eueDYPTIg

While it’s pretty annoying, according to the comments young children seem to like it. The motion graphics have pretty clear instructions and is very easy to grasp. While I can’t fault it for that, I think this is aimed at children aged 3-7, therefore it doesn’t appeal to children aged around 8-15. I understand that this is probably intentional, but it’s still an issue. How could this be more universal then? The graphics and animation are very childish, but to make them more mature, let’s say, may mean cutting out the lower age demographic. So maybe approaching this from a different angle is necessary. An straight-up exercise animation may not be the best way to catch the attention of a wider audience. But what would appeal to a wider audience? Perhaps a character that is easier for them all to relate to, instead of these dancing munchkins. Oh, and definitely not head, shoulder, knees and toes. Maybe a funny/ cool character who is sporty to teach children about healthy living would be more fun. He, she or they could teach children about the dos and don’t about being healthy.

Also, I found this while browsing Behance:

While the characters in it look like they’re aimed at an older demographic and not really happens other than a display of simple exercises, the animation itself is fun and straight to the point. The concept is quite appealing and may prove to be a good piece of stimuli.

Bonus! A great tutorial for character animation inside After Effects and Illustrator: https://www.behance.net/gallery/30341405/A-bit-of-character-animation

Though I know I shouldn’t necessarily start looking into platforms for a product before the concept is complete, I’ve been experimenting in the game engine Unity. I wanted to see what the engine was capable of and how I may (or may not) at least incorporate it into my product.

Unity is a very flexible and powerful tool for creating 2D and 3D games, as well as interactive experiences. Both indie and major developers have used it, though it’s a particularly popular choice when developing mobile games.

Upon opening the program, I realised that use it efficiently would take a lot of time and patience. However, after following the tutorials available from the Unity website I was able to make a (very) simple game, in which the player controls a ball using the a keyboard and has to collect tokens to win the game. This took a surprising long amount of time to understand and I had to watch the tutorial multiple times.

But coding that simple game made me realise that it was just the tip of the iceberg. Unity can be used for not just 2D and 3D games, but also 3D modelling. After some research, I found that it would be possible to use object made in Unity and animate them in Adobe After Effects. This works both ways too. It’s possible to take elements in After Effects and use them in side Unity.

I think it’s a great tool to keep in mind when developing a range of media products, from games to apps to film and more. Because of its flexible nature I will definitely use it should I feel that it’s a necessity, but for now only time will tell.