Bill Sabram's Prezi about Monumental
MeYou Health had a good presence at Games For Health this year. Our game designer Bill Sabram presented the effort and process designing our iPhone game Monumental. We also had posters of the application hanging in the expo space. And I participated on a panel about what we can learn from MMOs about using big data to solve big problems.
All in all, it was a fun and educational few days. My two big takeaways are:
The sensor wave is coming!
I was in the building for maybe 30 minutes and I had already heard the word "sensor" referenced a few dozen times. Everyone was talking about sensors and the solutions and experiences that they would eventually enable. It wasn't just accelerometers, but gyroscopes, gps, camera/light, temperature, NFC, cadence, galvanic skin response, blood pressure, pulse oximeter, compasses, etc. If you can think of it, someone is building a sensor to measure it.
At the middle tier level I talked to two people during the day who were working only on the middle tier that pipes data from devices wirelessly using standards and links them up with HIPAA storage and medical records, or exposes them in a usable API. So even the middle teir (called aggregation management) is evolving.
A conversation about Simulations vs Games
This was the best session of the conference for me because it made me think the most about different types of product philosophies and how that impacts engagement. The topic of the panel was a discussion about the interchangeable nature of building games or simulations.
More profound was this single idea:
Once you know the learning objective, the game is no longer fun.
In my mind, that could be a huge reason why health games fail. The objective is far too known too early to be interesting. A big piece of this is that games are optimized to create emergent experiences, not outcomes. The best games do not dictate the goal. The goal is "fuzzy" and the purpose is to play the game to discover the goal yourself. When I look at what we are doing with Daily Challenge, that is the best part. We do not dictate an outcome, but we do convince you to play... and in participating, you have your own emergent experiences that are social and rewarding.
In games one can rarely point to the moment when a really good game became such. The entire experience has to be judged as a whole. The danger is over-engineering this. The moment we say "the goal of this product/game is to do <this>" it takes the fun out of it because the objective is known. So how do we design products that are required to have outcomes, but we don't lead with them?
Conclusion
The Games for Health conference gets bigger and better every year. I still feel like they offer a few too many tracks which leaves some presentations full while others barely have any people in them. Less choice and more guidance would be welcome, but I appreciate the diversity of the concepts and speakers, and I look forward to seeing how far sensors and design comes in the next 12 months. If the G4H conference points to anything, it is that this is a really vibrant and exciting time in the industry.
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