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.

Courtesy of jasoneppink

Can social game designers learn something from child’s play? You be the judge. I came across an interesting social game design article from Mike Sellers and his blog, Online Alchemy, and I thought I’d share the link with you.  Sellers’ blog post examines the close relationship between the emergence of gameplay in popular social games and the path of individual psychological development of play.  Why is this so interesting from a game design and business perspective?

If you’ve been following my blog, then you know how interested I am in the meaning of play and its fundamental role in human behavior. It’s not just for fun, but it’s a biologically based, evolutionary contribution to human survival and development, a crucial vehicle for cultural learning and cultural transmission. Seller’s blog post discusses a 1930′s study published by Mildred Parten looking at the development of play in children. Simply put, there are 6 stages of play that correspond to a child’s physical, cognitive and social development. Here are some the developmental stages of individual play:

* Solitary play: Playing by yourself (ignoring others around you)

* Onlooker play: Noticing others around you, but not playing with them

* Parallel play: Implicitly recognizing the play of others around you, doing some of the same things and playing in the same cognitive space, without open social interaction. (Think of two kids building sand castles near each other that resemble each other, even though they never said a word or joined together at all.)

* Associative play: Light social interaction with others nearby, but without involving play as a topic or structure

* Cooperative play: socially interacting and organizing using play as a structure on which to build these interactions.  Note that this implicitly includes competitive play, as the social structures involved necessarily require in-group (our team) and out-group (the other team) interactions.

According to Parten, as we develop as humans our forms of play become more social and common. We tend to play less alone and want to cooperate and compete during gameplay. As Sellers points out, if we examine the emergence of social games, we can see similarities in this regard:

* Solitary play: Bejeweled, tower defense, most early casual games. The game design and moving parts were simple and easy.

* Onlooker play: the addition of leaderboards, “who’s playing now”, and other features that, while they don’t give you the opportunity to be “playing” with others, or even observing their actual gameplay, at least give you some indication that there are other people out there playing at the same time.

* Parallel play: current social games such as Farmville, Pet Pupz and Mob Wars, where you may have “neighbors” but the game play is largely solitary. While you’re able to associate with other people and even observe their play, in terms of the gameplay you’re almost entirely working on your own.  These games do however start to edge up into Associative play.

* Associative play: your play involves interacting with other people directly, and their play is one of several factors that effects yours. Foursquare would be an example, as well as higher levels in Mob Wars and Farmville.

* Cooperative play: think of people forming teams for the purpose of playing the game and these interactions enabling the formation of communities. Think of games where complementary roles —as well as shared goals and complex in-group/out-group interactions are part of gameplay.

As you can see, there’s plenty here for game designers to consider! What about games where the play within the game evolves through the various levels of sociality as you progress? What about games where individual players can decide independently how deeply they want other players to effect their play? What are your thoughts? Email me at michael@ayogo.com.

References:

http://psychology.about.com/od/developmentalpsychology/a/childdevtheory.htm
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/ehyun/10041/culture_and_development_in.htm
http://onlinealchemy.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/the-psychological-development-of-social-games/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parten%27s_stages_of_play

Courtesy of Flickr's Unhindered by Talent

As you probably heard, Google Buzz’s release was less than smooth. If it has sufficient motivation, Google has the capability to make Buzz succeed over the long run, despite the inauspicious start. If they do make it popular as a service, will it also be a good platform for social gaming? Based on our experience with Facebook, Twitter and smart phones, I have some suggestions for Google on how to make Buzz a great social gaming platform.

The general thrust of my suggestions is that Google Buzz should aim to be more like Facebook’s feeds and walls and less like Twitter. Although Twitter has been used in games, and should be a tool in every game developer’s toolbox, it is just not as central for a social game developer as Facebook is. In the sections below I’ll describe why this is.

Understanding Gaming Platforms

In any social network, the two features that interest us most are friend lists and feeds. The friend list allows us to make games that take advantage of real-world relationships. The feeds allow us to communicate with the user’s friends and followers.

Friend Lists

The main thing that social game developers need from friend lists is that it be game-relevant. What does that mean? The key is that the people on the friends list should really be friends and that they be the kind of contacts who would be interested in getting game-related news. There is at least one way that Google could determine that without mind-reading: they can watch a viewer’s history of interacting with (showing, hiding, commenting upon) game-related content. Google might also be able to infer from your history whether your interactions tend to be business-oriented (e.g. with office document attachments) or social (e.g. with image attachments).

Google should follow Facebook’s lead here. Facebook allows you to have different “types” of friends and could theoretically use your groupings to direct your tweets. Google should similarly encourage you to group the people you follow into categories that it could use to infer message relevance.

Feeds

Google Buzz, like Twitter, is fundamentally organized around the idea of feeds. Feeds have also been important at Facebook for years, and they get more and more so with each revision of the user interface.

