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.

One good definition of a game is “an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some limiting context.” (Serious Games, Clark C. Abt, 1970) As you may have noted to yourself already, this can describe all of manner of human endeavor from finance (sometimes not in a good way) to education to medicine. Airline pilots are required to practice in simulators that look a lot like big console games, and many of our sports such as biathlon, javelin, archery, are based directly or indirectly on survival skills our ancestors developed from necessity. Today, we use those skills for the fun of it. Why is that?

Games and play are a basic survival adaptation. Think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (basic human needs are represented in the shape of a pyramid, with the largest and lowest levels of needs at the bottom, and the need for self-actualization at the top): at all levels of the pyramid we work within a framework of rules, collaborating with others to reach our goals. Our brain has evolved to encourage our success by rewarding us when we’re successful, beyond the inherent rewards of survival.

Here’s an observation that I hope you will find interesting:  When you call something “a game”, there is generally an implication that you’re talking about something that isn’t (for lack of a better word) important. And in many cases that’s true: the game is not important. But the interesting thing is that our brain doesn’t necessarily know that. Our brain will give the same sort of dopamine reward for a solving a meaningless puzzle game as it does for learning how to properly tie a life saving knot (shout out to all the cub scouts out there).

This is valuable from an evolutionary perspective because most of our games, like hockey for example, are analogs to things in the real world. That’s why they work as games and that’s why we play them. Hockey teaches us about timing and teamwork, and helps us develop useful fine motor skills. These are the same skills and abilities, generally speaking, that we use to navigate our world, so we can survive. Even though we don’t truly require all these skills for survival purposes any longer, these same instincts remain, crying out to be satisfied in other ways. This is why we get a dopamine rush when we do well at a complex pattern-matching game, despite the fact that we’ll likely never use those skills to learn which mushrooms make good soup, and which ones are poisonous.

Implications for design

When you’re designing a game (or even a customer response form for the corporate website), understanding this mechanism of reward lets you recognize the patterns and use them to your advantage. As Eisenhower said: motivation is getting somebody do something because they want to do it. In coming posts,  we’ll talk about how that’s done, by looking at examples from a variety of different games.