Trapper Markelz

Army Attack is straight up, simple combat fun on Facebook.

I use to take the effort to write more about the games I was playing. Maybe it was because I was working at gamerDNA where it was such a large part of my life! Due to the lack of general publication about my gaming, it could appear like I have lost my gamer cred, but that is not the case! I still DO actually play games. The challenge lately has been finding any good games to keep me engaged. 

I started Assasin's Creed 2 (Xbox), but just couldn't get into all the time-wasting mechanics they threw into the sequel. Then I started playing Enslaved (Xbox), which had a great demo, but the actual game itself became a tedious door/key puzzle solver. Then there was Battlestar Glactica Online (PC), but there just wasn't enough visceral payoff in the combat, and walking around the motherships was seriously boring. I will say that I finally found my way into a small Angry Birds addiction. What can I say? Pop culture is sometimes right about these things.

Amidst all this gaming exploration, I stumbled into a simple, yet compelling (for me) Facebook game recently called Army Attack. It was recommended by TheInternetSamHouston(tm).

Like many Facebook games, it is pretty casual. If you have played Advanced Wars (DS), you will know how this works. Each of your units has a certain movement allowance, attack range, damage level, and health level. Every time you take a turn to move a unit, the enemy moves their units. You have to manage your energy level (which allows you to take turns), your money (to buy things) and your supplies (to keep things repaired). 

I've been playing for about a week now, and it is simple and satisfying. The audio with headphones on is well done. The satisfying "thud thud thud" of an APC auto cannon and the resulting shrapnel explosions, add to the straight forward action. 

Currently, the game is pretty sparse when it comes to unit selection and customization. This isn't city building. It is about repelling wave after wave of enemy attackers while you try and expand your territory, often times working on multiple fronts.

So if you are looking for a new Facebook game, you could do worse than Army Attack. It is straight up, simple combat fun. If you do give it a try, send me an ally request!

Come see me on a "gamification" panel, March 29th

I have been asked to participate on a panel this month.

Gamification: Level Up Your User Experience
03/29/2011 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM 

What are the scenarios where gamification works? What is the future of gamification? How will it manifest beyond just games and location services? MITX is bringing you the experts who can answer these questions: 

• Mike Schneider - SVP, Director Digital Incubator Allen and Gerritsen (moderator)
• Steve Curran - Founder/Chief Creative Officer Pod Digital Design
• Nataly Kogan - Vice President Consumer Experience, WHERE Inc.
• Trapper Markelz - Head of Product, MeYou Health
• Peter Stringer - Director Interactive Media, Boston Celtics
• David Tyler - SVP, Bunchball  

Register now to come check it out if this seems like your kinda thing!

So just what is this gamification thing? Who knows these days. From my perspective it is a neologism that isn't that well defined. I would like the definition to be actually turning something into a game. But it is also often used to describe any scenario where you apply game-like mechanics... even when the application of those mechanics does not actually create a game. It should be a fun discussion though. I hope to contribute a perspective, but I also hope to come away learning something.

My TEDxChange Talk: Fulfillment Mechanics

Here it is. My TEDxChange Nashville talk on the Fulfillment Mechanics we can use to build more fulfilling online health and well-being products that make people passionate about healthy behaviors.

Putting this talk together in six weeks was a very arduous and humbling experience and I am honored to have been asked to participate. It has always been a goal of mine to be asked to give a TED talk, and thanks to TEDx and the global proliferation of the TED idea across the globe, more and more people are getting the opportunity to share ideas that they find to be inspirational.

I joined the Health industry because I felt like this is where some of the action is at. This is where we can do things that make a real difference in people's lives. I fully recognize what we are doing is also not easy. It will be filled with success and opportunities to learn and do better. And it will take all of us in all our areas of expertise, leveraging the type of spirited and lateral thinking that TED inspires to really make a difference in the coming years. 

A special thanks to all my friends and family who helped me prepare. Your comments and ideas took me in directions I didn't expect and ultimately culminated in something that I felt comfortable delivering and am proud to have been a part of. Also a special thanks to everyone at Healthways who asked me to participate and pulled together such a smooth running event.

It is a simple idea that the same passion us gamers feel for games, can be created in other types of online products, most notably health. Check back with me in a year and I will let you know how we are doing over at MeYou Health.

Yes, I unveiled the secret at TED.