Here are some examples of how we use feeds in some of our games:

* when a player accomplishes something boast-worthy, we encourage her to post it to her wall and Twitter feed. This informs other players of the game that something noteworthy has happened, deepens her reward (in the same way that standing on a podium accentuates an Olympic medal) and informs her friends about the existence of the game.
* when a player needs help, we encourage her to inform her friends through the wall or Twitter feed. This helps them build a feeling of cooperation.
* when a player has a surplus item that might help a friend, we suggest she offer it to friends through feeds
* when a player generates a creative work, like a customized car or a fantasy hockey team, we encourage her to show it off through feeds
* when a player makes an interesting or potentially controversial move (such as swapping a hockey veteran for an up-and-comer) we encourage her to get feedback through feed posts
* and of course we always encourage a player to recruit friends through feeds

Spamminess and Control

One of the central design challenges in social gaming is how to use feeds without abusing them. Some curmudgeons think that any use is an abuse, and some games vendors are shameless in their spamminess. The most fundamental ground rule is that game players must always have complete control over what is posted.

By default, Facebook allows the application to prompt the user to post any particular item. If the app is Facebook Connected, but not embedded in Facebook itself, then Facebook uses an HTML “iframe” to ensure that the user is talking directly to Facebook when giving permission to post the item. Twitter’s API seems much more primitive: one must either give an application complete access to Twitter or none at all. It cannot be done on a per-message basis.

Control on the recipient’s side is also very important. Even the most cynical game publisher benefits when their messages are received only by those who will apreeciate it. This is because game players will free more free to publish content if they know that readers have an easy way to filter the feed. Facebook allows users to hide updates from a certain friend or from a certain app. Twitter does not keep track of which application a tweet comes from and therefore cannot filter them by application. This means that game players must be much more conservative about what they publish for all of their followers.

In general, the Twitter model is simpler than Facebook’s. Twitter’s model is “you publish something” and “your followers read it”: like a blog. These primitive controls are especially acute in Twitter, which many “early adopters” use as a business marketing tool. No thought leader wants to encourage their audience to “unfollow” them.

Facebook’s model is more like “you publish something” and then “Facebook uses an inscrutable and complex algorithm” to determine whether to show it to your friends. This gives Facebook the leeway to filter out game-related posts from the sites of disinterested users.

Google is obviously following the Facebook model. Here’s what they say:

“Buzz also weeds out uninteresting posts from the people you follow — collapsing inactive posts and short status messages like “brb.” These early versions of ranking and recommendations are just a start; we’re working on improvements that will help you automatically sort through all the social data being produced to find the most relevant conversations that matter to you.”

Multimedia

Facebook wall posts can include graphics, flash, music and hundreds of characters of text. Twitter posts are always 140 characters of text. Obviously games benefit from Facebook’s more flexible model. For example, in Need for Speed Nitro for Facebook, we allow users to post pictures of their customized cars to their wall and photo album. Google is also following Facebook’s lead here. Buzz can attach media files just like Facebook. Even more interesting is Buzz’s capacity to attach location information. As we’ll discuss in future posts, there are many interesting ways to use location data in social games.

Summary

Google Buzz has to solve its perceived privacy problems and the bad, ummm, buzz around its launch before it can be of value to anybody. But if Google can generally get its user base back on side then there are some simple techniques it can use to turn Buzz into a rich social gaming platform. Users must have control over their friend list and their posts: both incoming and outgoing. They must be able to post multimedia and text of a reasonable length. In general: Buzz must ensure that the right information gets to the right readers: if they do that, they’ll make up for the rocky launch.

Courtesy of Flick'rs kylemac

As you may or may not know, there are a few of us that keep the Ayogo Games’ engine in good working order, inside and out. You might have read my post explaining what my role is here, and if you’ve clicked on any of the authors’ links, you can easily figure out what they do. But still, there are a handful of other Ayogos (as I call the people that work here) that we haven’t had a chance to introduce to you, until now! (We think that they’re pretty spectacular people with interesting things to say, hopefully, you do too!)

Here’s the first Q&A in a series of many to come with one of our programmers, Damien, who has been with Ayogo (pretty much) since its inception. Damien is not only a programmer, but the guy “who has all those cool t-shirts.”He has more than 70 colourful and hilarious t-shirts that he likes to show off at work–some more provocative than others. Here are some of his thoughts about our industry.

When it comes to the virality of games…

In this industry, game makers have to balance getting their games out there and noticed with annoying users too much. There has been a trend where users were getting spammed all the time. That’s not useful for the player. You have to message users with relevant information. In Need for Speed Nitro (we did that one!) does that well. For example, if your car has participated in a race, you’ll get an update. I think that’s interesting information for the player. This is opposed to the really inconsequential messages you get from many games.

