Hiccups, Canada’s most-watched new Canadian comedy series returns to CTV with the Season 2 premiere on Monday, May 30 at 8 p.m. ET. In the lead up to the show’s premiere, Ayogo’s design, tech and social media teams have launched a multimedia campaign. Our engagement-centric strategy includes the creation of a Twitter channel and a content-rich Facebook fan page, which features sneak peek trailers, an integrated YouTube channel, exclusive webisodes, interviews, behind the scenes footage and a Facebook game called “What would Millie do?” Ayogo’s social media team has also been busy in the Twitterverse and Facebook world engaging with fans and building a Hiccups community around the show.

Ayogo will launch the Facebook game on June1st and will release a new game weekly for the duration of the show’s run.

For more information about Hiccups, check out their website.

HealthSeeker is a unique collaboration between experts, advocates and industry partners who are on the front lines of healthcare. It was developed by Ayogo for the Diabetes Hands Foundation in collaboration with Joslin Diabetes Center, with support provided by Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Healthseeker, our award-winning Facebook game, was designed with the goal of helping adults living with diabetes or those at the risk of developing diabetes with specific lifestyle and nutritional challenges. The game creates compulsion loops around reciprocal social obligation, gifting, collection, and achievement to motivate action. The idea of shifting a player’s concerns from big commitments over long periods of time for greatly deferred rewards to small manageable actions in short periods of time for instant rewards, has been very popular with players and medical professionals.

At Pixel and Pills, shot at ePatient Connect in Philadelphia, Michael explains some of the reasons why Healthseeker is such an engaging game and talks about some of the game mechanics.  Adam Penenberg for Fast Company has interviewed Michael about Healthseeker and how video games modify behaviour. And MIT’s Technology Review featured Michael and Healthseeker in an article about social games that sway behaviour.

In November of last year, a Spanish version of HealthSeeker became available to 10 million Latino and Hispanic users on Facebook.

For more great press about HealthSeeker, please visit our Press Page.

The panel will be held at the Austin Convention Center in Ballroom B on Friday March 11th at 3:30PM. Our Creative Director, Jesse Spink, will be tweeting from the event so even if you can’t be there, you can still get a taste of what’s going on. So please join us on twitter @ayogogames, @jessespink or @fergusson. It’s sure to be a fascinating talk!

We are very excited to be a part of SXSW Interactive, which features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology and an unbeatable lineup of special programs showcasing the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer.

The Health Nutz Facebook Game launches March 8th, four weeks before the official TV launch on APTN on Tuesday, March 29th (the show launches on HD APTN on Tuesday March 22) and Ayogo will release a new game each week until the end of the show’s series run in May.

Check out the Health Nutz Facebook game here or find the behind-the-scenes videos on the Heath Nutz YouTube Channel. The Health Nutz website will tell you all about the show and its cast, crew and creators.

LightSpeeder has also been featured in IndieGames.com’s Browser Game Pick, Gamerz Station’s Browser Games of the Week: 2-12-11 Part 1: Alxemy Edition, and AOL’s Switch calls it the “Tron Game We’ve Been Waiting For.”

Kudos Ayogo! Kudos to the game programmer, Ramon Zarate Saiz!

Play LightSpeeder now

In the video below, Joe Torres on Tiempo (WABC, NYC) interviews Manny Hernandez, President of Diabetes Hands Foundation, and Andreina Millan Ferro, a Dietitian at the Joslin Diabetes Center, about Healthseeker.

To play HealthSeeker:
-In English: http://HealthSeekerGame.org
-In Spanish: http://ExplorandoTuSalud.org

We know that people are open to discovering new forms of content publishing. Take books for example. In Japan, people are devouring books in the form of cell phone novels: novels that are created on cell phones simply by stringing together text messages. Looking in the App store, one can find 23,000 e-books. The projected market by 2018 for e-books is estimated to be $9.6 billion. Interactivity with books and e-books is also on the upward trend.  For example, the iPad version of Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice for the iPad, allows users to tilt the device and watch Alice shrink or grow. Other titles allow parents to record their voices reading to their children, while digi-novels feature video clips that supplement or replace bits of text. Textbooks, too, are becoming interactive, with 3-D clips of a DNA molecule. Book apps are also making strides, especially in the children’s book and the comic book genre.