Trapper Markelz at TEDxChange
Originally uploaded by TEDxNashville

A picture of me at the TEDxChange Nashville event. You can see another photos here and here. I have heard through the grape vine that the video should be up this week. Expect a recap when that happens.

I received a ton of great feedback from the event so I think I did well, but honestly I don't really remember what happened! It was all so fast, so I can't wait to check out the video and see what i said!

A special thanks goes out to everyone that helped me prepare. It was a massive mental effort, but well worth the time and I feel honored to have had the experience of giving a TED talk so early in my career. 

Now I can pull my focus back to where it belongs: Getting ready for the arrival of Baby Jack!

120 miles of single-speed biking

I crossed a milestone today. 120 miles on my new Origin-8 single speed. I have been riding a 24-speed bike my entire life... so the transition from too many choices to no choices was an interesting one. 

The first day I got this bike, I headed down the trail and immediately realized things were going to be different. As you speed up you can't simply gear down to go faster. You find yourself stuck at a maximum speed set by the ratio of your freewheel. You can go faster, it just means pedaling harder and faster, and at some point, it simply maxes out. Trying to get this thing above 22 miles per hour is almost impossible for me. You just simply run out of gear.

While the first few days this was frustrating, I have come to find a rhythm that has me cruising down hill at about 18 mph. Any more than that, and I just coast it out. I'm never really in that much of a hurry anyhow.

Coming home from work is all uphill so the experience is also different, and surprisingly better. Since you can't shift gears, you are sort of stuck at a certain pace. I have found that my time getting home is quite a bit faster because there is less thinking about what gear I should be in to maximize my strength. Instead I just get in a rhythm, turn off the brain, and crank the pedals. 

I really love this bike. It isn't anything fancy. But the simplicity and constraints of riding it are a welcome change of pace.

My TED Talk is next week!

I have been working pretty hard on this. It turns out writing a TED talk from scratch is really hard. It is made harder by a few things:

1. I am pretty young, and haven't really done anything really amazing in my career yet.
2. I was asked to talk about gaming and health. I am new to health and still figuring this out.
3. I am new to the health industry in general and don't want to cover ground that I am not an expert in.

So I have been writing and writing and re-writing, and I have arrived at something that I enjoy talking about. Here it is:

Fulfillment Mechanics
Games aren't engaging because they are fun. They are engaging because they are fulfilling. Trapper Markelz shares the four fulfillment mechanics every health product must use to create passion.

I have recorded myself running through it a bunch of times. It comes in between 15-17 minutes depending on how much I ramble. :) Next week I am off to Nashville to throw down. Wish me luck! 

I am speaking at TEDxNashville

 
In a few weeks, the TEDxChange conference is being hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. At the same time, dozens of other TEDx events are being hosted all over the world, one of which is in Nashville, sponsored by MeYou Health's parent company Healthways. They have asked me to speak for 18 minutes on Sept 22nd as part of the event.

I am excited, honored, and working day and night on my TED-worthy inspiring idea. Here is the list of speakers that I know of:

• Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and Harvard professor recently named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, and an expert in social network analytics;
• Dr. Jeannette Ickovics, a nationally recognized Yale University researcher and professor whose work centers upon improving the well-being of people who fall through the cracks of our health care system;
• Janice Weinman, President of KIDS (Kids in Distressed Situations), whose organization changes the lives of impoverished families around the globe;
• Brian Williams, executive director of Hands on Nashville, whose organization plays a key role in Nashville’s recovery from 2010’s devastating flood;
• Trapper Markelz from Healthways, who will discuss how the online gaming industry can be a catalyst for encouraging people to think differently about their own well-being;
• Radney Foster, a critically acclaimed artist, musician, and songwriter.

While my talk has to center around game mechanics, it is no secret that the last year of my life has been an emotional roller coaster of change and new perspective. I am not a scientist or a scholar, or an author. I am a web product developer, a husband, a father, a gamer. So while I won't be able to give a talk about what I have studied, written or researched, I can talk about what I have built, how people have used it, and what I am building now, and how I hope people use it.

Larger than that though, I have come to see a lack of genuine products out there that respect the challenges that we all face improving our well-being. We use frivolity and fun to protect us from the challenges of being truly honest and empathetic to those that are our real target audience in well-being product design. Or we fall into the safe practice of building things to make the young healthy people more healthy. We create feedback loops of beautiful people living fit active nutritious lifestyles, further alienating those that really need help becoming more mindful, educated and ready to change their lives. These people are longing for epiphany and we need to build products that help them get there.

