Fish’n’Steps: Encouraging Physical Activity with an Interactive Computer Game

Abstract

A sedentary lifestyle is a contributing factor to chronic diseases, and it is often correlated with obesity. To promote an increase in physical activity, we created a social computer game, Fish'n'Steps, which links a player's daily foot step count to the growth and activity of an animated virtual character, a fish in a fish tank. As further encouragement, some of the players' fish tanks included other players' fish, thereby creating an environment of both cooperation and competition. In a fourteen-week study with nineteen participants, the game served as a catalyst for promoting exercise and for improving game players' attitudes towards physical activity. Furthermore, although most player's enthusiasm in the game decreased after the game's first two weeks, analyzing the results using Prochaska's Transtheoretical Model of Behavioral Change suggests that individuals had, by that time, established new routines that led to healthier patterns of physical activity in their daily lives. Lessons learned from this study underscore the value of such games to encourage rather than provide negative reinforcement, especially when individuals are not meeting their own expectations, to foster long-term behavioral change.

Motivating participation in social computing applications: a user modeling perspective

“…reminders, visualizations, personal agent's interventions) used by persuasion applications typically address the user in isolation, based on predicted by the theory reaction of the user according to the specific theory on which the approach is based. Recently, however, persuasion researchers have started to include the user's friends and family as actors in the motivational interventions (Lin et al 2006;Khaled et al 2006) and generally have sought to engage the user's social network as a source of persuasion (Munson et al 2010). This can be seen as a trend towards convergence with the area of incentive mechanism design for communities.…”

Walking in the Wild – Using an Always-On Smartphone Application to Increase Physical Activity

“…However, this approach runs the risk that inexpert users will set goals that are either too difficult or too easy and that do not, therefore, provide optimal motivation [33]. In contrast, in Fish'n'Steps [25] goals are set at a modest level by automatically using baseline step-counts as reference points and taking the findings of previous studies as a guide to what users could reasonably be expected to attain. Furthermore, Fish'n'Steps breaks longer-term goals down into proximal, daily, sub-goals.…”

“…A number of smartphone apps include this facility -e.g. [13,38,25]. In Fish'n'Steps, for example, each user is presented with a fish avatar whose growth, emotional state and behaviour reflect the number of steps the participant takes each day.…”

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“…Consolvo et al (2008) developed the UbiFit Garden application to evaluate whether an analogous representation of exercise (with only positive reinforcement) was an effective motivator. Lin, Mamykina, Lindtner, Delajoux, & Strub (2006) used the Fish'n'Steps program to explore the motivational impact of analogous representations (with both positive and negative reinforcement). Fujiki et al (2008) developed an application with an avatar competing in a virtual race against other players.…”

“…Consolvo et al (2006) and Lin et al (2006) evaluated the impact of social competition on a participant's activities. Ahtinen et al (2010) evaluated the socialsharing and playfulness aspects that had been designed into their Into application.…”