Playing games…

I go through stages. I’ll spend a bunch of time on consoles then switch on handheld games for a while. I tend to concentrate on a very few games at a time.

I started to play Mafia Wars for research purposes for our iPhone game City of Ash. I ended up spending a lot of time there after the research was done. Ian (another dev) and I pretty much always have a game or two of Uniwar on the go.

About the popularity of social games…

You have that RPG aspect that hooks people – some sort of numerical gain – mixed with the social graph. Mob Wars, one of the first big social games, tied classic RPG elements together with the friends list.

Future of social game development…

It’s hard to say. In the beginning, users were getting messaged a lot, whereas more recently that’s changing. Facebook’s new gaming dashboard seems to be designed to help users manage that communication. It’ll encourage game developers to put out more interesting messages since each game has equal priority instead of each message. Until now it’s been quantity over quality and I think the dashboard will start encouraging more quality messages.

Interests as a programmer…

I’m interested in the lower level components of software systems: I like writing code that other programmers can use to do their jobs more effectively – components that other developers can use as building blocks.

The iPad and games…

The iPad provides, in a general sense, a new place for people to interact with technology. It’s cheaper and more portable than a desktop or laptop computer but has less processing power, no dedicated input device and it’s locked down. It’s more expensive than a netbook but you get more screen real estate and interact with the device quite differently. The increase in screen real estate over a smartphone or netbook means you can fit more information on screen and keep it readable. As for the underlying technology, we’ve already developed games for the iPhone and iPod Touch so we know how to do that part already. It’s just the interaction design that changes for us: we’ll have to design another UI, but I think it’ll be easier to do well than on the iPhone.

Your ideal technology scenario…

I think we need to work towards interoperability. We have all these interesting devices and technology, but they’re often separated. We need find a way to tie them together. We’ve started to have that with common communication technologies: you have your calendar, contacts and email available in desktop, web and phone environments. That’s a fairly recent change and it’s great, but new technology comes out and is kept segregated in its own world. This is especially bad when DRM is introduced. We need to move to a place where you can freely use information in more than one context.

If you were to make improvements…

The thing I miss most from console and PC gaming is the strong storytelling component that exists in that realm.

Designing social games…

In the current incarnation of ‘social games’ they tend to be free to play so they market themselves. This means that you have to make the experience good from the get go. People keep playing them because they’re fun.

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.

Courtesy of Flickr's vistavision

Could this be the support that local video-game developers were looking for?

The B.C. government just announced the video-gaming industry’s first major tax credit and also showed some love to B.C.’s film and television industry. Thanks to MCD for the heads up!

What’s in the deal?

There will be an increase in the B.C. interactive digital media tax credit–17.5 per cent– of qualifying labour costs in video game development. The digital animation and visual effects tax credit also gets an increase to 17.5 per cent. Foreign producers also get an increase in the labour tax credit to 33 per cent and the qualified labour expenditure cap rises to 60 per cent.

What does this mean for Facebook and iPhone game developers, like us?

First, any incentive that helps small start-ups grow is welcome. (Although it’s still hard to say how this tax credit will play out for startups in particular.) B.C. game developers will still have to choose between the new tax credit and the existing Scientific Research & Experimental Development (SR&ED) incentive program, as this tax-credit doesn’t replace it.

Second, incentives that encourage film and television production to take place in B.C. also indirectly benefit game developers like Ayogo by facilitating the natural partnership between our industries. Film production companies create the type of high quality original intellectual property that helps our social games stand out from the crowd, and our games, in turn, help extend the reach of the film, along with providing an ancillary revenue stream.

If approved by legislature, the interactive media tax credit applies to video game development projects that begin after Aug. 31, 2010. So, what do you think? Will this new incentive be a good thing for start-ups?

New Facebook Games, new iPhone Games

So… to get you up to date: It’s been crazy busy around here…in December, Ayogo designed, developed and launched two new games: one is a Facebook application developed for Electronic Arts called Need for Speed Nitro – the Facebook Game, and the other app is an iPhone game called City of Ash. We were really glad to partner with Monster Games (the creators of Mob Wars) for that project.

So, what’s on tap for the coming months? Well, the work continues. Michael will be on a panel discussion about startups, how they fail and why they succeed, at the F5 Expo featuring Malcolm Gladwell here in Vancouver. Make sure to check him out.  We’re also starting a new series of blog posts. They’ll be about a variety of topics that discuss the business side of casual social games. From analyzing case studies to marketing strategies, we’ll be sharing our thoughts with you. Beyond that, we’re continuing to forge new game design partnerships and to do more game development for recognized brands. So stay tuned, and as always, feel free to drop us a line and let us know what you think.