With the internet, the web, and vast social networks, we can reach those that will only respond to a realistic, convenient, immediate, genuine solution. My question to all of us in well-being product design is: Do we have the principals and the required empathy to really do it?

So that is where I am headed. Wish me luck! 

Do you use an RSS reader?

I can't really live without my RSS reader. If you don't know what one is, it allows you to subscribe to your favorite blogs and news sites, and have everything delivered into a nice organized place so you can easily and quickly consume it, save it for later, or share it out to the world. I came across a post the other day and it made me curious about my own RSS stats. If you use Google Reader, you can find this in your "Trends" section. My Stats:

Here is what that looks like all graphed out:

The best part about Google Reader is that it syncs across devices using clients for mobile like NewsRob for Android and ByLines for iPhone. So no matter where you are, you always have an accurate queue of the latest and greatest from the web.

Despite great tools and convenience, RSS Reading still hasn't hit the mainstream. I tried for years to get it working in a corporate environment, and it struggled because ultimately it requires a new behavior. And as we all know, learning/teaching new behavior is hard.

I don't know what the future of RSS holds. It has been proclaimed dead dozens of times now, but it still continues to hold on. I am the kind of person that tries every new method of tracking and consuming information, and I still can't find anything as convenient and flexible as RSS. Maybe I am missing something?

If any of you out there don't use an RSS reader... how do you stay on top of the things happening in your industry? How do you keep connected to all of your favorite sites and bloggers? Or maybe none of that is important and your Facebook News feed is all you need?

 

Goodbye Foursquare

I have reached the end of my Foursquare gaming... and I figured it was worth a post. What is foursquare some of you might ask? Simply it is a little app you put on your phone and every time you go anywhere you "check in" to say that you are there. You get "credit" for that (read: points) which you use to dominate the weekly leaderboard and prove you are a "person who goes more places" than your friends. You also get mayorships... meaning that you become the local "owner" of a place until someone else visits it more times than you.

It was fun for awhile, but in the end there was nothing that could really keep me playing. I racked up some nice stats, and the whole thing made me more mindful of new places I was going...

The best part was when all my friends were playing it, the social utility was very high. It was neat to see where all my friends were going. Even on the weekends you got a sense when your friends got up... where they went to breakfast. Every morning you knew where people were at on their commute, and when they got to work before you. It was actually quite cool. But as my friends stopped using it, the social utility dropped away and I was left along... checking in... by myself... no fun.

So I am calling it a day. On to the next new trend... or maybe Facebook will roll out check-ins like the rumor goes and I can just combine it with a status update. Who knows. The whole location based services landscape is full of all sorts of competition. There is obviously something to it at scale... there just needs to be more work on keeping people checking in. There are lots of FourSquare competitors out there (Gowalla, Loopt, Booyah) but I am liking stuff like CauseWorld more because at least by checking in you are helping the world. So that is where I am headed next... we shall see how that works.

So here are my final Foursquare stats...

I love Warstorm

Steve got me addicted to Warstorm... he pretty much has most of the people at work dipping their toe in the water or actively playing it. It is an online collectible card game (CCG)... however you don't actually play it... you set up your decks and then you click "MATCH" and the computer calculates the winner and then you just "WATCH" the battle unfold. Yep... that is it... you spend a lot of time (and money) sitting around... clicking MATCH and watching what happens.... brilliant. Here is what it looks like when you play (WATCH)... in this case I won the match.

I have been playing for a few weeks now... I am in the intermediate ladder... maxed out level (19) and have almost 900 cards... The crazy part (and Steve will tell you) is that I normally hate CCGs, but because I don't actually have to play this one... it is pretty fun. The strategy comes down to card selection and deck building. There is a single player experience where you can purchase and play through campaigns ($12.95 each) as well as some free campaigns... there are also tournament ladders... but mostly you just match other people int he game through the match making system and watch the battles unfold. The best part is you can easily do it while doing other things having it just match in the background and you watch the matches later if you want.

So check it out if watching CCGs sounds like a good time. You might laugh, I sure did when Steve told me about it... you can play a long time for free so there is no risk. Give it a go. You might just enjoy something new. Add me as a friend if you do.