Courtesy of Flickr's Thyago – SORG|FX

Why does this interest me as a game designer (and might interest you as well)? I’ve recently come across articles or have had lengthy discussion with other game developers about whether or not books will cease to be just books in the future.

To cite an article by Alix Christie and Ludwig Siegle for the Economist, they say that while 2010 was the year of e-readers and tablet computers, 2011 will be the year that books will just become apps. They argue that technology is making the shift inevitable. While I would agree with them, I’d like to add to their argument and go a step further to say that books will become games; games that are played by like-minded people, some of who are the reader’s/player’s real world friends. I see the instructional, motivational and self-help genre of books making the leap to becoming book-games (we’ll have to coin a term for it soon) first.  I think that books that may help readers modify behaviours, teach something or serve as motivational materials lend themselves to socialization.

Ayogo has already made a game that straddles the boundary between book and game. Our HealthSeeker Facebook game takes content that would normally be presented in a booklet handed to patients and re-imagines it as an interactive, social program for individual achievement. All of the content was written by professional authors and nutritionists from the Joslin Diabetes Center at the Harvard Medical School. Ayogo was approached specifically to take information that had been presented in many documentary forms and turn it into a fun, social, interactive format: a game. Since the launch of HealthSeeker, we have been working to generalize this practice to any informational resource or program. We call this customizable, generalized game engine the “Goodlife Engine.”

To show how this engine could be further applied, we could take an example of a book that helps to run a small business. It could be played with others all over the world who are also running small businesses and the game could connect those on social networks and smartphones, in essence, to an interactive workbook that players could access online at any time. Business owners could compete to be on top of leaderboards within the game, they could get rewards for achieving certain sales and grow their business by creating new revenue channels through adding their products as part of a virtual gifts marketplace.

As game designers, we’re in the business of socialization. It’s easy to imagine the act of recommending a book and having the idea stick and spread much more effectively in a socialized environment. This notion of socialization is also aligned with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg’s most recent messages. He seems to be convinced that every industry is going to be rethought in a social way. Why should content creators care?  First and foremost, because interactivity and social play are powerful pedagogic tools. Consider how business schools teach through case studies. Consider how the military instructs soldiers through war games. In addition, having a social layer allows authors and rights holders to build a bi-drectional relationship with their readers. They can obtain important player/reader data, they can monetize the book through in-game advertisements, offers and virtual goods and get the message out to massive audiences.

Based on our expertise in the psychology of game design, we know that games and play can help motivate the engagement of the reader, spread ideas both broadly and quickly (the so-called “viral meme”). Great game designers understand why a player would invite a friend to participate or recommend an idea to a friend. We believe this points the way to a new energy (and new revenue) for book authors and distributors – after all, few technologies are as information-rich, and as familiar across all demographics, as the book. What do you think? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. You can email me at michael [at] ayogo [dot] com.

Regardless of your product or industry, the job of a marketer is to motivate customers to act. There is no denying that games command incredible loyalty and mindshare. In this talk, we’ll explore the principles of game design for techniques we can apply to dramatically increase the effectiveness of our own marketing programs and applications.

Speakers Michael Fergusson of Ayogo and Selma Zafar of Openroad Communications.

It goes far beyond the iPhone, too. Facebook has over 50 million gamers logging in at least once per month, and MySpace, Hi5, and Bebo are hot on their heels. All this activity, and we haven’t yet mentioned a single “gaming platform”. These are all average people, and the demographics are attention-getting. Of all the casual gamers that pay, 74% were women, and 72% were over 35, according to the Casual Games Association. …and they do pay: casual games were a $2.25B industry in 2007. Casual gaming has replaced magazines, TV, and Radio in many people’s lives, with the busiest playing times just after dinner (from home) and over the lunch hour (at work).

Heady stuff. Gaming has made its way into the mainstream, and as a result, it’s changing. We look out into the future and we see game play as an increasingly important element in the design of all kinds of systems from enterprise CRM to electricity meters, encouraging exploration, communication, and increasing the fun across the board. That’s a great thing to be part of.